A Sense of Place and Purpose by Michael O. Leavitt

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Copyright © 2021 Michael O. Leavitt All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by reveiwers, who may quote brief passages in review. ISBN: 978-1-68564-072-9 Library of Congress Control Number: 2021921587 Publisher: Lairdhouse Trust Permissions: Deseret News, The Salt Lake Tribune Disclaimer: The author and publisher take no responsibility for any errors, omissions, or contradictions which may exist in the book. Cover Painting: Frank Ray Huff Jr. Writer: Michael O. Leavitt Contributing Writers: Laurie Sullivan Maddox Therese Anderson Grinceri Anne Leavitt Editor: Megan Anderson Designer/Production Coordinator: Roxanne Bergener Special thanks to: • Paula Mitchell, Special Collections Librarian, Gerald R. Sherratt Library • Utah State Archives • Ellie Sonntag, Mansion fire restoration • Anna Daraban, The Salt Lake Tribune First printing November 2023

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Sense of Place and Purpose VOLUME 1 The personal history of Michael O. Leavitt

Preface I am a westerner. My hometown is Cedar City, Utah, where I was raised with my five brothers by two loving parents. Time, place, and purpose all begin there.

Volume I: A Sense of Place and Purpose

My forebears had become westerners in the mid-nineteenth century. The Okerlund branch of the family settled in Loa, Utah, while the Leavitts put down roots in Bunkerville, Nevada. One of those ancestors was Sarah Sturtevant Leavitt, who in an unpolished hand wrote down an overview of her life in six pages. Her story describes her conversion to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and the persecutions she suffered as a result. She experienced the loss of child and spouse, hunger, exhaustion, freezing cold, searing heat, and a journey both on foot and by handcart to settle this western home of mine.

This volume encompasses both my Leavitt and Okerlund heritage, as well as my own recollections, beginning with my birth in 1951 and ending in 1993 when I was inaugurated governor of Utah at the age of forty-one. This volume includes my upbringing and young adulthood; my early professional life; marriage to Jackie; and the beginnings of our own family together.

Sarah’s essay and others on both sides of my family, close and distant, not only inspired me—they stirred an innate feeling of duty to capture what I have experienced and learned. Through genealogy, geography, faith, and affection, I am a westerner because of them. So now I have concluded seven decades, it is my turn to add chapters to the history of my family, church, state, and nation. I do so with the aspiration that my reflections will offer similar benefit to future generations. Because of my forebears, my life has been much different than those gritty ancestors of mine. I have visited every continent; interacted with kings and presidents; come to know the poor as well as the powerful of the world; and witnessed historical events both triumphant and tragic—none of which would have occurred without my forebears’ sacrifices, goodness, and endurance.

Most of Volume I was drawn from two separate books I wrote in 2007 and 2008 with the help of a former colleague in the Governor’s Office, Therese Anderson Grinceri. Those were titled A Sense of Place and A Sense of Purpose. The 2021 version consolidated the two into one—A Sense of Place and Purpose.

Life and leadership are a generational relay. In fact, the compelling need I felt to write this personal history may have been driven by a desire to discover for myself whether my contributions met my obligations. 2

A personal history falls on a continuum of candor somewhere between a journal and a published autobiography. It is not a substitute for a journal that records the activities from each day, whether important or trivial. However, it provides the luxury of length and the inclusion of whatever I want to recount. My personal history will consist of at least four volumes:

• Volume I: A Sense of Place and Purpose • Volume II: Real and Right Volume II recounts my stewardship as governor of Utah between January 1993 and November 2003, when I resigned to become a Cabinet officer in the administration of President George W. Bush. The title of this volume, “Real and Right,” was the theme of my campaign for governor in the 1992 election. I wrote this book with the intent to provide a window into my approach to governor, as well as give some insight to the unique aspects of being governor in Utah. I detail how I chose my Cabinet and other important staff members; how I dealt with the media; and how I worked with the state legislature. I give a general overview of the important tasks a governor has, such as giving speeches or staying close with the people. And since I could not have been governor without my dear wife, Jackie, I have included a chapter on her own initiatives, which have also had a huge impact on Utah. I have also included a chapter on my recollections of September 11, 2001, and some events that occurred because of it, as that was also a day that irreversibly affected our country.

• Volume III: A Sacred Trust In my first inaugural address, I used the phrase “a sacred trust” to describe the responsibility I felt as governor of Utah. I have chosen to use the same phrase as the title of Volume III. Volume III responds to a question I am often asked: how would I summarize our most impactful accomplishments during the time I was governor? It takes time for the answer to such a question to mature; real impact occurs over many years. It has now been nearly twenty years since my service concluded, which is plenty of time to get a good sense of what worked and what did not. In a history like this, one cannot write in great detail about everything, so I asked myself a question: What initiatives produced change and an impact beyond twenty-five years? This book seeks to answer that question by detailing eight legacy accomplishments I believe shaped the future of Utah long term. Against that standard, I have written chapters on subjects such as the 2002 Olympic games; the land exchange we did with the federal government involving reform of the state’s school trust land system; my role in returning control of welfare to the states; the founding and establishment of Western Governors University; creation of a charter schools movement in Utah; the Centennial Highway Fund, which organized forty-four highway projects, including the rebuild of Interstate 15 and construction of Legacy Highway; and an initiative to double the number of engineering graduates from Utah’s colleges and universities via a partnership between high schools and higher education, which produced forty thousand new engineers and positioned Utah as a technology capitol.

Volume IV: In Service as a Family Volume IV turns the focus onto family, with a central question: How did my service as governor affect each of them? When I was elected, Jackie’s and my five children ranged in age from two to fifteen years old. Jackie was thrust into a whirlwind of new expectations and duties, her life no longer her own in many ways. My entry into public life had a profound impact not just on us, but on our parents, my brothers, and her sisters. To capture this part of our family’s life during these years with accuracy and integrity, I invited Laurie Sullivan Maddox, who served as a speechwriter in the Governor’s Office, to be my co-author on the entire volume. Our desire has been for Volume IV to be a means by which each of the family members could tell their story and perspective. Laurie interviewed each family member at length and then wrote a portion of the book devoted to their account. Each member of the family was given an opportunity to review the chapter for facts and tone. My contributions to Volume IV came in the form of the introduction and a series of short essays— personal reflections on each of my family members’ experiences—placed at the end of their chapters. I also recount my thoughts as a parent during this demanding time and how our family preserved traditions and order.

current position as the president of the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square. I also plan to write a volume devoted to my spiritual feelings and experiences. While I have alluded to spiritual feelings and my faith in various parts of volume one through four volumes, because some of these are more personal in nature, I will write about them separately in a volume that will be held more closely that the others. It is my hope that these volumes will resonate with readers and take hold in subsequent generations’ histories the same way Sarah Sturtevant Leavitt’s handwritten six pages of personal history galvanized mine. About the cover: The cover is a painting Jackie and I commissioned artist Frank Huff to create. It depicts Kolob Canyon which is the western most reaches of Zion National Park. This region of the park is also referred to as “Five Fingers.” Frank and I explored the region on foot to find an angle that reveals the grandeur of these magnificent red sandstone cliffs. Ultimately, we concluded it could only be captured from the air. In an airplane, we photographed the elegance and ruggedness of southern Utah. Then, stroke by stroke Frank Huff masterfully created a painting that captures my sense of place in the world. The painting hangs in the home our family acquired in the Coral Canyon area of Washington, Utah.

Future Writing Projects I plan to write additional volumes of my personal history, since there are many more experiences I hope to write about, such as my time serving on President Bush’s Cabinet, founding and contributing to the success of a group of health care businesses named Leavitt Partners, and my 4

Acknowledgments In acknowledging those who contributed so much to the completion of this history project, I also wish to describe the process used to write and compile these volumes in hopes my blueprint may be useful to those who feel a similar obligation to capture the events of their lives. The inspiration I derived from reading my ancestor Sarah Sturtevant Leavitt’s six-page, handwritten history first surfaced in the late 1990s. I was serving as governor at the time and had realized early in my tenure that the telling of personal stories could be an effective way to entertain audiences and convey complicated subjects. However, I suspected I was wearing out some of the stories I used most repeatedly. One Sunday afternoon, I decided to create an inventory of events in my life that could be illustrative and would provide a larger pool of possible subjects. Within a short time, I had filled a page. These were not profound stories, but rather a list of small, unique, and relatable details. I did not attempt to write the entire story, just a line or two that prompted my memory. The list came so easily I pushed on to see how many such observations I could recall. Over a few weeks I had accumulated more than a thousand. The list sat for a couple of years. It was then that I read Sarah’s history and concluded that I should not be intimidated by the process of writing. Sarah’s writing was hard to read and had many misspellings, and yet it was a treasure to me. The thought took hold that anything I wrote would be better than nothing at all. On Sundays and at other moments when I had time, I began to write details around each small tidbit, realizing

as I went that the stories could be aggregated into subject matter categories, which then began to tell a larger story. After I transitioned from state government to the federal position in Washington, I recruited Therese Anderson Grinceri, a former speech-writing partner and press secretary while I was governor. Therese became a contributor, editor and logistics manager all in one. In 2006 and 2007 we completed the first two volumes that are now merged into one, A Sense of Place and Purpose. We printed one hundred copies of the originals and distributed them to family and a few friends. It must be noted that Therese skillfully shaped and polished my work in 2007 and 2008. She asked many important questions and added historical context to the manuscript, which was original to her. Likewise, the introduction of Volume I drew heavily on writing that my mother, Anne Okerlund Leavitt, had done in compiling a family history document. Because I added context and my own thoughts to the introduction, I have listed the two of us as co-authors. However, Anne Leavitt did a wonderful job of gathering and recording both the Okerlund and Leavitt family histories. I have not attempted to footnote or authenticate all the sources she drew on. During the next twelve years, I knew that continuing the history was something I wanted and needed to do. From 2007 to 2018, I continued to be busy serving in the cabinet and later in my private sector pursuits. However, on weekends or while traveling I kept compiling and writing. The productivity was inconsistent and the quality of the writing varied-In 2018, I concluded to get more

serious about the project. Therese had moved to Australia and then the U.K., and was no longer available. I reached out to another speech-writing partner from my days in the Governor’s Office—Laurie Sullivan Maddox. I had first known Laurie as a news reporter with the Associated Press and The Salt Lake Tribune. She joined the governor’s staff during my second term and became a co-author of many of my most important speeches, both as governor and at the Environmental Protection Agency. Laurie has a creative flare and native capacity to give life to words. I wanted to capture that style again for my history venture, and Laurie was persuaded to re-enlist. Our working partnership has taken two forms. Through all the chapters other than Volume IV, I have generated the words and the history, and she has made them better by pushing me for clarity, asking the right questions and rewriting or refining select portions. In other areas, particularly within Volume IV, Laurie has taken the role as primary author, summarizing interviews or research she has done. In those cases, we reversed roles. Laurie generated the words, and I responded to improve it with perspective. At the beginning of 2021, I set a goal that during the calendar year we would complete at least Volumes I and IV, and possibly Volume II. To do that we added two additional people to our little team. Megan Anderson, a busy mom and extraordinary editor, joined our effort. With her editing experience—including a bachelor’s degree in English and minor in editing—she has brought order and consistency that neither Laurie nor I could focus on.

Megan also introduced us to Roxanne Bergener, whose skill as a layout artist has combined shape and beauty into a wonderful design. She has a fantastic eye in choosing photos and artifacts that bring our work to life. Like Megan, Roxanne has given our text generation effort structure and discipline. Her dry and irreverent sense of humor enable her to keep us grounded, focused, and somewhere near on schedule. These friendships have been a meaningful part of this experience for me. Gary Doxey who was my general counsel in the governor’s office, is a trained historian. He gave me a piece of advice years ago that continues to prove true. He said, “In writing a history, the hardest thing is deciding what to write about. You have to make priority decisions and write.” As with the other volumes that make up this history, choosing among a wealth of subjects as well as thousands of pictures and artifacts has been difficult. I have also suffered over the fact that hundreds of people contributed in important ways to the events described. Not all of them will be mentioned or credited in the way they deserve. For that I have regrets. I hope they will know of my affection and properly attribute the omissions to the complexity of the task.

TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction: My Heritage. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 1 Setting Down Roots . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18 2 Life on Seventh West . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 31 3 Grandparents in the Desert.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 44 4 My Okerlund Grandparents and Loa. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 53 5 Elementary School . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 6 My Field of Dreams. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 84 7 Junior High School . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97 8 High School Years . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 115 9 Basic Training . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 140 10 Reap and Sow: A Mission to Oregon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 153 11 Meeting and Marrying Jackie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172 12 Together. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 188 13 Military Service . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 193 14 Launching a Career in Insurance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198 15 A New House and a New Son . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 205 16 Dixie Leavitt for Governor. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210 17 Moving to Salt Lake City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219 18 Managing the Jake Garn Campaign . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 232 19 Orrin Hatch’s Reelection Campaign . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237 20 A Growing Family . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244 21 Growing Responsibilities: Business, Family, and Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249 22 Balancing Politics, Work, and Family . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 254 23 Repositioning Leavitt Group and the Formation of Public Affairs Advisory Group . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 263 24 Higher Education . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 270 25 A Time of Political Turmoil . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 278 26 Time-Out on Partisan Politics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 286 27 A Fire in My Belly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 294 28 The Decision to Run for Governor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 300 29 I Need Boosters and Backers. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 310 30 Defining My Political Philosophy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 318 31 A Big Bet, a Running Mate, and the State Convention. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 326 32 A Real and Right Campaign. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 333 33 Closing the Deal. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 342 34 The General Election . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 349 Index.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 365 7

INTRODUCTION

Introduction: My Heritage

By: Michael Okerlund Leavitt and his mother, Anne Okerlund Leavitt

The Leavitts John Leavitt

The story of the Leavitts in America begins with a tailor who did not like to sew. Nearly four hundred years ago, John Levett lived just a few miles from the city of York in England. His parents were innkeepers, and his father was also the sheriff. John was apprenticed to a tailor. At that time, York was a city of about twelve thousand. King James I occupied the throne and was compiling the version of the Holy Bible that many use today. James Bradford and a band of pilgrims seeking religious freedom had recently sailed for Plymouth Rock.

John was unhappy as a tailor-in-training. His uncle, Captain Christopher Levett, an explorer and the king’s forester, had returned from a voyage to investigate the territory of the Americas. I imagine John listened with fascination as his uncle described vast fertile lands, abundant timber, and unending opportunity far beyond a needle and thread. When his uncle invited John to return with him to the Americas, he quickly accepted. I’ve always wondered if his parents had given him their permission to go, but I think there is a good chance he left without telling anyone. He was not listed on the ship’s manifest. A young man striking out for an unknown land, not knowing if he would ever come back, strikes me as a poignant scene.

John Levett’s ship landed near Dorchester, Massachusetts, in 1628. John changed the spelling of his name to Leavitt, and in time became a landholder. However, his past caught up with him when the tailor who held John’s apprenticeship tracked him down and demanded repayment. John had to relinquish his property to the tailor and start again, this time in Hingham, where he became a prominent citizen. John’s first wife’s name was Mary Lovett. They had five children together; however, after moving to Hingham, Mary died, and unfortunately was not able to see her children grow up, as they were young when she died. John later married Sarah Gilman, whose family had been prominent gentry and manor holders in England. The Gilmans had left their wealth and prominence to escape religious oppression in England.1 It was with Sarah that John helped build the Old Ship Church. John was a strong proponent for a new church to be built in Hingham, and in 1681 it was completed. The church still stands. When I visited it a few years ago, I found the pew they owned and imagined how hard it would have been to keep still their little children during the sermon.2 John and Sarah added eight children to Mary and John’s five.

Moses Leavitt

Moses Leavitt was the second son of those eight, and he established himself in Exeter, New Hampshire, as a timber man and town leader. He married Dorothy Dudley, who was the daughter of Reverend Samuel Dudley and the granddaughter of Thomas Dudley, second governor of Massachusetts. Moses and Dorothy became one of the most prosperous and prominent families in Exeter, as well as the parents of twelve children. Moses served in the militia during Native American conflicts and was active in the growing rebellion against England.3

1. Through the Gilman family, the Leavitts are related to important figures in American history. Two Gilmans from New England signed the Declaration of Independence and attended the Constitutional Convention. Oliver Ellsworth, a Leavitt relative through Sarah Gilman, was also there and later became the first chief justice of the Supreme Court of the United States. We are related to Sandra Day O’Connor, the Supreme Court justice, through the Leavitt line 2. John Leavitt became a prominent citizen in his time, with many famous descendants. For more information, here is a Wikipedia page about his life: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Leavitt

INTRODUCTION

Joseph and Nathaniel Leavitt

Joseph Leavitt was the fourth of seven sons and the sixth child of Moses and Dorothy. He worked in the timber industry with his father and his brothers. He became a cooper or barrel maker, but his work and his life were frequently interrupted so he could fight in a number of battles. He married Mary Wadleigh, the daughter of Captain Johnathan and Hannah Weare Wadleigh—a couple who figured prominently in these early American settlements. Joseph and Mary made their home at Deerfield, New Hampshire. They were parents of nine children. Family lore has it that Joseph and his eldest son, Nathaniel, fought in one of the battles at Fort Duquesne, in the French and Indian War. During the battle, they were rescued by a young British lieutenant colonel, George Washington.4 Following the French and Indian War, Nathaniel married Lydia Sanborn; they had twelve children. He and several of his sons fought in the Revolutionary War. When the war was over, the forest was decimated and land not so readily available, so they moved with most of their children to Grantham, New Hampshire, and established themselves on property still known today as Leavitt Hill.

restored gospel of Jesus Christ. The Leavitts responded and some were baptized. Most of the members of the large, extended family, including Sarah Shannon Leavitt, decided to leave the land they had labored to tame to settle near other members of the church. Jeremiah Leavitt II and Sarah Sturtevant Leavitt were among those who embraced the idea of the pilgrimage.5 Jeremiah was the fourth son and sixth child of Jeremiah and Sarah Shannon. Sarah Sturtevant was the daughter of Lemuel Sturtevant and Priscilla Thomson, who lived across the border in Barton, Vermont.

Jeremiah II and Sarah Sturtevant Leavitt

Jeremiah II and Sarah Sturtevant Leavitt were already parents of ten children. They had lost one, Mary Ann, as an infant. Their second daughter, Clarissa, chose to stay behind. In July 1837, they departed by wagon train with eight of their children, some of whom brought families of their own, on a journey filled with trials and difficulties they could not have foreseen.

Jeremiah Leavitt

Their fourth child, born July 10, 1760, was Jeremiah Leavitt. He was born in Exeter and was probably part of the Revolutionary fray by the time he was nineteen. He married Sarah Shannon. While his brothers were clearing the land and settling in Grantham, Jeremiah and Sarah looked further north, eventually settling with their ten children in Hatley, Québec, Canada. The Leavitts settled that heavily forested land by clearing farms and building barns and planting orchards. They were prospering by 1817, when Jeremiah died at fifty-seven. Most of Jeremiah and Sarah’s ten children were married and lived near them.

In 1835, missionaries for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints traveled through the Vermont/Canada area, bringing news of the

September 5, 1998, a life size bronze statue of Sarah Sturtevant Leavitt was unveiled in an idyllic park on Main Street in Santa Clara, Utah. (sculpture created by L’Deane Trueblood of St. George)

3. For more information about Moses Leavitt, here is a Wikipedia page on him: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moses_Leavitt 4. It is hard to find concrete evidence of this; however, this website has information about some of the battles George Washington was a part of during this war. Alison Dundore. “Fort Duquesne.” George Washington’s Mount Vernon, George Washington University, https://www.mountvernon.org/library/digitalhistory/digital-encyclopedia/article/fort-duquesne/ 5. To avoid confusion, family historians have designated the son Jeremiah II and his father Jeremiah I.

INTRODUCTION

Slowly they worked their way toward Kirtland and Nauvoo, stopping to plant a crop or to wait for better weather. Many died along the way. Jeremiah II and Sarah Sturtevant Leavitt established a farm when they reached Nauvoo. Their property was called The Mound and sat a few miles from the center of the city. They were subject to religious bigotry and persecution, ultimately being driven from Nauvoo by mobs. All they received for their land and the bricks they had prepared for their new home were an old quilt and a yoke of wild steers. After the expulsion of the Saints from Nauvoo, the Leavitts endured sickness and deprivation. They reached Mount Pisgah, where a temporary settlement had been established for the fleeing Saints. Jeremiah II went to Bonaparte, Iowa, to get flour for the winter and to help his son move to Mount Pisgah. But Jeremiah II never returned; he developed malaria and died in Bonaparte. Sarah Sturtevant Leavitt was left with her five sons: Weare, Jeremiah, Dudley, Lemuel, and

Thomas Rowell, and three daughters: Mary Amelia, Betsy Jane, and Sarah Priscilla. Before they reached the valley of the Great Salt Lake, Weare passed away. Finally, after a thirteen-year journey, the Leavitts reached the Salt Lake Valley. They built a home in Tooele; the 1850 census finds them there. In Tooele, Sarah Sturtevant’s daughters married men of the Hamblin family, who were frontiersmen, noted as colonizers. Brigham Young called them to move to the southern reaches of the territory, where Native American tribes existed. Their assignment was to teach and civilize the Native Americans and to carve out a settlement in the warmer climate. Dudley Leavitt and Thomas Rowell Leavitt were called to join the mission with Jacob Hamblin as leader of the group. They settled the hamlet of Santa Clara. During their first spring in Santa Clara, they were washed out of their homes by a raging flood. The Leavitts resettled in Gunlock, Utah. Later, the group moved downstream, just over the border into Nevada and began to form a community that would be called Bunkerville. Making a life in the Nevada desert was as hard as it sounds.

Erma and Vincen Leavitt

Dudley Leavitt’s son, Charles Albert, married Lillie May Barnum, and they became the parents of my grandma, Erma Leavitt. Erma married Vincen Elias Leavitt, who was actually her second cousin. Dudley’s brother Lemuel had a son, Thomas Dudley, who married Mary Luella Abbott, and Thomas and Mary became the parents of my grandpa, Vincen Elias Leavitt. Grandpa and Grandma Leavitt, as I called them, made a home in Bunkerville, assisted in building the community, and raised a family of five children. They named their second son Dixie.

Mike and great-grandmother Mary Luella Leavitt, Bunkerville, Nevada, 1953.

Dixie, my father, was gregarious and outgoing, as well as a gifted athlete. In high school, he was a standout in basketball and football. He earned a scholarship to play football at the college in Cedar City. The year he served as student body president at the college, he met a bright, attractive freshman from Loa named Anne Okerlund—who would eventually become my mother.

INTRODUCTION

The Okerlunds Ole and Bengta Åkerlund

About the time Sarah Sturtevant Leavitt and her eight children left Tooele for southern Utah, Ole Jeppsson and his wife Bengta Carlsson were baptized into the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Sweden in May 1856. Ole was a blacksmith, whose shop where he was apprenticed was located near a grove of oak trees. When he decided to dispense with the Swedish practice of patronymics, he took his name from the oaks and added the Swedish word for grove, which is “lund.” He spelled it Åkerlund, with the tiny “o” over the A making the pronunciation “Okerlund.” Persecutions began immediately following their baptism. Ole lost his work privilege; they were not allowed the freedom to participate openly in worship and met for church by night, walking clandestinely to the meetings.

Ole became a missionary early in his membership. He was, on occasion, imprisoned for the crime of having left the Lutheran church and preaching his new faith. Bengta, left alone with a small son, Charles, and an infant daughter, Hulda, struggled to keep them from starving. Bengta often told the story of their hunger and meticulously avoided wasting food. It is said that Ole’s father, Jeppa Olsson, though disapproving of their membership in the church, helped them by bringing bread for the children. Bengta walked to a farm, four miles away, once a week, for a bucket of buttermilk. Despite their best efforts, Hulda died on August 20, 1859. Ole and Bengta, their son Charles, and a second daughter, Matilda (who was seven months old) left Sweden in May 1861, sailing on the Monarch of the Sea, to join the Saints in Utah. Thirty-four days later, they arrived in America. The Okerlunds traveled by train to Missouri. They crossed the Missouri River into Florence, Nebraska, and signed on with the Samuel A. Woolley company. Ole and Bengta owned no animals and had no wagon. Their necessary supplies were transported, but they walked the entire way. They arrived in Salt Lake City on September 22, 1861.

The family first settled in Mount Pleasant. Their son George William was born November 9, 1862. The family didn’t stay long in Mount Pleasant; they were driven out by Native Americans. They then settled in Salina in the spring of 1864, but Native Americans threatened them there as well. On July 11, 1864, a girl, Lydia, was born to them in a dugout on the banks of the Sevier River. There were six families living in Salina. They subsisted on thistles, sego lily roots, and greasewood greens. They boiled the plants and thickened the water with bran to eke out nourishment from the plants. Ole constructed the first house in Salina from adobes that he made himself. The house had one room and a dirt floor. Bengta gathered willows and rabbit brush to make a broom to sweep her floor. She used sand to clean the woodwork and the furniture that Ole had made. Ole cleared the land of sagebrush and began to build what he hoped would be a farm. He had a forge and a trip hammer to fashion the tools that he needed. In Salina, Bengta did the laundry by washing the family’s clothing in the river and spreading it on the willows to dry. One laundry day, she left the clothes to dry and hurried home to check on her children. When she returned to gather the clothes, they were gone. She went directly to the Native American camp. Knowing they were unfriendly, she breathed a prayer. As she neared the camp, she could hear them whooping and dancing around the fire. She later related that it sounded to her like thunder, and that she did not know at the time that they were preparing to go against the white people. Bengta called the chief aside and told him that she had to have her clothes back. The chief was impressed with her courage and ordered the woman who had taken the clothes to return them. The hostility of the Native Americans intensified. They killed many people and drove away the settlersˇ livestock. Salina had grown to eleven families and all of them had to flee for their lives. Their farms were destroyed, and they left behind all that they had worked to build.

INTRODUCTION

A girl, Hannah, was born as the family fled to Gunnison. Bengta was helped onto a high wagon loaded with wheat, where she gave birth on April 23, 1866. They lived in Gunnison for ten years and added three children to their family: Albertine, born June 15, 1868; Ole Albert, born September 17, 1870; and Mary Ellen, born February 12, 1873. The family then moved to Scipio, where the tenth child was born. Orilla was born prematurely on March 31, 1876. Both she and her mother came very near death, but they survived. In September 1879, Edward, the last of eleven children, was born. In 1879, the Okerlund family left Scipio and moved to what is now known as Loa, Wayne County, Utah—a valley famed for its high grass, plentiful water, and good grazing area. There were only five families living in the valley at the time. Ole took up a farm near the area that is now called Big Rocks and worked as a blacksmith. The residents of Loa made treaties with the Native Americans that lived in Loa and enjoyed a more peaceful coexistence than they had in the past. Ole Okerlund died on November 13, 1909. He was eighty. His sandstone headstone, with its Scandinavian design, was carved by his hand. Only the death date was added after his death. Bengta lived on for nearly nine years. Her grandchildren remember her as an extremely religious woman, of a serious disposition and very frugal. The hardships of her life had formed her strong character, and the miracles that brought them through the hardships solidified her conviction. Bengta Okerlund died April 28, 1918, at the age of eighty-six.

George Okerlund

George was the first Okerlund child born in Utah. His childhood was marked by a series of moves to escape conflicts with the Native Americans. When he was fifteen, he attended the St. George Temple with his family and was sealed to his parents. The following month, he rode on horseback through the settlements of Sanpete, Sevier and

Millard counties to carry the news of Brigham Young’s death. When his brother Edward was born September 18, 1879, George was a strapping, handsome young man of seventeen. He had attended the public schools of Sanpete and Millard counties, but when his family made the move to Loa after Edward’s birth, he was considered far too valuable on the farm to be spared for further schooling. He helped construct the first meetinghouse and schoolhouse in Loa, and also helped build the Manti Temple. In 1885, he traveled with President Wilford Woodruff and President A.K. Thurber, visiting the Native Americans, in an effort to strengthen the peace. Later, when George was hired to assist Thomas Alvin and Ammon Hunt to herd their sheep, the course of his life changed forever. The Okerlunds knew the Hunts from their years in Gunnison. While the Okerlunds were cattle people, the Hunts were accumulating several herds of sheep. Monroe Mountain, their grazing ground, was either badly overgrazed or a drought had stricken the area. In search of feed for the herd they moved their sheep over Monroe Mountain, into Grass Valley, and then grazed them on Parker Mountain, leading into what was then called the Fremont Valley, where the Okerlunds had established their homes. Fremont Valley was cattle country, and Scott McClellan, one of the leading cattle producers, along with other cattlemen, wanted nothing to do with sheep coming onto his range. He boasted that he had drawn a line at an area he called The Tanks, and that if any sheepmen crossed the line, he would come out shooting. McClellan also owned the local store. Ammon Hunt, who was big, strong, and handsome, went into the McClellan store and bought all the ammunition in stock. Without saying a word, he had made his point. The Hunt sheep moved into the region without any overt objection. They were quietly accepted, even by McClellan. It was many years later when the government agencies came in to manage the land. Until then, people just claimed it, and when you beat the

INTRODUCTION

other fellow to it, it was yours. There was plenty of land and the livestock, and men believed it would always be so. George became a good friend to the Hunt brothers. They liked him so much that when they returned from a visit home, they brought their sister, Eliza Ann, with them to meet George. He was prepared to impress her, and the first time she saw him, he was sitting on a wagon tongue, his hair combed, playing his little concertina accordion. The story he used to tell was that he played, “Who’s on the Lord’s Side Who?” but Eliza told the children that he played a pretty waltz that she always called “my waltz.” Eliza, then age twenty-two, was engaged to another fellow, but liked George (who was twenty-eight). When he traveled to Monroe to pay a courting visit, he took along his sister Albertine, who was just a year younger than Eliza Ann. In May of 1890, Eliza Ann and George, and Albertine and Ammon, traveled together by wagon to the Manti Temple, where the two marriages were performed on two separate days.

Eliza Hunt

Thomas Hunt, Eliza’s father, had prospered in the sheep industry in Utah, but his first job at the age of twelve was in the coalmines of Derbyshire, England. He left the mines and joined the Navy. Following his release, he married Hannah Moon, whom he had first seen along the sidelines of a rugby match he was playing in. Thomas and Hannah came from religious homes. Hannah favored the Ranters (a Shaker sect) and Thomas was drawn to the Methodists, but he reported, “I always had a desire to be religious but never could fix on no society. They difered (sic) so much from the scriptures which I always believed to mean what they said.”

When he was introduced to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by some neighbors who were members, the teachings made sense to him. He felt he had “found the people of God.” He and his wife were baptized by Thomas Pionton on November 23, 1848.

Thomas and Hannah had always wanted to live in America, and this desire intensified after they joined the Church. On March 31, 1855, they sailed with three children: Sarah Ellen, Moroni, and Fredrick Nephi. They worked in Alton, Illinois, south of Nauvoo, for seven years to earn the money to travel west. They arrived in the Salt Lake Valley on August 29, 1862. Eliza Ann was born April 2, 1867, in a dugout at Fort Alma, now Monroe. Little is recorded of Eliza Ann’s childhood. One story comes by way of her daughter Berta. Eliza wanted a pair of shoes that she had seen in the peddler’s wagon as he traveled through town. She decided that she would glean enough wheat to buy the shoes, which cost two dollars. She gathered the wheat that was left in the field and threshed it. She saved all the wheat until she had what seemed like enough. The wheat sold for one dollar, which disappointed her. She didn’t know how she would earn the difference. She decided to take her problem to the Lord. She asked Him to help her get another dollar so she could buy the shoes. Not long after her prayer, she was sent to get a bucket of water to bring to the house. The water ran from the ditch into a wooden trough and then into a bucket. As Eliza Ann held the bucket to the trough, she heard a clunk. When she poured out the water, there was a silver dollar. She always related the experience and her sure knowledge that the Lord sent the dollar so she could buy the shoes. Eliza’s father saw to it that each of his children was provided with a start in the business. Daughters received as much of a start as sons, and Eliza Ann came to the marriage with her share of the Hunt sheep. Range land was free, and George already had experience working with Eliza Ann’s brothers, so Eliza Ann and George began their livelihood of keeping sheep. George and Eliza built a two-room cabin in Loa, which was still a frontier town. They remained close to the Hunt family in Monroe. When it was time for her to give birth to her children, she returned home where her mother and sisters could care for her. Their first child, Ivan George, was born in May 1891, in Monroe. The second child, Ruth, was born

INTRODUCTION

January 1893, in Monroe, and the third child, Alberta, was born December 1896, at Monroe. The children felt close to the Hunt aunts and uncles. The fourth child born August 1897 was Dalton. He was barely four months old when Ruth, age four, died. Eliza was noted for her kindness. She was a familiar sight in her small, black-topped buggy, delivering food she had prepared for the sick and needy. A small, gray horse was a gift to her from her fatherin-law, Ole, and she learned to hitch him to the buggy. A son, Clare, was born January 17, 1901. At the end of the summer that year, a letter arrived from the First Presidency of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. George, thirty-nine years old, had been called to labor in the Scandinavian Mission, headquartered in Stockholm, Sweden.6 Dalton recalls that during the mission, things did not go very well for the family. Edward, George’s brother, tended to their sheep while he was away, but the herd developed scabies and many died.

outfit with a sailor collar. Not long after the photo was taken, Eliza became gravely ill with diabetes. She died June 20, 1912, of blood poisoning that resulted from a sliver in her hand. The children were shattered by her passing. In a photo taken the day of his mother’s funeral, my Melvin is seated on the porch of his house, his arm around his dog, as if for comfort. He often said, “There is never a day goes by that I do not think of my mother.” Less than a month after his mother’s death, Melvin’s oldest brother, Ivan, left on his mission to the eastern states. The family received a letter from Ivan dated August 3, 1912, from Fairmont, West Virginia, informing them that he was engaged in the work and doing very well. On a postcard dated October 4, 1912, Ivan hastily scrawled that he wasn’t feeling well and supposed he would have to go to the hospital for help.

They had a cow which provided them with milk, but when the sheep died and money ran out, they sold the cow to support George on his mission. From then on, the family subsisted on bread and warm water flavored with nutmeg.

Seven days later, Ivan died of typhoid fever in a hospital in Fairmont. Berta, Dalton, and Clare mourned him for the rest of their lives. In later years, Clare said, “Things would have been different if Ivan had lived. It was a real blow when he died.”

When George returned in late 1903, he built up his sheep herd and prospered, building a magnificent house, by Loa standards, with windows that faced every direction.

Clare took Melvin under his wing. Although Clare was seven years older than my grandpa, they were the closest in age.

Melvin Okerlund

On September 7, 1908, my grandfather Melvin was born. George was forty-six and Eliza was forty-one. The earliest photos of Melvin show he was doted upon by his family. In a photo taken when he was two, he wears warm clothes and shiny, hightop shoes, and sits astride a docile horse. In a portrait taken when he was nearly three, the family is well-dressed. My grandpa wears a Lord Fauntleroy

Three years after Eliza Ann’s death, George married Eliza Ann Larsen (also called Lide), age thirty-one, who came from a Danish family. She adored my Grandpa Okerlund. His only childhood memory of a mother was of Lide Larsen as she dressed him to look his very best, then stood him on a chair to admire him. She called him, “My little prince.” She made a miniature town in a sandbox in the house, so if the weather was cold, he could still play indoors. But two years later, she was gone, due to a fatal kidney ailment.

6. At this time during the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, a worthy, male member at any age could unexpectedly be called on a mission, even if he had a wife and children. Nowadays, missionaries for the Church are unmarried young men between the ages of eighteen and twenty-five, and unmarried young women ages nineteen to twenty-five. (The one exception to this is retired, married couples can also choose to serve missions.) The process to be called on a mission is a little more formal now as well; these young members send in paperwork to inform the leadership of the Church their desire to serve a mission.

INTRODUCTION

Clare again took charge of Melvin, taking Melvin to herd sheep with him. One April afternoon, my grandpa, then ten years old, was traveling on horseback with his two older brothers. They were making the trek from their sheep camp to town. It had been a hard spring, with severe losses; an unusual number of ewes had died or abandoned their lambs. The boys carried on their saddles about a dozen motherless lambs. The family financial situation made every lamb precious. One of those startling spring snowstorms that occurs in Utah mountains descended with frightening fury; it was blinding. The brothers became disoriented, wet, cold, and worried. Wisely, they stopped and built a crude shelter of brush and saddle blankets. They gathered what sticks they could find and with the last of their damp matches succeeded in getting a fire started. It got dark. On nights like that the wind is bitter and blows right through you. They huddled with the lambs around the fire, but as their meager woodpile dwindled, the fire began to burn low. By this time, a thick blanket of snow covered the ground, but they had to have more wood. The older boys wrapped themselves as tightly as possible and ventured into the darkness for wood, leaving my grandpa to tend the fire. Despite his best efforts, the fire continued to burn down, leaving only the dim glow of the orange and blue coals. He knew if the glow of the embers disappeared, reviving it would be impossible. The fire was their source of warmth, and also provided a guide back for his brothers. He knelt by the fire and gently blew again and again upon the embers to keep them alive. The brothers returned, each with an armful of sticks. The fire burned brightly again, and they survived the night. Melvin was the youngest among them, but the boy preserved the source of their survival. When my grandpa was eleven, George married Marie Inger Sofie Johansen, who was twenty-six. Inga (the name she went by) was Danish, two years older than Berta and thirty years George’s junior. Clare, age eighteen, was well established at Snow Academy. That left Melvin as an only child until the Johansen family arrived from Denmark. Inga’s

youngest brother, Hans, one year younger than Melvin, became his friend. When Clare went to college in Ephraim, Melvin went along to attend high school. They lived together, with Clare caring for him just as he had at home. During his junior year of high school, Melvin dated Phyllis Meeks, whom he had known from his neighborhood in Loa. After high school, Phyllis, who later became my Grandma Okerlund, went to Snow College, and Melvin was called on a mission to the northwestern states, headquartered in Portland, Oregon. When Melvin was released in 1930, he had served twenty-nine months. He wanted to serve longer, but due to the Depression, missionaries had been released to relieve the financial strain upon their families.

Melvin and Phyllis

Grandma Okerlund used to tell the story of seeing Grandpa Okerlund for the first time after his mission. He entered a dance wearing a black overcoat, looking strikingly handsome. Melvin was equally smitten by Phyllis, as she had grown up in his absence. While maintaining an active social life at Snow College, she had exchanged letters with my grandpa each month. It didn’t take Phyllis long to change her mind about her interest in the “big-city types” she had been dating. Phyllis and Melvin dated from December 1930 and got engaged in the spring of 1931. She was twenty-one and he was twenty-two.

They had planned to accept one of several career opportunities that had resulted from contacts he had made on his mission. One man invited Melvin to join him in his mortuary business. Another offered a job at J. C. Penney Company. So Melvin and Phyllis planned to be married in June in the Cardston Temple, then travel west to return to Melvin’s mission field and begin their lives together there. But Melvin’s father needed his help with the sheep. George persuaded him that there was a future for him in the sheep business. They made a loose agreement, with my grandpa understanding that his hard work would eventually earn the herd, so the course was altered.

INTRODUCTION

On April 3, 1931, Melvin and Phyllis married in the Salt Lake Temple. A few days later, they returned to a cabin in Burrville while my grandpa supervised the lambing of the sheep. They tried to have a honeymoon, but two herders bunked with them in the cabin. Phyllis and Melvin were glad when lambing was over.

percent cotton sacks, printed in colorful designs. My mother, Anne, used to romp around on each new load of feed, choosing her favorite fabric. All that remained from that misadventure were drawers full of printed, cotton, turkey feed sacks, which were made into dresses and shirts for the Fourth of July and Christmas.

They lived at the Okerlund family home for a while, then rented their first home. “Three rooms and a path,” was my grandma’s wry description of the place. There was a cold water tap in the kitchen, but no bathroom. They were expecting their first baby—my mother, Anne—in May 1932.

The slowly expanding cattle business and the meager revenue from farming was barely enough to sustain the family, let alone support children about to enter college. Melvin was forced to find additional work. In 1951, he took a job working for the Utah State Highway Department.

Because of the sheepherding, there were long periods of separation for Phyllis and Melvin, which were difficult for both of them.

Melvin’s daily routine was this: he would start his day about 4:30 or 5:00 a.m. to do morning chores. Around 7:00 a.m. he would be home with the family and they would gather for breakfast and family prayer. He would then walk to his job at the State Highway Department shed, which was only a half block away, and there he was deployed to work on various roads across the region. He would return home from his state highway job by 5:00 p.m. and immediately head to his farm where he irrigated, fed, and doctored cattle, hauled hay, and all other manner of farm work.

Mary Jane was born in December 1934. Faun Rae came in June 1937. Doris Jean was born in August 1939, and finally a son, David, in October 1943. Ten years after their marriage, Melvin decided to sell his sheep and focus on his farm and raising cattle. He loved his sheep, but being away from home and too many bad years in the sheep business had worn him down. A portion of the revenue from the sale of the sheep was invested in turkeys, which were the way to prosperity at that time. However, those turkeys made my grandparents appreciate the sheep; if anything bad can happen to turkeys, it will. The only good thing about them was that the feed came in 100

But even that was not enough to pay for tuition, books, room, and board for their children, who were nearing high school graduation, so Phyllis found work. First there was the turkey plant. The remarkable thing about that job was that Phyllis had grown up with a phobia of feathers. She could not bear to touch feathered things and was traumatized by any encounter with them. Now she took a job working in the plant at Richfield, picking the feathers from the turkeys and packing the birds in boxes for shipping. It was tantamount to the greatest kind of sacrifice that she could make. And it answered the question, “Where will we get the money to send Anne to college?”

Dixie Leavitt and Anne Okerlund

The Loa home where Mike’s Grandpa Okerlund lived as a child. The home is now owned by the Leavitt family.

My mother was a bright girl who had skipped second grade. The spring of my mother’s graduation from high school, her friend Garth from Koosharem, who had finished his first year at Branch Agricultural College (BAC) in Cedar City, brought his yearbook for her to examine, in an attempt to persuade her of the school’s merits.

INTRODUCTION

My dad was prominently featured in the yearbook; he had been voted Mr. Personality, and his congenial look kindled her interest. That summer, Phyllis sewed turkey-feed sacks into a complete wardrobe for my mother, who entered BAC believing that she was as well-clad as anyone could possibly be. During my mother’s freshman year, my dad was student body president. The first time she saw him he was serving soda to the incoming freshman; she recognized him from his picture in her friend’s yearbook. He wore a bright, cotton shirt made for him by his mother. He was surrounded by a large group of incoming freshmen, so my mother made no connection with him on that occasion.

Dixie Leavitt

But on a snowy night, when my mother and her friend Althea Sylvester entered the girls’ dorm, their arms laden with groceries, they met my dad and his friend Ed Southwick, who were ringing the bells on the buzzer system, just to see who might come out. Boys were not permitted to pass the front desk of the dorm but were allowed to ring the buzzers to summon girls to meet them in the front living room. My mother and Althea came in the front door with the groceries, and both my dad and Ed exclaimed, “We were just calling for you.” When they invited them to go “ward teaching,” my mother and Althea quickly disposed of their groceries and were back in a flash. About the same time, my mother was dating Doug McShane. He played on the football team with my dad. Doug was a good guy, but my mother didn’t see him at church on Sunday, and attendance at church was important to her. In contrast, my dad attended church and was active in just about everything. For a time, my mother dated both of them, but little by little, my dad became a more frequent date, and as the year went on, my mother and father dated others less often.

Anne Okerlund Leavitt

They eventually married and moved into a small, eight-by-eighteen-foot trailer on the BAC campus. I was the first child of that marriage—a marriage of humble beginnings, but a continuation of a noble heritage and history.

01 Setting Down Roots 1951 to 1956 • Mike’s Birth; Earliest Memories; The Leavitts’ First Home In 1951, U.S. troops were fighting in Korea to stem the tide of communism creeping eastward from the bounds of the Soviet Union. The Second World War had ended six years earlier, but the Soviets, unhappy with the UN Treaty assuring them of security, invaded Eastern Europe and Asia to protect the USSR from future invasions. In addition, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg had been found guilty of selling nuclear secrets to the Soviets and were sentenced to death. Senator Joe McCarthy had started accusing members of the State Department of being communist agents. A film was released instructing schoolchildren to “duck and cover” should they see the bright flash of an atomic bomb. And on January 27, 1951, the U.S. Army detonated an atomic bomb—the first in a series of tests—over the Nevada desert, just miles from Cedar City. American’s fear of communism and invasion was at a fevered pitch, and would remain that way for nearly the first forty years of my life. The fear was so pronounced I remember wondering as a young boy if I would ever have the chance to grow up. But despite the fear many Americans felt at this time, my parents had faith, and decided to start their family—with me.

CHAPTER 1

The Beginning

and Dad decided to leave the apartment at Bert Langford’s, and we moved in. My earliest memories are of that home, and the floor plan of the apartment is still familiar to me. It was a white stucco house at the bottom of Seventh West. The entrance to the basement was in the front of the home rather than the back. Concrete steps led down to the front door, which opened into a small living room. A sharp left turn just inside the front door led to a long, narrow kitchen with a couple of bedrooms in a hallway at the back of the apartment.

Whenever we made a visit to the doctor he would always say, “That kid didn’t breathe for fifteen minutes!” He was still saying it when I was governor.

Our street abutted the college’s property. The old PE building and the Centrum are there now, but in the early 1950s, the college farm occupied that land. Add vacant lots to both sides of the street, no curbs or gutters, with hayfields between the blocks, and you see that the place had a distinctly rural feel, complete with the scents that accompany farms.

I was born on February 11, 1951. My mother remembers my birth as rather traumatic; she had toxemia during the pregnancy and was hospitalized during the eighth month. My mother has described how, when I arrived, I wasn’t breathing. The doctor worked over me for what seemed like a long time, performing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. People in the room started to panic. Finally, I took my first breath. My mom remembers feeling palpable joy when that happened.

In Cedar City, the population around the time of my birth was 6,172. The city celebrated its centenary that year and boasted that it was the home of Branch Agricultural College1 (BAC) and the gateway to five national parks, including the Grand Canyon. Sheep, lumber, mining, and cattle industries were booming; the other major employers in town were three car dealerships, the Bank of Southern Utah, the El Escalante Hotel, and Southern Utah Power Company. At the time of my birth, my parents lived in a small eight-by-eighteen-foot trailer house on the Branch Agricultural College campus. Their trailer didn’t have a bathroom, so they shared a bathroom block with others in the trailer park. A short time later, they moved to the apartment at the rear of Bert Langford’s house—a white house on Main Street where the Sugar Loaf Cafe is located today. At the time, Dad was finishing school and working as a truck driver at the iron mine. The apartment was a big upgrade from the trailer, even though the secondhand washer Mother had access to gave her an electric shock every time she did the wash.

The Endsley Home

About the time I turned two, Dad got a job teaching fourth grade in Cedar City. One of his students, Billy Endsley, told Dad that his family was going to rent out the basement of their home. Mom

Mr. Endsley, who owned the home, was the proprietor of Cedar City’s Western Auto store. Billy, his son, was the first babysitter I remember. As a fourth grader, he would have been about ten. He teased me unrelentingly, as kids that age are inclined to do. I do have a positive memory of him, however—shortly after I was elected governor, I got a call from Billy, who was living in New Mexico. Of the hundreds of Cedar City people who say they have changed my diapers, he may be one of the few who can truly make the claim.

“

That kid didn’t breathe for fifteen minutes!

“

The Endsley home had a two-car garage with a basketball hoop, which attracted neighborhood children. Basketballs were often left unattended, and I remember playing with one, trying to dribble. One day my mother realized that I had disappeared and began frantically searching the yard and neighborhood. To her horror, she spotted me

1. Southern Utah University (as it is now called) has undergone many name changes over the years. It was founded in 1897 as the Branch Normal School, and in 1913 the name changed to Branch Agricultural College, as you see it called here. From 1953 to 1969, the school was called the College of Southern Utah, and after 1969 was called Southern Utah State College. Finally, in 1991, the school achieved university status and became Southern Utah University. Throughout this history, I will refer to the school by the name it was called at the time. For reference, go to https://www.suu.edu/about/history.html

SETTING DOWN ROOTS

1 Mike and Anne Leavitt in Loa with the Okerlund family dog, Ginger, 1951. 2 Mike (seven months old), with friend Louis Mitchell 3 Mike on the lawn at his grandparents’ home in Bunkerville, Nevada

4 Dixie (twenty-two years old), graduating from Branch Agricultural College with a teaching degree, holding Mike (three months old). Spring, 1951.

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1 4

1 Mike (three years old) in front of the Endsley home on 700 West 2 Mike, foreshadowing his days as a catcher. 3 Mike playing ball

4 Mike riding his favorite red tractor in the driveway of the Endsley home. 5 Giles Bolander gives Mike his first haircut, 1951. 6 Picnic up Cedar Canyon with Dixie and others

SETTING DOWN ROOTS

leaning out of an opening in the garage’s attic, positioned directly above the basketball hoop. I had carried a basketball up some rickety wooden stairs and across some planks lying on the rafters, then climbed into the window. Before she could do anything, I dropped the ball through the basket and shouted the words, “Made it!”

incident that occurred in 1953, when I was around two years old. The Lamoreaux family had a little girl my age named Peggy Lee. She had been playing at my house, and as she crossed the street she was hit by a car and killed. Either effective parenting managed that situation or protective memory devices did.

Earliest Memories

Cookie Day and Other Memories

Most of my memories of that apartment are strange little incidents that have no historical or practical value. I have a vivid memory of falling down the front concrete steps; it was like things were in slow motion. I remember playing “store” with canned goods in a Lazy Susan pantry cupboard and having so much fun that I ignored nature’s call. I quite distinctly remember sticking my head between the stove and the refrigerator and filling my pants. Seventh West was a great neighborhood with young families and lots of kids. In addition to the Endsleys, the Isom family up the street had six or seven children, most of them boys. The Platts lived across the street, as did the Lamoreaux family. The Rymal Williams family had six children. Kumen and Naida Gardner had five or so. The Wall family next door had two girls: Janie and her older sister, whose name I can’t remember. Janie was closest to my age, though she must have been a little older than I was. Upon receiving an invitation to attend her fifth birthday party, I climbed under the dining room table, threw a savage tantrum, and screamed, “I want to be five! I want to be five!”

The Wall family had a swing set in their backyard. Janie’s older sister taught me how to pump my legs to get airborne in a swing. I remember the sense of independence it gave me; such a big-kid skill. One summer day, it rained. Janie and I held hands, swinging them wildly as we walked down the sidewalk in front of her house, drenched and belting, “I’m singin’ in the rain / Just singin’ in the rain!” It is interesting that I have such vivid memories of Janie Wall in relation to such ordinary things, and yet absolutely no memory of a rather traumatic

The Wall sisters oriented me to another cultural phenomenon of the Seventh West community: cookie day. Next door to the Walls was the Isoms, and next door to the Isoms lived Mr. and Mrs. Dalley. The Dalleys seemed ancient. Mrs. Dalley was frail, thin, and in poor health much of the time. Despite this, she loved children. Each Monday, every child in the neighborhood was entitled to receive a warm, homemade cookie from Mrs. Dalley. If it was summer, the side door of her house was opened, and through the screen wafted the scent of freshly baked cookies. I remember the Wall sisters explaining cookie day protocol to me as if it were essential to our survival. One simply stood at the door and yelled, “It’s cookie day!” Mrs. Dalley would bring a basket of warm cookies and each child would withdraw one after a brief conversation with Mrs. Dalley. I look back now and admire what Mrs. Dalley did. Because she was ill, she couldn’t go out much. Cookie day was her way of staying connected to the neighborhood, and she got the children to come to her. We loved it, and her. Living in a neighborhood with lots of kids had some natural perils. One day, Wynn Isom, who was two years older than I, pushed me down in the gravel on the side of the road. Steve Platt, who was a year older than Wynn, came to my rescue; he ran from his porch and equaled the score. It really wasn’t a big deal, but in my three-year-old mind, Steve could have been Superman. I should say that Wynn wasn’t a bad sort; we played ball in high school together and were good friends. But Steve has always had my loyalty and admiration. When I was governor, I appointed him to some board or commission, thinking maybe it was partial payback for his heroics. The lesson

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there: good deeds come back to you, sometimes years later, in ways you could never predict.

coal dust. He had a reputation for being strict with the neighborhood kids.

Dad was scoutmaster of the ward troop. His boy scouts, Billy Endsley and the Isom boys among them, taught me the scout oath. I remember struggling to shape my hand into a three-fingered salute and reciting the oath with them.

The Cherry Tree

There was a uranium rush in Utah during the early 1950s, and my father was persuaded by a family relative that there was money in uranium stocks. I’m not sure what the angle was but for some reason we had a Geiger counter, a device that measured the radioactivity of the uranium, in our apartment. It made a clicking sound that increased in intensity as radioactivity was detected. I remember my father explaining it to the scouts.

My First Move

Twain Tippetts was a professor of humanities at the college in Cedar City, then called College of Southern Utah. Years later he became a distinguished professor at Utah State University. During his Cedar City years, the Tippetts family lived in a wonderful white rambler about a half block from the college campus. The home sits at an angle with a large picture window that faces the mountains. When Twain went on sabbatical, our family rented the house. I’m guessing the move from a small apartment into a home that size must have felt to my parents like quite a step up in the world. I remember being impressed that it had a library. It was another great neighborhood. Two doors down from the Tippetts’ home lived the Joneses. He was a farmer; she taught weaving at the college. Their son that was my age was named Howard, but everybody knew him as Howdy. In between Howdy Jones’s and our new place lived the Grant Tucker family. They had several children. One, Clarisse, was a year older than me. Grant Tucker was a coal miner with a gruff persona who scared the heck out of me and my friends. When he’d come home after a day at a little coal mine above Cedar City (that he later owned), his entire body would be covered in

When I was about four or five, I, along with some of the boys in the neighborhood, found an old, rusty, double-edged axe. We were intrigued. We began to deploy its weight against whatever wooden objects we could find. I joined a huddle in the vacant lot with a troop of boys my age. We were plotting a strategy against the cherry tree in Howdy Jones’s yard across the street, as though we were planning for war. (I should point out that even though the tree was in Howdy’s yard, Howdy was in this gang.) We had an old rope, probably something that Howdy’s dad used at his farm. We ran toward the tree, whooping and hollering like warriors. We took turns hacking at the cherry tree with the axe while others tied the rope onto the tree and pulled. The tree began to yield—falling over, but not breaking. It was at that point that the work of this arbor lynch mob was interrupted by the unexpected arrival of Grant Tucker, home from the coal mine and so black that the whites of his eyes and teeth bulged out. He stopped his truck in the middle of the street, with the motor running and the door open, as he stormed toward us. We scattered. I sprinted up the sidewalk looking for a place to hide. My father had recently hung a hammock between two poles in our backyard. I climbed in and the sides curled up around me. I lay motionless, expecting any moment to see a black-faced madman round the corner of the house. A few minutes passed and no Grant Tucker. “Could it be,” I thought, “that he didn’t get a good look at our faces?” As I laid there, my mind racing to assemble a credible alibi, I heard my dad’s car pull into the driveway. I remained motionless, eyes closed, pretending to be asleep. I could hear the soles of my dad’s shoes clicking against the pavement as he approached the hammock. I opened my eyes as if his arrival had awakened me from an afternoon nap.

SETTING DOWN ROOTS

“I’m so glad you’re enjoying this hammock,” he said. “Oh, yeah. Thanks for putting it up, Dad,” I gushed, hoping not to betray the sense of panic I was feeling. It was only a matter of hours, however, before Howdy’s mother came home, conferred with Grant Tucker, and completed the investigation. I don’t remember the specifics of the consequences, but I’m certain they were swift and sure.

A Nurturing Mother

There was an old, broken-down truck filled with dirt in the backyard of the Tippetts’ home—a terrific place to play and pretend. I remember sitting in the front seat shifting the gears and working the pedals. Digging one day in the dirt in the bed of the truck I found a pair of rusty, old scissors. What a find! I ran to the house, and to my great pleasure my mother seemed as pleased as I was. We cleaned them up, had them sharpened, and Mother used them for years. (I say she used them, but it was possible that Mother didn’t actually use them and just allowed me to think I’d produced a great find.) On another occasion, Mother let me help her make cookies. I poured the ingredients into a bowl

and did part of the stirring. I pressed the dough onto a cookie sheet, slid it into the oven, and presto! Cookies. Several days later, Mom was gone, and I was there with a friend. We concluded we should make cookies since I was now experienced. We proceeded to mix some dough using the ingredients I remembered, which were essentially flour and water. We created a serious mess just in time for Mother to return and see our enterprise. She was remarkably good-natured. She said, “Why don’t you put the dough on sheets, put them in the oven, and I’ll call you when they’re done?” Once the sheets were in the oven, we went to the yard to play. When Mother called, we ran to the kitchen. The cookies were removed from the oven just as we entered. They were perfect. Several weeks later, I tried a similar flour and water recipe in Mom’s absence, but to a much less satisfying result. I’d lost my touch. It was several years later that I discovered that my first self-made cookies tasted remarkably like Nilla Wafers.

Back porch of the home on 700 West. “My mother thought I looked cute in my underwear. I was horrified to stand on the back porch in this condition.”

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A Wanderer and Party Lines

Across the street from the Tippett’s house lived the Marchant family. Elloyd Marchant owned a hardware store called Cedar Builders Supply. His wife Shirley was a stay-at-home mother with five boys. My mother, not knowing that she would ultimately end up with six boys, often said how impossibly difficult it seemed to manage such a crew.

The Marchants lived down the block from the Corrys—their cousins—and dozens of other kids of every age. This neighborhood also had a big vacant lot that the kids had converted into a baseball field, complete with a chicken-wire backstop, but no grass. Eric Marchant, one of the Marchant boys, is a year younger than I am. For whatever reason, I felt a sense of responsibility for his well-being. He was prone to wander, and on several occasions was found blocks from home, always with a destination in mind, like seeing the trains or going to the swimming pool. My mother says that I would wake in the middle of the night having had bad dreams that Eric was wandering. I remember playing in the street with Eric on a rainy day. He fell in the mud, and I made a deliberate decision to sit next to him. In this case, as in the cherry tree caper, I cannot defend the logic, just report the memory. Telephones in Cedar City at that time required operators to initiate every call. The phones were simple black instruments with no dial or buttons. We had party lines, where there were several families served by the same line. To make a call, you picked up the receiver and listened to ensure that no neighbors were on the line, then an operator said, “Number please.” Our phone number was Juniper 288. Some years later, we got dial phones—a major technological breakthrough. However, dial phones diminished the number of operators who were employed by the phone company. I had several friends whose mothers were operators.

Park ‘n’ Shop

A major event of that period was the opening of a small grocery store at the south end of Dewey Avenue. It was known as Park ‘n’ Shop. People

pulled up in their cars, picked up a handset, and ordered their groceries. The clerk answered the phone behind the butcher counter, gathered the groceries, and brought them to the car. An innovative man named Thermer Jacobs installed the phones in front of the shop. It was the 1950 equivalent of ordering your groceries online. I remember learning that the Park ‘n’ Shop would be built. It was a big event and much anticipated. The owner was Forrest Hunter, the father of Jon Hunter, a good friend of mine. Finally the building took shape and an orange neon sign was affixed. I remember sitting near the front window of our house to watch the new, glowing sign. In time, it became a neighborhood hangout, a place to get treats and talk to friends. The Park ‘n’ Shop concept never really caught on, but the store survived for some time.

“Man in the Dorm”

At the other end of Dewey Avenue sat the college. My mother’s sisters lived at Spruce Hall, a World War II surplus building that was converted into a girls’ dorm, while they attended College of Southern Utah (CSU). It was not uncommon for me to walk to the dorms to see them. I figured out early that five-year-old boys with freckles got treated pretty well at the girls dorm. Protocol required dorm residents to notify others on the floor if they had a male guest. This was done by saying repeatedly, in a loud voice while walking down the hall, “Man in the dorm.” I went often enough to see my aunts that I knew the drill and soon just abbreviated the process by walking down the hall calling, “Man in the dorm.”

Other Early Memories

It was while we lived at the Tippetts’ that Dad started to have some measure of success in the insurance business. He spent long hours working and traveling. I had no idea what he did for a living or why it was important, but I remember thinking how cool it would be if he could work on the garbage truck so I could see him on Tuesdays and Thursdays when he would come by to empty the trash cans.

SETTING DOWN ROOTS

1 Dixie and Anne’s new home, 1956. 2 Sitting in the mud with Eric Marchant, in front of Mike’s Dewey Avenue home in Cedar City 3 700 West gang. Bottom left: Steve Platt, Wynn Isom. Bottom right: Mike. The white house in the background is the Endsley home.

4 Just singin’ in the rain with Janie Wall (four years old). 5 On the front steps of the 700 West home 6 Mike (five years old), on Dewey Ave.

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Occasionally, my father would take my mother on a trip. A wooden toy rifle with a bolt action was produced after such a venture. Wisely, they brought one for Eric Marchant as well. I was still an only child. My mother had at least one miscarriage during the period we lived at the Tippetts’ house; I remember her going to the hospital in an ambulance. On Third West, just a couple of blocks from Dewey Avenue, there was a preschool, or, as it was called then, a nursery school. It was run by Miss Wanda Tollestrup. I have a feeling my enrollment was more a function of my pleading than anything else; I remember being genuinely excited about going. Pupils at Miss Wanda’s did the usual: work with clay, listen to stories, and take naps on rugs they brought from home. It was my first memory of some of the boys with whom I would go through school. I remember, for example, Kevin Bulloch and Scott Nelson, who lived in the neighborhood,

The Leavitt’s first home, 393 South 700 West in 1956.

coming to Miss Wanda’s dressed as cowboys, complete with vest, holstered gun, and hat. Pretty cool stuff, I thought. There was one mystery at Miss Wanda’s: the second floor. Rumor had it that children who misbehaved were taken there for extended naps. It was a scary thought and kept me in line.

Our First Home

There are a series of prominent characteristics that define my father’s personality. One is a tendency to scavenge; another is an addiction to remodeling things. The perfect manifestation of both is our family home at 393 South 700 West in Cedar City. My family was still living at the Tippetts’ on Dewey Avenue. My dad was building an insurance agency, and I’m sure that he and my mother, like many couples, were working to fulfill the American dream of owning a home. He can recall the story of acquiring our house in minute detail, because such events are the most exhilarating of moments

SETTING DOWN ROOTS

for him. He heard that a group of homes was for sale in Panaca, Nevada. He schemed that he could buy one inexpensively, have it removed from its foundation, and brought to Cedar City. I’ve never asked if it worked out financially as well as he had hoped, but I presume it did. Dad has a natural instinct for this kind of deal.2 I was filled with anticipation awaiting the arrival of the home. When it finally came, it sat on large timber beams, ready to be placed on a newly poured foundation on our corner lot. The corpus of that home still lives in the structure. The two front bedrooms and basement, as well as the “old kitchen,” were part of the untouched version of the Leavitt home. We have joked that if you stripped that home down to its original structure, you’d have an outhouse from Panaca,

Nevada. However, the ongoing existence of those original parts of the home feels dear to me in understandable ways. The move to our house was among the most significant events of my life. I must have been younger than six, because I was not yet in school. Though five other children came later, we never left that house. The history of our home and its various stages of development would be worthy of its own book. I’m not going to attempt to tell that story here, but I do want to acknowledge what a memorable time it was for me as a boy. We had a home; I had a room; we were a permanent part of a neighborhood. The world may have still felt tense, and perhaps a little scary, my parents were still able to achieve part of the American Dream: owning a home.3

2. This home that we moved into was actually on the same street as the Tippett’s home that we were living in before, it was just on the other end. 3. Interestingly, my parents still live in this home at the time of this writing, around sixty-six years later.

393 South 700 West home in 2021

CHAPTER #

David Okerlund, Mike, and Anne in California, stopping to see the oranges actually hanging on a tree, 1958.

CHAPTER TITLE

02 Life on Seventh West 1956 to 1959 • Fourth of July; Dane’s Birth; Baseball; Entering School; Television; Cub Scouts; Baptism A large group of willows grew near the southeastern corner of our lot on Seventh West and formed a canopy over the irrigation ditch, which ran alongside the road in front of our house.1 People came to this part of the ditch several times a week to redirect water for their gardens and lawns. “The water turn,” as it was called, was an enterprise managed by the

From left: Dixie (holding Dane), Mike, and Anne, 1956

people who used irrigation water from the open ditches that ran throughout the neighborhood. A water master was employed by the water company or the city to mediate disputes, but for the most part people knew when it was their turn. The willows grew in abundance and formed an ideal place for my friends and me to build huts and

LIFE ON SEVENTH WEST

sell drinks like lemonade or Kool-Aid. We placed the pitcher in the irrigation ditch to keep the drinks cool and waited in the willow hut for customers. On one occasion, we were selling Kool-Aid from our willow hut when Layne Spevak’s older brother Johnny, who was probably in junior high at the time, approached us and explained that he and his friends wanted our space. They had some candy they wanted to sell. Johnny was a rather intimidating presence, and since business wasn’t all that great, we decided to accommodate him. Johnny and his buddies revealed a milk case full of candy in bags that they had “found” behind the college store. They commandeered our Kool-Aid signs and wrote “Kool-Aid and Candy” on them. They concluded we were needed as candy displays and insisted we stand on the street holding the bags so passing motorists could see the merchandise. What Johnny Spevak and his friends didn’t know was that our best customers were the cops. They always stopped, and, I might add, paid full price for their punch. As they rolled up on the scene, the word went out: “Quick! Drop the candy!” My friends and I quietly evaporated into the willows. Turns out the college bookstore had reported a theft—and the CCPD had found their men.

Fourth of July Parade

When I was around five years old, I was playing with Danny Yergensen, and he told me he was going to the Lions Club to try out for king of the Fourth of July parade. Mrs. Yergensen invited me to go along. My mother says I ran home and breathlessly asked for permission to go, saying, “I know I’ll win.” I don’t remember saying that, but I do remember being told I’d been chosen and how mad Danny was about it. Anne Milne, who was a schoolmate through the early years of high school before she moved with her family to Lander, Wyoming, was the queen. Our duties were to ride on the float and wear the crowns. In later years when I was governor, Anne came to the office several times as the head of the legal aid clinic in Salt Lake City.

That year however, was not my first Fourth of July parade. Perhaps it was the year before, when I was four, when I had become eligible to ride my

decorated tricycle in the parade—a highly anticipated event. Each child used colored crepe paper to decorate the handlebars and cross members of his or her bike. It was particularly cool to fasten playing cards to the spokes with wooden clothespins so that as the wheels turned, they simulated the thunderous sound of a motorcycle. I had looked forward with anticipation to the parade; my tricycle was decorated well in advance. On the day of the parade, my father accompanied me. The tricycles were, as a matter of protocol and safety, placed toward the front of the parade but behind the bicycles. As the parade began, I broke with the tricycle pack and moved up into the bicycles. Suddenly, I moved in front of the bicycles and passed the marching band, then passed the color guard and the grand marshal. My dad sprinted alongside the road, calling my name, but to no avail. Finally, I reached the Chevron station next to the city park where the parade route ended. “What are you doing?” he yelled as he caught up to me. “I won! I won!” I said. The parades in Cedar City were grand events. In addition to decorated bicycles, there were high school bands, church floats, hay wagons, Little League teams, baton twirlers from the summer recreation programs, marching ballerinas, and the fire truck. Following the parade, the whole town gathered at the city park for grilled food, foot races, and snow cones. It was a scene right out of Norman Rockwell. Two memorable features of a Fourth of July celebration at the city park stand out in my mind. The first was a dunking pond, where a prominent person sat on a stool above a tank filled with cold water. Townspeople paid to throw baseballs at the bull’s-eye, which, when struck, released the stool into the water. It always drew a crowd. Plus, the kids got to sit in the seat after the adults, and it was fun to sit on the stool on a hot July day. The second feature was the footraces. Always organized by age group, these were taken very seriously by the kids and generally involved prizes or a few nickels and dimes for the winners, not to

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1 Mike (two years old), 1953 2 Fourth of July King, 1956 3 Mike and Anne, Fourth of July celebration

4 Lions Club float for the Fourth of July. Bottom left: Jimmy Lunt (attendant), Top left: Mike (King), Top right: Anne Milne (Queen), Bottom right: Janet Petty (attendant), 1956

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mention bragging rights to being the fastest kid in town. I don’t recall ever gaining that title, but I do remember my heart pounding as I stood at the starting line. The kids ran in stocking feet—you could just run faster that way. Shoes were tossed into a pile. When the race was over, I always found it a challenge to find my shoes.

“

Whoever deemed baseball the national pastime must have been thinking about the games played within that neighborhood.

”

Another Fourth of July, I remember Dad had been landscaping the yard, and we invited neighborhood kids to come for fireworks. I remind myself of this story mainly because the general scene felt a lot like the neighborhood seemed to me: open, friendly, and inclusive. People looked after each other’s children, knew what was going on in one another’s lives, and genuinely cared about their neighbors.

Grand Canyon and Disneyland

When I was nominated by President Bush to serve as administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, I recounted my first visit to the Grand Canyon. Mother had entered a contest at KSUB radio that required her to write, in twenty-five words or less, why she would like to take her family to the national parks. She won. Frankly, my parents didn’t want to ride the bus to the three parks, but I did. I’m guessing I made a big fuss over it because the problem was solved by letting me ride the bus alone while my parents drove the car and met me there. I can remember the ride. The driver, or gear jammer, as one was called in the vernacular of the Utah parks, stopped the bus on top of a

mountain and served watermelon while the engine cooled. We were met by a mass of employees as part of the show of hospitality. My souvenir from the trip was a miniature bowie knife from the gift shop. I remember seeing the canyon for the first time and being awestruck by its majesty. I have a photograph from this visit, which my father took. My mother and I are seated on the South Rim. I’m facing her, with the bowie knife attached to my belt. She is leaning on her left hand, looking at the canyon stretched out before us in an infinite pattern of peaks and valleys. Her hair glistens in the sun. Her expression is not captured in the photograph, but her pose is one of quiet satisfaction. Not long after our trip to the Grand Canyon, we made our first trip to Disneyland. I have in my mind that Mother was pregnant with Dane, which would have made me five. David Okerlund, my uncle who was only seven years older than me (and we were more like brothers than anything), had never seen the ocean nor been to Disneyland, so he went with us. Most of my memories of the trip are driven by pictures that Mother took of us at Disneyland and other places. I do have a vivid memory of the cups and saucers ride.

Dane’s Birth

One of the most profound moments in my memory during this period was Dane’s birth. I was five. The day before his birth, a Saturday, I had gone shopping for a pair of church shoes with my mother. The next day was Mother’s Day. Very early in the morning, Dad woke me up. “It’s time,” he said. “I’m taking Mother to the hospital.” He asked if I’d be alright. I assured him that I would, and I went back to sleep. A couple of hours later I got out of bed, and, feeling in charge of the house, fixed some cereal, got ready for church, and retrieved the paper from the front porch, despite the fact I couldn’t read. I hadn’t started first grade, but I liked the pictures in the paper, and I remember lying on the floor to eat my cereal and read the funnies.

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My dad came home about that time. He seemed rather proud of me for having taken such good care of myself. He told me I had a baby brother.

moments of my life up to that point was overhearing two older boys debate whether or not I could make Little League.

I don’t know how I got to church that day, but I have a clear memory of sitting in junior Sunday school on child-size pews, participating in a Mother’s Day program and leaning across the aisle to announce to Steve Bulloch, “Hey, I have a brother.”

Other than baseball, there was also swimming. Cedar City had an effective city recreation program in the summer. Swimming lessons were taught at the municipal pool, and there was a baseball program for aspiring Little Leaguers. Eligibility for entry into the league was eight years old. Each player received a shirt and hat—which, for a boy in Cedar City, was his symbol of tribal acceptance. No pun intended here, but my first team was the Milwaukee Braves. Our shirts and hats were bright yellow.

Baseball at Seventh West

As a resident of the lower end of Seventh West, I had credentials to play in the neighborhood baseball games at that end of the street. The neighborhoods in our community were so territorial that playing on the other side of the hill, though it was still on Seventh West, seemed like a different part of town to me. One day, when I rode my bike over the hill to play baseball, I suffered a fit of conscience. My mother had told me that I could not ride my bike off our street without permission. For some reason, I thought that our street ended at the gentle hill that separates the lower half of the street from the upper end. Having gone over the hill, I felt so guilty I confessed. Mother told me that it was still on our street, and that I was under no obligation to report or worry. I realized I had interpreted the restriction too narrowly; I felt my world widen.

Having cracked the playing barrier for the games at the bottom of Seventh West, I had more baseball experience than the average eight-yearold. However, I was still quite nervous for the first game. So nervous that when I was told to play left field, I trotted to the wrong one. Gratefully, the other players on the team knew even less.

Whoever deemed baseball the national pastime must have been thinking about the games played within that neighborhood. They were perpetual. The neighborhood rules made games a community affair: a ball hit onto Mrs. Dover’s lawn was a home run; hit Mr. Harding’s house and it would be no more than thirty seconds before he came out of the house growling; the outfielders played in the street and had to let traffic go by, but traffic was infrequent enough that it worked. The home-run line was a two-foot-wide ditch that ran in front of the homes in left field. If the ball was hit into the ditch, it was a double.

Entering School

The quality of our baseball games was pretty good; many of the kids in my neighborhood went on to play baseball and other sports in high school, and several of them played baseball in college.

The next year in school, on the first day of first grade, I remember getting dressed in the new clothes Mother had bought for me. I also remember Mom saying to Dad, “Can you believe our son is old enough to go to school?” Danny Yergensen and Steve Bulloch came to my house, and we all walked together. I must have previously walked the route with Mother, because it doesn’t make sense that

By the time I was seven, my baseball skills were sufficient enough that I was called upon to play if nobody else was available. One of the proudest

Not only did that identification with the Braves inspire loyalty to my teammates but the Milwaukee Braves became my favorite major league team. Warren Spahn, Lew Burdette, and Hank Aaron were the team’s marquee players.

When I wasn’t playing baseball, I was in school. Utah did not have a full-time kindergarten when I was old enough to attend in 1957. The alternative was a six-week summer kindergarten. Mrs. Myrtle Davis was my teacher. I remember standing at the door to the classroom and feeling rather frightened as my mother left me. The first order of business was a fire drill. The principal rang a bell she held in her hand, and we were trained to line up at the door and follow our teacher out of the building.

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4 1

5 2

7 3

1 Eric Marchant, Mike (six years old), and Danny Yergensen 2 David Okerlund and Mike, (seven years old), on a beach in California with Dixie. This was the first time either had seen the ocean. 3 David Okerlund and Mike (five years old), on the tea cups ride at Disneyland

4 Mike (five years old) and Dixie in matching pajamas, living in the home on Dewey avenue. 5 Dixie and Mike at the rim of the Grand Canyon. 6 Mike (eight years old) and Anne at Lake Tahoe in Nevada

Dixie and Mike at the rim of the Grand Canyon

LIFE ON SEVENTH WEST

she would have let us go the first day without more assistance unless things were pretty well-greased. My teacher was Mrs. Cooley; I really liked her. On the first day of class, she sat down with me, pointed to a word on the page of a book and read, “This is Dick. This is Jane.” The next page repeated the words. We were taught to read by memorizing what the words looked like, not by sounding them out. The first book I took home was titled Spot. I crawled onto my dad’s lap that night and read to him. The books got progressively more complex, but I don’t remember the method changing. It’s easy to be critical of this style of teaching today; the method I was taught may not have been as purely devoid of traditional phonetics as I remember it, but, as a result, many of my generation lack confidence in spelling. Over time I created my own method, blending the system of memorization and the system of phonics together, which has been adequate, though even today I make mistakes in reading and spelling. Thankfully, the education system has moved back to a whole-language approach. School started at nine in the morning. We had a half-hour for morning recess at 10:30, an hour for lunch, half-hour for recess again in the afternoon, and concluded school at 3:30 p.m. Most days I walked home for lunch. With an hour for lunch, that was possible, and plus, it was more common to have a stay-at-home mother to meet and feed you. Nowadays, school starts earlier, includes fewer breaks, and finishes earlier. I think the earlier start time for schools was instituted to accommodate working mothers who dropped off their children on their way to work. But frankly, the old schedule seems better for children. I remember first grade as a time of confidence and happiness. It was also the first time I remember caring about girls. Patrice Holt was a classmate whose parents had gone to college with my parents, and she seemed to me the cutest girl in the class. I remember us playing a game together on a rocking horse in my basement. I dove onto the sofa, pretending to rescue her from some uncertain fate. When I was promoted to second grade, I had the good fortune to have Mrs. Brown as my teacher. She was the mother of Joanna Brown, a friend of my mother. What a kind and wonderful woman

Mrs. Brown was. Her gentleness is still the most profound memory I have of that time. I can still picture her in a blue dress with white lace. She had glasses that peaked at the corners and heavy black shoes that I’m sure were comfortable but typified the kind of shoes worn by older ladies.

“

I just have a feeling this boy is going to grow up to be someone very important, maybe vice president of the United States.

”

One embarrassing moment happened during this year. I got a coat known in the popular vernacular as a “car coat.” It was an ordinary coat when I think back on it, but owning one made me feel rather stylish. I remember hanging it on a hook just outside Mrs. Brown’s room. At recess, I hurried to put it on. As I got outside and put my hands into the pockets, I felt a jump rope. Suddenly, standing there on the playground, I realized I was wearing a girl’s coat, complete with lacy fringe. Oh, how humiliating! I slunk back into the school, replaced the coat and returned to the playground without anyone noticing. Today I chuckle to remember how relieved I was that my error was known only to me. I have positive memories of this year as well. Mrs. Brown did two things to build my confidence that I have never forgotten. The first: she cast me as the emperor in the play, The Emperor With No Clothes. It was a fun part, and the kids responded to me. The second thing is more profound. When I attended parent-teacher conference with my mother, we reviewed my work, and then Mrs. Brown said, “I just have a feeling this boy is going to grow up to be someone very important, maybe vice president of the United States.” Perhaps it was intended as merely a nice expression of confidence, but those words from Mrs. Brown struck me deeply. That one sentence from a

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teacher at that early stage of my life was a powerful affirmation, and frankly became somewhat of a responsibility to fill in later years. The opportunities I have had during my life have given me important responsibility. Whether Mrs. Brown had a spiritual insight or was just being nice, I will never know, but her words built me in an important way. I have worried that over time I have missed opportunities to build people in similar ways.

Heading Home After School

The West Elementary compound included the junior high and high school, which meant there were lots of “big kids” present. The junior high was in the same building as the elementary school, and the high school sat just west in a three-story building. The trek between the school compound and home was one I may have made a thousand times during first and second grade and later in seventh, eighth, and ninth grade. To me it seemed like a long walk, but it was only about three-quarters of a mile. And there was so much adventure along the way.

When we set out for our homes on Seventh West, we used a crosswalk that put us next to what was called the old student center and is now the university’s conference center. A cluster of pine trees stood nearby. High school and junior high students would often seek the cover of the trees to smoke, and it took on the name Nicotine Point. When I was an elementary school student, Nicotine Point frightened me because that’s where the “hoods” hung out. By the time I entered junior high, it had become less intimidating, and we used Nicotine Point as a shortcut around the student center. On the site of the College of Southern Utah administration building and west of the old student center, there were two flights of descending stairways—one after the other—which led to tennis courts on the right and, on the left, the old college power plant where coal burned to provide heat and energy for the campus. A couple of garbage bins built into the side of the power plant were transformed by our imaginations into caves or hideouts.

Second grade class taken on the steps of West Elementry. Front row from left: Unknown, Lorraine Clark, Scott Nelson Second row : unknown, Rodney Knight, Janet Petty, Milton Perry, Scott Lund, Mike Leavitt Third row: Evan Lewis, Guy Getz, David Fotheringham, unknown, Verlann Lowe, Brent Whittekiend Back row: Merrill Williams, unknown, unknown, Larry Smith, Bernell Thorley, Charles Taylor and Mrs. Brown.

LIFE ON SEVENTH WEST

One of the stairways was extraordinarily long, maybe fifty feet, with a gradual descent. Unless it was cold or wet, we always slid down the pipe banister. The sidewalk ran alongside the tennis courts, past the entrance to the football field, and along the east side of War Memorial Field House. After school, this was an area of great distraction for me. If it was football season, the college football team was preparing for practice. I loved to stop at the field and play a game with my friends in the end zone or watch the football team practice. I loved the sound of cleats on concrete as the players moved from the dressing room to the field. In the winter, the side door to the gymnasium was always open, and my friends and I could easily slip in to watch the basketball team practice. Occasionally, the coach or some athletic manager yielding authority would run us off, but the combination of a warm place in the winter and the squeak of Chuck Taylor All Stars gym shoes on hardwood, or the sound of a leather basketball passing from hand to hand, held an allure I couldn’t withstand. When I was in elementary school, the college farm was located where the old physical education building and Centrum are today. It’s hard for me to believe as I sit and reflect on it, but they were still using workhorses, huge Clydesdale horses, on the farm at that time. During my first- or second-grade year, we learned that one of the workhorses was pregnant. It fascinated us. Every trip between home and school included a stop at the stable to see if the colt had been born. Finally, it was, and to great celebration by the entire Seventh West gang. There was a vacant lot at the bottom of Seventh West on the northeast corner. It was directly across from the field where we played baseball. The college owned it and plowed it one day, and in so doing, disrupted a diagonal path we had worn across the lot. We called the path “the short cut;” it was part of our route home. We were incensed. We organized ourselves and walked back and forth until it had been worn again. The walk wasn’t all fun and games. The Isoms had a dog named Sailor. It was a big, mean, clay-colored hound of some sort. It was the meanest dog I ever remember encountering—it attacked kids.

It’s remarkable the Isoms didn’t get sued. The dog ran at you as you walked up the street. Everyone who knew about the dog walked on the other side of the street, but even that wasn’t enough. I picked up a rock once and threw it at Sailor. He attacked, knocked me to the ground, and went for my throat. Mr. Isom yelled at him, and I escaped without injury, but that dog was just an awful animal.

Television

In 1927, Philo T. Farnsworth (born in Beaver Creek, Utah) invented television. Thirty years later in Cedar City, I saw my first television transmission. I was with Lynn Heyborne and his dad. Lynn was my age and lived next door to us on Seventh West. Lynn’s dad was an electrical engineer of some sort. I remember a giant antenna, which I assume was a ham radio tower, sat on his roof. He was always working on something electronic in the basement. One evening, he took us to Leigh Hill, where he had assembled a crude antenna and was trying to pick up television signals from Las Vegas. I was able to see, through the snowy static, just the faintest outline of a person on the screen. On another occasion, Mr. Heyborne invited us into his basement to see an unclear and snowy picture of the Lone Ranger on the same six- or eightinch television. That was truly interesting to me. A short time later, I watched television at my Grandmother Leavitt’s home. They had service with some quality before we did.

The first television in the neighborhood belonged to Teri Bradshaw’s family, who lived down the street. Teri was a girl, and one year younger than I was. Her father and her uncle owned the Chevrolet dealership in Cedar City. Every day—and I mean every day—the entire neighborhood would gather on the front lawn of the Bradshaw home, waiting for the Mickey Mouse Club show to start. At about five to four, Mrs. Bradshaw would open, or authorize to be opened, the front door. We would rush in and take our places on the floor in front of the black and white television. The Mickey Mouse Club included serials like the Hardy Boys, along with the music and personalities of the presenters.

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1 Mike (seven years old), with infant Mark 2 Mike (seven years old) with Dane (two years old) getting Dad to “do tricks” with them, this being one of their favorite acts of daring.

3 Mike (five years old), at Fish Lake 4 Steven Bulloch and Mike (six years old), on the front porch of the Leavitt home on 700 West.

LIFE ON SEVENTH WEST

At the end we would sing: “Now it’s time to say goodbye to all our company. M-I-C (See you real soon) K-E-Y (Why? Because we like you!) M-O-U-S-E.” When I was about eight, my family finally got a television. The big, black, square box sat downstairs on an old, speckled desk in the corner. I impatiently awaited a man to install our antenna. The television had been sitting on the desk for several days, and the anticipation was killing me. Finally he came, and we had television. It was a significant event for all of my friends. The downstairs was such a wonderful place to watch television. It was cool and dark. We had a reddish sofa with a half moon–shaped pillow on each end that was held in place by an oak rail inset. We also had a black recliner. At first there were linoleum floors in the TV room but then Dad found some old gold carpet that he put down there. Color television was to follow several years later. The color TV set was dramatically different from the square, black box. It was nearly round and had a giant white cord that allowed it to be somewhat mobile but still tethered to the stationary power source. Color programs were at first few and far between, but gradually more and more studios began to produce them. HDTV is following a similar pattern. My favorite programs during the first years of television had successfully transitioned from radio. For example, I used to listen to Gunsmoke on Sunday nights. Seeing Marshal Matt Dillon on television for the first time was a remarkable surprise; I had envisioned him differently. Gunsmoke was actually filmed in the Kanab area, so it was always my dream to meet James Arness, but I never did. However, I did meet the actor who portrayed Doc Holliday while I was sitting beside a motel pool in Kanab when I was there with my parents.

Perry Mason, which had been on the radio as well, was another big favorite. I had great fondness for The Ed Sullivan Show on Sunday nights at 7:00 p.m., Leave it to Beaver, Father Knows Best, and The Red Skelton Show. There was a very early version of cable television in Cedar City. I don’t understand exactly how it worked but I’ve talked with Jack Gallivan, the publisher of The Salt Lake Tribune and the originator of the cable business in Utah, who confirmed my memory. The television station was built by Thermer Jacobs—the same innovator who installed the phones at Park ‘N’ Shop—inside the Berrett Music building on the east side of Main Street, next door to where the State Bank is now. The station produced some local programming, including some boxing fights. I admire Thermer Jacobs’ ingenuity. The Park ‘n’ Shop system was ahead of its time, but the television station was real pioneering.

Cub Scout

When I was eight, I became a Cub Scout. Grandma Okerlund was in Cedar City on the day of my first den meeting. I remember being in tears about my uniform not having the patches sewn on correctly, and while Mother worked on those, Grandma drilled me on the Cub Scout oath. My first Cub leader was Carma Lunt, Scott’s mother. Not long after I joined Scouts, Mrs. Proctor, Paul and Steven’s mother, took over the job. Our den meetings were held in their basement. It was unfinished and provided a perfect place for eight-year-olds to rumble. We participated in the pinewood derby and various activities. One activity we did was meet Governor George Dewey Clyde at the El Escalante Hotel. I remember waiting outside the hotel and wondering why this was such a big deal. However, the memory of shaking his hand is crystal clear, and I’m so glad I did that. While I was governor, I often shook the hands of Cub Scouts and Scouts, and would share the story of when I met the governor as a Cub Scout. The El Escalante Hotel was built as a hub for guests who rode the railroad to see the national parks. It was rather grand for a city the size of Cedar City. Warren G. Harding, the twenty-ninth U.S.

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president, visited the hotel during the summer of 1923. During the 1950s, the hotel employed many Cedar City residents. I used to go there with Mother and her friend Bee Roberts for lunch. I’m not sure how they knew each other but I don’t think Bee had married. I remember that she had a great fondness for me, and I have other memories of times when I would go places with her. As I recall, she died of cancer, providing rather significant sadness. The El Escalante was also the home of radio station KSUB. Our neighbor, and my parents’ friend from college, Walter Lowe, was the manager of the radio station. The Lowes lived across the street from us and were members of my parents’ gospel study group/social club. Walt and his wife Pat had a daughter named Verlanne, who was my age. Larry Lowe was Dane’s friend. Larry was famous because he could stick out his stomach farther than any other human being.

Baptism and Confirmation

My baptism was, like that of most children in my situation, much anticipated. It was held at what was then called the Cedar West Stake House— the building just north of the College of Southern Utah football stadium. It was held on a Saturday evening, likely the first one in March 1959. I recall dressing in white, going to the prayer meeting with my father, and walking into the opening exercises in the Relief Society room, which was adjacent to the stage. When I entered the font, the water felt warm to me. That helped me relax. I held tight to my father’s arm and accepted baptism. I was worried that the water would cause the clothes to cling to my body on the way out of the font. I was confirmed the next day in sacrament meeting. I tried to keep track of my sins for a while, thinking that this was my one chance to be perfect. I later learned to apply a more general repentance process on some of the hard-to-specify infractions.

03 Grandparents in the Desert Bunkerville Trips with Dixie; Visiting Grandma and Grandpa Leavitt Bunkerville, Nevada, is on the banks of the Virgin River, near the southeast corner of the state where Utah and Arizona join in a tightly packaged confluence of borders. It was settled by a small group of my pioneer ancestors, who were looking for a place they could practice the United Order, an ecclesiastical form of government whereby each member devotes all his or

her efforts to the collective good. One more Leavitt, they say, and it would have been Leavittville. The riparian bottomland was called Virgin Valley, named after the Virgin River that flows from the mountains of southern Utah through Zion National Park. It was a hard place to live; extreme summer heat, limited water, and distance from population

Leavitt grandparents’ home in Bunkerville, Nevada

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centers were the enemies of prosperity. However, it may have been just the type of isolation my a n c e s t or s were looking for. Many writVincen's selective service card for WWI , his have ten on how middle name misspelled "Ellis" instead of Elias hardy and devoted my Leavitt ancestors were as a people to have left Canada in pursuit of the Church, then surviving persecution, the loss of loved ones, a thirteen-thousand-mile trek, and an assignment to the cotton mission with its uncertainties. I will simply acknowledge it and the profound impact that foundation has had on every aspect of my life. This is the setting my grandpa Leavitt was born in. I’m guessing that Grandpa Leavitt was one of the last children in the church to be born into a polygamist family; he had twenty-two brothers and sisters. My grandmother was also a Leavitt (she and my grandfather were second cousins). She was about three years younger than Grandpa. She told me once that she wasn’t terribly enthusiastic about him when they first met, but their marriage of nearly seventy years proves that he grew on her. Grandma and Grandpa Leavitt married during a rather prosperous time in the United States, but given where they lived, they did not see much of the abundance. My father was born in 1929, on the leading edge of the Great Depression. Dad is the second oldest in his family of four brothers and one sister: identical to what Jackie and I have, the girl being the middle child in both cases. In piecing together a picture of my father’s life from conversations and stories he’s shared with me, it’s clear his childhood was a continuation of the struggle his forebears had waged for the previous fifty years. For his family, the Depression wasn’t anything new.

Bunkerville With Dad

Once I was about six years old, my dad started bringing me along on his work trips to Nevada. We would stop in Bunkerville for the night, Dad would leave me there and drive on to Las Vegas, then he would return a couple of days later to pick me up. Once Dad was in the insurance business, he worked hard to cultivate clients in Nevada. It was a natural market and it took him home. As the oldest child, it provided me with many opportunities to be with him, and I look back on it as remarkably formative and important in my upbringing. During the drives, Dad would tell me stories from his youth, including one about the first electric light in Bunkerville—a porch light on his home. I have always pictured him driving from Las Vegas on the milk truck in the evening, turning left off the old highway, dropping off the little hill just before the family house, and seeing the porch light glowing in the darkness. Other stories I relished were Dad’s experiences as a high school basketball player. As a little boy, I had heard so many retellings of games that I could reenact key plays between the Virgin Valley Bulldogs and Moapa Valley, the Bulldogs’ chief rival. A pair of rolled-up socks served as a basketball in the living room of Grandma’s home. One basket was above the archway going into the kitchen and the other was above the doorway leading to the bedrooms. I would have been seven or eight at the time. (And I had a similar court set up in my home in Cedar City.) The trips were frequent but typically short, usually one or two nights. I formed a base of friends in Bunkerville, got to know all my cousins, had an inventory of rituals and secret places, and bonded completely with Grandma and Grandpa Leavitt. Of the grandchildren, only Terry and Jilene, Bert’s children, were older than I was. I spent quite a bit of time hanging out with Vin, my dad’s younger brother. My relationship with him wasn’t as close as my relationship with David Okerlund, but I still felt a sense of kinship with him.

G R A N D PA R E N T S I N T H E D E S E R T

1 Grandparents, Erma and Vincen Leavitt 2 Bishops of Bunkerville still living in 1975 3 Dixie’s brothers and father. From left : Bert, Vincen, Vin, Dixie, Tom.

4 Home built by Weare Leavitt, 1888. Originally one room measuring about 20 by 45 feet.

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We often caught toads and lizards hiding in the bushes or grass. Vinny always told me they would give me warts. I believed him enough to worry about it, but never enough to stop handling them. Traveling was a good way to spend time with my dad, and I enjoyed the adventures. We usually stopped for gas at one of his service station clients in Mesquite before heading home. On these occasions I would always plead for a pop. Generally, I’d drink Hires Root Beer or Nehi Orange. On one trip, we had just finished eating hamburgers at the Freezer Café. When we stopped for gas a few minutes later, my request for pop was denied. I appealed; denied. I got out of the car, and while the attendant filled our car and Dad talked business inside, I began goofing with the slot machines that were under an awning outside the station. My habit was to pull the handle and check the tray to see if change had been left behind. On one of the three machines, I pulled the handle and the dials spun. The first wheel revealed a cherry and three nickels fell into the tray: the exact amount of change needed for the pop machine. I smugly deposited the nickels, extracted my Nehi and sat in the car waiting for my dad to question the source of my soda.

Grandma and Grandpa’s Home

I know little about the origin of Grandpa and Grandma Leavitt’s home in Bunkerville. It is a single-story house with a stucco exterior, covered front porch with no stairs, and a big picture window. A bed or love-seat swing sat on the porch. The lawn was the typical bent grass, planted in that area because it is hardy enough to survive the withering summer heat. It felt scratchier than the bluegrass in Cedar City and was not quite as green. In the front of the house was a small, rounded ditch that had been lined with cement to prevent erosion. A white picket fence surrounded the yard, with a spring-loaded gate that had squeaky hinges and various latches over the years. The concrete leading to the house had a surface that was extraordinarily smooth.

Next to the house there was a small building called the storehouse. It was a combination pantry and storage shed, and it always had a padlock on the door. Grandpa kept tools and supplies there, and Grandma used it to store fruit and an extra freezer. Attached to the storehouse was a single car garage and carport where Grandpa kept a small fishing boat (though he rarely used it). On the northwest corner of the house, there was a small, exterior stairway descending into a room referred to as the cellar. It was used as a bedroom for one of the boys. I remember it as cool and nice but incredibly scary. I hated going down there alone—absolutely hated it. The nights were so warm in the house that a bed was placed in the backyard under a tree as a way to escape the heat. The nights in Bunkerville were quiet, which also made that bed a great place to sleep. One night, my cousin Jilene and I began jumping on the bed in order to catch a limb of the tree. In a perfectly choreographed effort, we jumped, grabbed the limb, then fell onto the mattress—with the branch. Grandpa got real mad at us over that one. In the backyard, there were pomegranate trees, grapevines, and a plot for the world-class garden my grandparents kept. For many years, a chicken coop sat just southwest of the house, next to Grandma and Grandpa Leavitt’s barn. On the other side of the barn, there were haystacks. The chickens were fond of laying their eggs in the haystack. I loved looking for the eggs, and I used a little wire basket to gather them. I was fascinated by the brown ones. As a little boy, I would go out several times a day to check on the eggs. To this day, whenever the phrase “chicken coop” comes up, I think of that place. The front door to the home opened into a large, oblong living room. There was a conversation area just inside the door and then an area to the west where Grandma often had a quilt framed up. The kitchen was directly behind the living room, and you entered it through an arched doorway. Like most homes, the kitchen was the heart of activity in the house. There was a back door that opened into the kitchen and a panel of windows over the sink on the back wall that provided a view

G R A N D PA R E N T S I N T H E D E S E R T

1 TTop row, from left:: Vin, Dixie, Bert, Tom, Bottom row: Erma, Vincen, Rhea.

2 From left: Dixie Leavitt. Mike. Mary Luella Abbott Leavitt, Vincen Leavitt

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of the backyard and garden. Grandma always had food available to eat, usually warming in the oven. There was a top-open freezer in the corner. An interior door against the north wall of the living room led into a wing of three bedrooms and the bathroom. Grandma and Grandpa slept in the front bedroom. In later years, a second bathroom was added. At first, the shower was outside, which didn’t provide much privacy. Before the added bathroom, there was a cooler attached to the house that blew freezing wind and sounded like a jet engine. I choose the words “freezing” and “wind” deliberately. In the hall next to the bathroom, there was a bookshelf that held many books. Grandma loved books, and I used to spend a lot of time looking at those she had collected: The Hardy Boys mysteries, Nancy Drew, Little Women, and Moby Dick are ones I remember, as well as numerous church books.

Arriving in Bunkerville

Dad and I had our own rituals for trips to Nevada. We stopped at certain places along the way, generally to see clients or to eat. There were different observations we’d make in Santa Clara, then at the Shivwits Indian Reservation, then at Beaver Dam, and finally Mesquite. Grandpa Leavitt worked for the state highway department, so when we entered Mesquite, I would look for a Nevada Highway truck, because I knew it would be carrying Grandpa. I’d also look for the sign in the form of a bellman with his hand waving. I always tried to look into the doorways of the mini casinos as we drove past. My Dad and I would count the twenty bumps on the bridge over the Virgin River out loud together.

If we arrived at Grandma and Grandpa Leavitt’s home in the evening, as was often the case, we would knock on the door to let them know we were entering, and then walk in. If Grandpa hadn’t gone to bed already, he’d be sitting in a rocking chair near the windows, and Grandma would be working on a quilt or other handicraft. Grandma Leavitt would lead us to the kitchen. If she was in bed, she’d get up. The makings of a meal were always at hand. There would be something warming in the oven, and a couple of fresh pies on

the counter, or there would be hardtack bread in a pan, and grapes in the refrigerator to go along with bread and milk.

“

I have a surprise. Today, I bought you a horse.

”

The bread was always homemade, and the pies defy description. Along with all the traditional pies, Grandma Leavitt would make a green grape pie, an apricot pie, or a peach pie that I simply loved. The crust seemed to be the secret. Grandma would serve us and continue fussing, but never seemed to sit down. When I joined the insurance business like my dad and began to travel, I followed the same pattern that my dad had, always stopping in Bunkerville. Grandma treated me just like Dad, including the fresh meal and pie. Grandma Leavitt sometimes involved me when she made bread. She would knead it, leaving it to rise on the kitchen table. She used a big tan bowl with a blue stripe around the top to mix the ingredients. Grandma Leavitt always had a big box of corn flakes in her pantry. It was that or oatmeal mush for breakfast. I could only stomach the mush if it had lots of sugar and milk on it. Grandpa Leavitt was a homebody. When he came to our house for a family event, such as a baptism, he insisted on getting home before dark. Sometimes he’d sit in the car to illustrate his seriousness. A few times, Grandma Leavitt stayed with us while my parents were away. She lived with us while she attended summer school for her teacher certification and for her job as a librarian. One of my favorite things to do as a child in Bunkerville was to swim at the falls, which was a big hole in the irrigation canal. My first memory of the falls was a straight drop-off of about eight or ten feet. Later, a concrete slide was added, which put holes in my swimming trunks. But I didn’t care. I remember pleading with my parents for permission to swim at the falls.

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The water was often dirty, especially after a storm. Some days it was just too muddy to swim in. Other days somebody up the canal would be using the water. The bottom was dirt, and it was between six and eight feet deep. There was no gradual slope, just a drop-off. It’s a good thing I didn’t know then what I know now about water quality. The water must have been terrible. The natural current cycled around the pond. If we weren’t sliding, we would float on inner tubes, the current carrying us as though we were on a merry-go-round. It was a wonderful place to swim on hot days.

A Place of Firsts

Bunkerville was a place of firsts for me. It was there that I learned how to kill a chicken and how to drive a tractor and a car. I remember well the first time I saw Grandpa Leavitt kill a chicken. He put the chicken’s head under a board and just pulled it off. It grossed me out. Then he went to find another chicken and the headless chicken started to run. It didn’t go very far. Despite the method, it was a good lesson in food preparation. Years later, when I was in officer candidate school, we were given some live chickens and told to prepare a meal. I was the only one there who knew a sure way to kill them.

I learned how to drive a tractor in Bunkerville on farmland Dad had purchased. The tractor was small and white, with a level hooked to the back. Dad put the tractor in the lowest gear, showed me the pattern, made sure that I could stop the thing, and turned me loose. I loved it. Most of my early experiences driving a car were on trips to Nevada with my dad. He would let me sit on his lap and steer. Later, I graduated to controlling the gas and brake, while sitting on his lap. When I was tall enough, I sat in the seat by myself. By the time I was fourteen or so, I was driving, and Dad would doze in the passenger seat. One night in Bunkerville, Dad said, “I have a surprise.” After insisting that I guess a few times, he said, “Today, I bought you a horse.” I have such a clear memory of that moment; I was beside myself with excitement. The next day, we went to see the mare and colt he had purchased. We rode the mare all over Bunkerville, while the colt followed. We named the horse Glitter because it glittered in the sun, and the colt we called Lightning because it was so quick. Glitter and Lightning were kept in Bunkerville during the first year we owned them, and then

Mike and Elaine Braithwaite in front of his grandparents’ home in Bunkerville, Nevada, on Mike’s horse, Glitter.

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we moved them to a vacant lot behind our house in Cedar City. The horses were a big incentive to travel to Bunkerville and became a major part of my experience there. I loved going to Bunkerville for many reasons. In addition to seeing my grandparents, I looked forward to riding my horse and watching my grandparent’s TV. While Bunkerville residents were slow in getting electricity, my grandparents got dial phones and television before we did in Cedar City. My grandparents had careers that took them away from home. Grandma Leavitt worked at the school in Mesquite, first in the lunchroom (where I ate school lunch when I accompanied her), then as the school librarian. Like Grandpa Okerlund, Grandpa Leavitt worked for the state highway department. He and another man were the only ones working for the highway department in that part of Clark County. When I traveled to Las Vegas with Dad, we would often stop and visit with them along the way. I cannot imagine a more miserable job than working on the highway between Las Vegas and Bunkerville during the middle of the summer. It must have reached 120 degrees at times. When Grandpa Leavitt retired from the state highway department, the governor of Nevada sent him a letter of appreciation and congratulations. Grandpa hung it next to the front door of the house, where it stayed for years. When I became governor, the memory of that letter stayed with me. Each time I signed a similar document, I did so recognizing how significant it would be for the person receiving it, as well as his or her family.

End of Life

As they became aged, my grandparents’ health became a struggle. I learned great lessons watching them. One day during one of my visits, Grandma Leavitt was feeling somewhat frustrated with

Grandpa Leavitt. He couldn’t hear well. The volume on the television was turned up, and she had to shout to be heard. She had been experiencing lots of health troubles herself and was feeling discouraged. She said to me, “I’m ready to go, but I can’t until your grandfather is gone. He needs me to take care of him.” Then she added, “He doesn’t have the faith to die.” While I think Grandpa’s will to live had more to do with his enjoyment of life than his fear of death, the concept of having enough faith to die has stuck with me. I think my grandmother felt he was reluctant because he was comfortable with what he understood. My grandfather just liked being at home. He was like the horses I’ve ridden that try to turn around and head home during the entire ride. My grandpa did have faith, and he was an example to me. He was called as a St. George temple worker late in his life—which, as his life history reveals, this was just one of many periods of service for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He had memorized the entire temple worship service, and when he got too weak and ill to attend the temple, he would lie in bed and take himself through an entire session in his mind, repeating all the parts and commitments. It was personal worship of the highest kind.1 Grandpa underwent a heart bypass operation in his late eighties and emerged with a renewed vitality that allowed him to maintain his remarkable work ethic. However, other things began to wear out, which aggravated him. He started to lose his sight, but he wouldn’t give in to it—he continued to cultivate his garden by touch, working his way through the rows on his hands and knees. Grandpa wasn’t alone in his work ethic. One day I stopped in Bunkerville and found Grandma Leavitt—now in her mid-eighties—standing on

1. In the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, temples are an important part of worship and service. According to churchofjesuschrist. org, “In temples, we can draw closer to the Lord, we can learn more about His plan for our happiness, we can receive essential ordinances for our exaltation, and we can perform vicarious service on behalf of those who have died without the gospel of Jesus Christ. The culminating blessing of the temple is that we can be joined together as families for eternity, so that our relationships with those we love will last forever.” “Why Latter-day Saints Build Temples: A Commandment with Blessings.” Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/ temples/why-latter-day-saints-build-temples?lang=eng

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scaffolding she had built over the cellar stairs, painting a wall. She said it was “too hard and expensive to hire a painter,” so she’d do it herself. Grandpa Leavitt must have eventually found the faith to die. He called my dad one day and told him that he needed him to come because he, my grandpa, was going to die. Dad went to Bunkerville and spent the day cheering him up and driving him around town. He thought Grandpa Leavitt was just feeling discouraged and needed a lift. That night, Grandma Leavitt woke up and saw Grandpa standing at the window like he was looking for something. When she awoke a couple of hours later, he had passed away, lying in bed.

Grandma Leavitt’s health slowly weakened after Grandpa’s death. I visited her in Bunkerville the day before she passed. I don’t remember many of the things we talked about, but I do remember that she wanted a blue blanket with her. We talked about the peace she had found. She knew it was her time, and she was ready. That night, I attended a championship boxing match between Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield in Las Vegas. It was a spectacle of showmanship and human power. But it formed the antithesis of the peaceful, spirit-filled moment at Grandma’s bedside, a perfect metaphor for the contrast between man’s strength and God’s.

At the time of his death, I was preparing to run for governor. He had followed every development with interest. One day he gave me a great piece of political advice: “Mike,” he said, “if you can get everyone in Utah who is related to you to vote for you, you’ll win.” He was right.

Front row, from left : Mike Leavitt, Vincen Leavitt, Dixie Leavitt holding Matthew Leavitt, Dane Leavitt. Back row, from left: David Leavitt, Jackie Leavitt, Erma Leavitt, Anne Leavitt, Mark Leavitt, Eric Leavitt.

04 My Okerlund Grandparents and Loa Grandma Okerlund; David Okerlund; Fishing; Hunting; Loa Tabernacle; Uncle Clare Loa, Utah is located in south central Utah. Between 1950 and 1970, the population hovered around 350 people. It is the seat of Wayne County, which declined in population during that period from 2,205 people in 1950 to just 1,483 in 1970. My grandparents, and their parents before them, had settled the place gallantly trying to raise sheep and cattle. Success was hard to come by in these high mountain valleys; growing seasons were short and distances to market long, but they stayed and tried. Despite its economic and demographic struggles, Loa and Wayne County was a place fundamental to my development as a person. From the time I was a small boy, significant parts of my summers were spent there, first just staying with my grandparents and later working on the farm. Grandma Okerlund’s house and the surrounding community was a place rich in relationships for me, not only with my grandparents but my uncle David as well. David, while seven years older than me, was a big brother figure in my life. He was the only boy in his

Grandpa Okerlund branding cattle at his corrals near Loa, Utah.

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family, and we were, to a large extent, more like siblings. We were fishing buddies, we hunted rabbits, searched for magpie eggs and arrowheads, and did chores together. I was there regularly enough that I developed a group of friends who were my age—plus a girlfriend or two—and got to know all the town characters. In short, it felt like an extension of my home. Loa can be described by this memory I have of my grandpa Melvin Okerlund. The filling stations in Loa, Utah—the Ellett’s Phillips 66 at the north end of town and Daryl’s Chevron in the middle of town—formed two centers of devoted patronage. Daryl seemed to be much more of a perfectionist; things were always tidy and orderly. He spent most of his spare time squirting the pavement with a hose. The 66, on the other hand, was a bit disorganized and not quite as tidy. We would stop at Daryl’s on the way in from the field because Grandpa Okerlund preferred Daryl’s—even though the 66 station was more conveniently located. One day, as some tourists were finishing their stop, one of them said to Grandpa, “You sure have a lot of nothing out here.”

“Where are you from?” Grandpa asked them. “New York.” “Mister, I’ve been to New York, and you sure as hell could use some of our nothing out there.” To some, Loa seemed desolate and isolated, a place people passed through on their way to other destinations. But to me, Loa offered devoted grandparents, a place where my love of the land matured, and where I had lasting experiences with work.

My Grandma Okerlund

Aside from my parents, my grandma, Phyllis Okerlund, was the most influential adult of my childhood and adolescence. Routinely still, I think of our interactions. For example, during the summer when I was thirteen and she would have been in her fifties or early sixties, I was in Loa for an extended stay, and in a joking way I had challenged her ability to control me. She told me if I didn’t shape up, she’d pin me to the ground. With typical thirteen-year-old confidence, I told her she couldn’t do it. She did.

Mike climbing on Grandma Okerlund’s fence in Loa.

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Pinned me like a championship wrestler. Needless to say, it gave me both a new humility and a new respect for her. She was always discreet in telling the story, but didn’t hesitate to remind me. Another time when I playfully challenged her authority, she flipped her slip-on shoe into her hand and swatted me on the butt. That fluid foot-to-hand motion became a symbol of discipline between us. She often joked that was the reason she always wore slip-on shoes. Grandma Okerlund was a stickler for manners and had serious bias about those who lacked them. Drinking milk from the carton or eating ice cream from the container were serious offences, and ranked comparison with Jimmy Jackson, whom I never met but had somehow warranted Grandma Okerlund’s displeasure.

“

You sure have a lot of nothing out here.

”

Holding my fork properly, chewing food with my mouth closed, and walking alongside a woman, placing myself between her and the road, were social graces drilled into my head by Grandma Okerlund. My favorite summer in Loa was marked by a particularly memorable experience I had with Grandma, one that takes a bit of explaining. I was working in Loa between my sophomore and junior years in high school. I was old enough to drive, I had lots of friends, and I felt like I was able to make a serious contribution to the farm. I worked closely with Wayne Torgenson, who was my age and well-skilled in matters related to the farm. He taught me farm life, and I did my best to enlighten him on life outside Loa. Most days, Wayne and I worked in the field hauling hay, irrigating, or changing pipe. At precisely noon each day, the fire siren sounded, reminding everyone it was time for lunch. One day at lunch I read a Reader’s Digest article about venomous snakes, which heightened my

dislike of them. After lunch I went to the field to put a canvas dam in the ditch. A canvas dam was a device used to redirect water before sprinkler systems were invented. A large, thick tarp was sewn around a pole and then rolled up. Before the water got into the ditch, you unrolled the canvas, laid it in the ditch and then piled rocks or sod on top of it to hold it in place when the water ran into it. I picked up the dam and shook off some mud. As I did, a large blow snake landed at my feet. It startled me so badly that I just trembled. I had a pretty good social network in Loa to occupy me after work. Besides Wayne Torgenson, there were five or six kids my age. Marianna Sorenson was a year older than I was, and we had what would have been considered a summer romance. Many nights after work, Marianna and I would drive in my truck Buckley to the Dairy Queen or down to Bicknell, get a soda, and then drive around. After I dropped her off at night, I’d have to creep into the house without Grandma knowing what time I had arrived. The creaky stairs made that difficult, so I quickly learned which stairs to avoid. One night I came in particularly late. I made it all the way up the stairs with no sign of Grandma. I closed the door to David’s bedroom, where I slept when I was there, and quietly switched on the light. As I turned around, I saw Grandma sitting in the rocking chair next to my bed. I had the same feeling then as I did when the snake dropped out of the canvas dam. Like many women of her era, Grandma was a bottler of fruit. It was a multi-day operation when the peaches or cherries were in season in Fruita, Utah. The kitchen would be hot and messy, bottles strewn all over the kitchen and porch. The house was filled with the wonderful aroma of the juice cooking. When completed, the bottles of fruit would be placed in the basement for storage. To me, the basement was an extremely scary place. There was no chore less favorably received than fetching a bottle of fruit from the cellar. I would stand at the top of the stairs, reassuring myself that the light was on and that the fruit was just inside the door. I would

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4 1

1 From left: Phyllis Okerlund holding Ruth Anne Hansen (Mike’s cousin); Melvin Okerlund; Mike (thirteen years old); and David 2 Grandpa Okerlund lighting sparklers on the Fourth of July. 3 Mike (nine years old), with the entire Okerlund family behind the white house in Loa. From left: Doris Okerlund Judd; Faun Okerlund Hansen holding Ruth Anne Hansen; Jane Okerlund Piercey; Anne Okerlund Leavitt; Phyllis Okerlund; Melvin Okerlund holding Mark Leavitt; David Okerlund. Front: Dane Leavitt, Mike Leavitt

4 Melvin Okerlund and his daughter Anne Leavitt rounding up cows on Parker Mountain. 5 Melvin Okerlund in the Leavitt home in Cedar City at Christmas

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count to ten, open the door, run in, grab a bottle, slam the door behind me, and bound up the stairs. As for Grandpa, he worked for the state department of transportation. About a hundred yards to the north of the house, separated only by storage tanks for Ellett’s 66, stood the road shed, a metal building big enough to hold two large trucks, a potbellied stove, and a workbench. It always smelled of oil and asphalt.

To Grandparent’s House We Go

My family started to sing “I can see Loa, I can see Loa,” to the tune children use to taunt each other, at the first sighting of the town’s lights at night or the Loa chapel in daylight as we passed over the hill just before the horseshoe turn northwest of town. Then we’d go down the big, long hill into Dry Valley, back up another hill, one more big curve past the “Loa, Utah, founded 1878,” sign, and into the town limits. Driving into town, I’d always glance into the Knotty Pine Café to see who was sitting at the lunch counter. Then, as we slowed down to turn left at the first intersection, I’d see if there was anybody I knew at the Ellett’s 66 station. Grandma and Grandpa lived on the corner. There was a white picket fence around the yard for many years. I think the repairs of the fence probably made its value marginal as years went on. There was a hole in the slats with the contour of a dog’s belly, because the fence was used as a shortcut by several dogs that lived with the family. Big cottonwood trees lined the yard, and one big pine sat on the northwest corner. There were some leafy bushes against the fence that attracted lots of birds. The interior of the house changed over the years with the addition of new carpeting, furniture, or paint. The exterior of the home always seemed the same to me: the porch had fishing poles, tippets aloft, leaning against the house or draped over the brick wainscot wall on one side, and a rocking chair on the other. There was usually a chunk of petrified wood sitting on the ground at the base of the porch steps—a specimen that matched hundreds of others in Grandma’s rock garden, a peculiar feature that always seemed to require as much weeding as a flower garden.

There was a small, free-standing garage. Actually, I don’t ever remember seeing a car in it, only saddles, sacks of grain, and lots of mice. It had a distinctive smell drawn from its contents. The house was surrounded by a small pasture with some corrals made of weathered, gray pine slats of irregular height and width in the far corner. A pole fence separated my grandparents’ property from the Ericson’s next door. There were usually a few sheep or calves in the pasture. Inside the front door of the house was the living room, and then you would pass into the kitchen where a stairway on the right led to the second floor. The kitchen was connected to a screened porch. There were some metal pegs in the corner next to the screened porch where Grandpa kept his hats and coats. The kitchen was small and basic, but so many of my memories originated there. When I was a little boy, Grandma would do the wash in the kitchen using a washer, a wringer, and a rinsing tub. On laundry day, the kitchen would be hot and steamy, the windows fogged up, and a bleachy water smell filled the air. Grandma hauled wet clothes to the clothesline to flap in the wind. After a bath, Grandma lowered the oven door in the kitchen, and I’d run in, wrapped in a towel, to warm up by sitting on it. I can’t reconcile in my mind how the oven was fueled, but I do have a distinct memory of a coal stove and having to carry the coals out morning and night. The main bathroom in Grandma Okerlund’s house always seemed rather large to me until I was an adult. It was located between the two downstairs bedrooms and just off the living room. The tub was extra deep and great for soaking. A closet next to the door was filled with towels, which had the pleasant scent of having dried on the clothesline. They were so fresh. A loose doorknob and a lock had to be twisted just right, in combination with a little yank and turn of the knob, to open the bathroom door. I was one of many children who got locked in. Adults had to kneel down and talk through the keyhole as they tried to calm and instruct at the same time.

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1 David Okerlund boating with Dixie at Navajo Lake. 2 Grandma and Grandpa Okerlund home in Loa. 3 Mike (nine years old), watching Grandpa Okerlund in a pie eating contest at a Fish Lake church party.

4 Nap time for Grandpa Okerlund 5 Grandpa Okerlund coming home from his chores or work, met by David Okerlund and Eric Leavitt, 1969.

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Several magazines were stacked on the back of the toilet. Trips to the bathroom were often elongated by Laughter is the Best Medicine or Campus Comedy from Reader’s Digest, my most frequent selection.

the school bus. It was a big event to see the bus arrive in the morning when David left for school, and in the evening when he returned. My aunt Doris has said I would jump up and down yelling, “School bus! School bus!” when it came into view.

If David Okerlund was away working, I liked to stay in his room; I liked the feel of it. It was full of model airplanes and neat stuff. You could hear people coming and going from the service station across the street. Full-service gas stations had a black rubber hose stretched across their driveways. As each tire of a customer’s car hit the hose, a bell rang—ding, ding, ding, ding. It became a familiar rhythm and sound of summer nights.

The corner location on the highway and Grandma’s worm-rich lawn provided a business opportunity for David and me—selling worms. We painted a sign which read, “Night Crawlers 25 Cents a Dozen” and hung it on the fence.

Just down the hall from David’s room was the rabbit room. It was called the rabbit room because of the crib that had a picture of a rabbit on one of the headboards. Okerlund babies all had their turn in the rabbit bed. At the back of Grandma’s house was a low, sloping, and seldom-used irrigation ditch. It was a perfect place to play with trucks and imaginary construction equipment. The dirt was soft and because it was under a tree, it was usually shady. I would spend hours building roads, tunnels, bridges, and canals in my make-believe world. The shade tree was the site of a great tree house built by David Okerlund and his friends. It was later designated the Airplane Tree by successive waves of grandchildren who pretended it was the cockpit of a plane.

David Okerlund

I am seven years younger than David Okerlund, my uncle. Because I was the oldest grandchild and he was the youngest Okerlund child, our relationship resembled that of brothers and included plenty of mutual teasing. We used to wrestle on the front lawn and occasionally box with a pair of boxing gloves. When I was four, my gloved fist connected squarely with David’s face, bloodying his nose. When I was a toddler, I would stand on the back of the sofa, look out the front window, and wait for

Nights were often devoted to restocking our inventory. We would soak the lawn all afternoon. Then when night came, we’d crawl on the lawn with a flashlight, catching the worms with a thumb and forefinger before they could retract into their holes. We’d carefully tease them out without breaking them in half. On a big night we’d catch ten to fifteen dozen in a couple of hours. We’d put the worms into a wooden box filled with dirt and peat moss, then cover the box with a wet gunnysack. Every can and milk carton used by the family was preserved as a bait can. Anglers would knock on the door and one of us would fill the order. I suppose it was a big day if we sold a dozen-dozen. It was good pocket change and good exposure to running a small business. We had to develop and maintain inventory, we had competition to worry about, and I figured out quickly that if I charmed the customers they would tip me more. Plus, David and I would always have worms when we wanted to go fishing. The night crawler money came in handy for trips to Richfield to shop. While in Richfield, we would go swimming. There was no swimming pool in Loa, so it was a big deal to go swimming in Richfield. While Grandma shopped, David Okerlund and I swam at the municipal pool, and then we’d stop at the Dairy Freeze on the way out of town. The Dairy Freeze had licorice ice cream. It was just wonderful. It left your mouth and tongue black, and when it was placed in a sugar cone after a swim, it created the perfect incentive for completing chores before we left Loa.

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I remember one Saturday Grandma decided not to go to Richfield, but David and I wanted to go swimming. Grandma told us if we mowed the lawn, we could swim in the canal. We mowed the lawn with a push mower. It was hard work, so we’d switch off, making one pass each, a mower’s relay of sorts. When we were done, Grandma took us to the canal on the west side of Loa and we swam up and down the length.

Fishing With David and Grandpa

We spent a lot of time outdoors fishing and hunting. At times, David and I could talk someone into taking us to Spring Creek, which is about five or six miles from Loa. They would drop us off, with an agreement to pick us up at the hatchery three or four hours later. We’d take a lunch and spend a good part of the day there. I got to the point where I knew every bend and fishing hole along that creek. We’d work our way up and down the bank, using a worm or spinner as bait.

“

If he comes, tell him you haven’t been to school yet and that you can’t read.

”

A fence separates the state-owned fish hatchery from the legal waters. If things were slow on Spring Creek and we had time, we’d start figuring ways to fish in the hatchery. Our favorite technique was for one of us to stand with our pole below the fence separating legal waters from the hatchery, and the other to carry the line upstream and drop it in. Worked nearly every time. Another method was more blatant. I was only five. David had me climb the fence and start fishing, then he’d walk downstream around a curve where he couldn’t be seen. His instructions to me were, “If he [the much-feared game warden] comes, tell him you haven’t been to school yet and that you can’t read.” Eventually, I had to use that line, and it worked, but not without a rather harsh reading lesson from my grandparents, and several days of worry, on my part, that I was going to juvenile court.

When we were tired of fishing, we’d walk to the fish runs and watch them, and then lie on the lawn by the hatchery manager’s home. One day, we’d been lying there for quite a while when it occurred to us that we were the only ones around. We decided to try fishing in the main hatchery pond. I was probably eight and David fourteen. It was an angler’s holiday; every cast we hauled in a fish. Suddenly, David said, “Drop your pole.” He had spotted a hatchery worker leaving a building on the other side of the compound. The problem was I had a fish on. I dropped the pole, and we stood innocently by the pond, watching the fish. David took out his pocketknife and cut the line; we retreated to the lawn and waited. As a result, I had nightmares about being caught fishing at the hatchery. Another favorite place to fish and play was Road Creek, though it was so shallow that seldom did we catch fish of any size. But it was an adventurous place just under Ponikey Mountain and we loved to just play there. There were some dams and pools of water, as well as heavy willows that made it cool and jungle-like at the same time. However, the major problem with Road Creek was stinging nettle. It seemed that everyone had an experience grabbing a stinging nettle weed and stripping it, thinking it was ragweed or Indian tobacco, and being left with excruciating pain in the palm of his or her hand. The infield remedy was mud. My memory is that it didn’t work, only made me dirty. The real fishing trips were with Grandpa Okerlund. He was a serious fly fisherman. It was not unusual for us to go on summer evenings to Mill Meadow or Johnson Valley Reservoir after he finished working. On those occasions, I waited for him to pull up in his state road truck or scraper. He would then walk from the road shed, cut through the back of the little pasture that surrounded the house, enter the screened porch, stop in the kitchen, exchange greeting, and put his empty lunch bucket on the counter. However, before we could fish, the chores had to be done. David and I would jump into Grandpa’s truck and drive to the field on the southwest corner of Loa. We fed and watered the horses and a few cattle he kept in from the range. There were often a

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couple of other duties, doctoring a calf or finishing a fence. He seemed to keep a list in his head. Chores done, we would head back to town with a stop at Daryl’s Chevron or Harward’s General Store to pick up an RC Cola, a candy bar, and some fishing tackle. At this point, it was about 5 p.m. We would stop at the house, gather our poles and the tackle box, and head out. Grandpa loved to fish. He would work his left arm back and forth, his line arching and falling, until it found the spot he wanted. He would work the line for a moment, then return it to motion. I have revisited that scene in my mind several times during my life—my grandpa calm and serene, directing his line. If it was a Saturday afternoon and we could leave earlier, we would drive to Boulder Mountain and fish one or more of several lakes there: Lower Bounds, Donkey Lake, or Crescent Lake. We would fish until after dark and then pile into Grandpa’s truck and make the slow climb out. One night after fishing, clouds covered the moon as it came over the horizon, turning it red. I was eleven or twelve at the time and remembered a lesson from church recounting the Book of Revelation and prophecies about the last days and the moon turning to blood, so the sight of a red moon was eerie and strange. I remember asking Grandpa about it. He assured me it wasn’t the end of the world, but I think I repented anyway, just in case. One of my favorite places to go fishing was Bicknell Bottoms on the Fremont River. There were some big brown trout in that part of the river. Grandpa liked to go there, too. In fact, just down the road was the Old Mill where he proposed to Grandma, though I don’t remember getting the story directly from him.

Fishing at Bicknell

In the dead of winter, when I was about fourteen and Dane about nine, we wanted to go fishing at Bicknell Bottoms, which was open year-round. Our parents were going to Capitol Reef National Park, and we just pleaded until they agreed. We were sure we’d catch a bunch of fish.

We were inadequately prepared for everything: fishing, the weather, the wait. It was miserable. We ran out of bait somehow and were trying to catch fish on Kraft caramels. Then it started snowing and we didn’t have warm coats. I had some matches, but the wind was blowing so hard we could hardly get a fire going; the only way I could get a fire going was to build it in a small hole against the wood underpinning of the bridge. Unfortunately, our parents weren’t due to return for several hours. A few minutes after the fire started, I looked across the road and saw smoke migrating out the other side. I panicked, thinking we had started the bridge on fire. I emptied my tackle box and dipped it in the water so I could put the fire out. Now, not only were we cold but I was a nervous wreck, worried that I had structurally weakened the bridge and that somebody was going to die when it collapsed. What a miserable day. My parents, who had warned us repeatedly that the trip was ill-advised, finally returned. I harbored my worries about the bridge in silence for many years and was relieved only by time. One summer, David Okerlund worked at the lodge on Fish Lake as a boat and cabin boy. He invited me to come and stay with him for a couple of days. I have such fond memories of that trip. A couple of mornings, we took a motorboat to fish. For weeks in advance, I had fantasized about catching one of the Fish Lake monsters. I still have distinct memories of the feeling of the morning on the lake, the mist that was present when we left, the sound of the outboard motor, the exhaust smell as we trolled across the lake. I remember each fish we caught, and returning to the dock feeling so grown up to be there with David.

Royal’s Market

For a time, there were pigs in the corrals. We would feed them scraps from the house, which had been accumulated in a bucket. Frankly, I found the pigs a little scary when I was small. I think somebody must have told me pigs ate little boys or something—that’s just the kind of thing a couple of David Okerlund’s friends would have done.

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1 Loa fish runs 2 Loa Tabernacle 3 Family home in Loa. Though it is yellow now, the home was originally white.

4 Loa barn next to the yellow house 5 Field in front of family home in Loa 6 Tack shed at the Loa corrals where saddles, bridles, and tools were kept

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The biggest tease was Ronnie Harward. Whenever I was sent to the store, Royal’s Market as it was called, Ronnie Harward would tease me, big time. He was twelve or thirteen, but he got a kick out of it. He would make me sing before he’d help me. I remember walking to the store for bread or other groceries and just dreading the fact that Ronnie might be there. There were nice Harwards. Newell was always great, as was Kendall, the oldest. Once in a while they’d let Layne run things, but he was only a couple of years older than I was. The truth is, Ronnie turned out to be an alright guy, but he terrified me as a little boy and enjoyed every minute of it. Royal’s Market was about a half block from Grandma’s, right next to the Ellett Theatre. The store later moved further down the street to a larger cinder block building, but back then it was a small general store with hardware, fishing tackle, groceries, Levi’s, and cowboy boots. We didn’t always pay with cash; I remember saying, “Charge it,” a lot. Royal Harward, the founder and owner, was one of Grandpa’s best friends and hunting partners. We would often stop at Royal’s for “a drink and a bar,” as Grandpa put it. We would linger and talk. Royal was a member of the Utah State Senate for a while, and later the House of Representatives; he actually served with my dad. He spoke softly and slowly. I remember him as kind. He always called me Michael, as did my grandpa. Royal had a strange habit of stroking everybody’s earlobe. You’d be in a conversation with him and he’d just reach up and start feeling your earlobe. I’ve never been able to figure it out, other than he liked the way it felt and it had become a habit. But it happened every time; not once in a while— every time. There was no discernable organizational scheme to this store. I remember being in Harward’s one day, Layne was behind the counter, and we were

talking. A younger boy came in and started looking through the nuts-and-bolts section of the store. Layne said, “Can I help you find something?” “I’m looking for aspirin,” was the reply. It struck me as humorous because the way the store was organized, the aspirin may well have been in the hardware section.

The Loa Tabernacle

Loa society revolved around the church house. It wasn’t the chapel, or the ward, or the church; it was the church house. And you didn’t just go to church, you went to meeting. The church house was the Loa Tabernacle—a remarkable structure for a town that size to have built at the time. It is made of local rock and has a high-pitched roof. The chapel itself has a balcony that surrounds the main congregational area. When I sat in the balcony, it felt like the place from which Tom Sawyer watched his own funeral.

The chapel had a pipe organ and wind-up clock that would sound particularly prominent during long pauses in testimony meeting.1 Stories of experiences in the Loa Ward could occupy pages: the characters who came every week, discussions of how the stake farm was doing, prayers for rain, the Loa accent that seemed to be magnified at church. I was there enough, particularly in the summers, that I knew all the kids and felt like a member of the ward. One of my most memorable summers was when the church house was being remodeled. We were expected to spend time working there, and I have clear memories of working on the roof. I think I was probably about fourteen at the time. Many weekends the church gymnasium was the site of a “wedding dance,” which was basically a reception where there was dancing, usually to music of the Peterson Brothers Orchestra.

1. Testimony meeting usually happens the first Sunday of the month. While normally on Sundays members in the congregation are assigned to teach the congregation (in the Church this is known as giving a talk on a gospel topic), testimony meeting is a chance for anyone in the congregation to go up to the stand and share their feelings and stories of faith. No one is assigned to go up, so sometimes there are long pauses in between the testimonies shared.

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At Grandpa’s funeral, held at the Loa Tabernacle, they played “Somewhere My Love” (Lara’s Theme from the movie Dr. Zhivago), which was one of the songs that Grandpa and Grandma liked to dance to. That was the moment when everybody lost it.

Hunting in Loa

Hunting was a big part of the culture in Wayne County. Grandpa had a running contest with Arval Taylor on how many rabbits they could kill. It wasn’t just for sport; rabbits damaged the hay. But there was enough sport in it that occasionally we’d take boxes of .22 shells and hunt rabbits. Grandpa could really shoot. He was left-handed and keen-eyed.

“

Okerlunds have been carving up trees for a hundred years, but we all know it means far more.

”

Preparing for the deer hunt took on ritual proportions. Again, this is a subject that deserves more treatment because it so embodies the culture and fabric of Loa. My earliest memories of the deer hunt feature its symbols: fall leaves, red shirts, grub boxes, rifles, bed rolls, and lots of anticipation. I remember waiting in Loa with excitement for the hunting party’s return. In the 1950s, each hunter was allotted two deer tags, so a load of deer was often brought home for butchering and preparation. Grandpa would hang them up in a tree near the house, skin them, and let them cure. He would then bring out a white butcher table, sharpen his knives, cut the meat, and wrap the pieces for storage. We would take most of the meat to Munson Appliance and Cold Storage just south of Rues Market. Grandpa’s venison is better than any other I’ve ever tasted. He would pound it and roll it in flour before he fried it.

On the morning after the opener, if we were successful, it was tradition to have liver. That’s something I shared with Grandpa—we both loved liver and onions. I learned later, after I began hunting with him, that it was the first thing he removed from the deer. He carried a special sack to put it in. My first opportunity to go on the deer hunt came when I was eight or nine. We hunted on Parker Mountain, which was the area where our family had a cattle permit. Every family had a camp that was understood to be theirs. Just as a pew at church becomes the place everybody knows the Leavitts sit, there were family campsites. When we’d hear shooting across the way, Grandpa would say, “Sounds like the Brians are getting into them.” We always joined forces with the Harwards. I remember setting up a big white tent under some aspen trees just off Parker Knoll. A few years later, Grandpa hauled an old cabin from Fish Lake Lodge to Parker and put it down in what became our spot for the next thirty or more years. (If there was a candidate spot for hantavirus, this was it.) The cabin was furnished with a couple of old box springs and a homemade stove, and we sat on stumps for chairs and talked around a fire pit out front. The night before the hunt, we set up camp and put the horses in a small, fenced area. Every year Grandpa would talk about all the hunters. He’d see headlights streaming toward Parker, and in a voice that yearned for the days when it was just Parker Mountain–permit families, he would say, “Look at all the hunters. Look at all those sonsabitches.” We hunted on horseback. In the first years I hunted, I rode on the back of Grandpa’s horse, and I’d hold the reins while he shot. One day we were standing near a grove of aspen trees. We heard deer moving through the trees and then into an opening. I had the field glasses and could see the deer. “Can you see any bucks?” he whispered. “The third one back is a buck,” I said. Boom. It dropped. Grandpa was truly an amazing marksman.

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I remember helping him clean the deer—a lesson, I’m afraid, my children will never have. There’s something so earthy about it.

and then he’d walk to the house through the back of the lot, eat breakfast, pick up his lunch pail, and head out.

For a few years, I rode my own horse, accompanying Royal Harward. Looking back, I’m not sure what the point of that arrangement was but it provided a good relationship between the two of us.

No breakfast or lunch began without everybody turning their chairs around, kneeling, and having family prayer. Grandpa always knelt on one knee, rested his elbow on the other, and spread his hand across his forehead.

When I turned sixteen and had my own gun and horse, I became a full-fledged member of the hunting party. I harvested my first deer on the first day of the hunt that year. I had a strategy planned months in advance: I went to some rocks near the Parker Rim because I knew that as the deer started to stir, they would head for the rim. I got buck fever several times, missed several shots, and finally got a three-point buck—but had to haul it out of a difficult ravine. The feeling of getting up before dawn on the first morning of the deer hunt, standing around the fire waiting for it to become light, is a feeling I’ll never forget: the crackle of the fire, Grandpa cooking fried eggs and some potatoes, saddling the horses, and finally riding out just before the sun came up to be in position for the first light. We would generally gather for lunch, compare stories, usually take a nap, and then head out again. There are lots of aspen trees on Parker Mountain with names carved into them. I suppose some would see that as defacing nature, but some may see an anthropological element in it. There is a tree near the Okerlund sheep camp bearing the names of George Okerlund, Melvin Okerlund, David Okerlund, and Clint Okerlund. Four generations on the same tree. Somebody at a family reunion once asked Clint what that meant. He said, “That Okerlunds have been carving up trees for a hundred years.” True, but we all know it means far more.

Daily Life in Loa

Grandpa’s daily routine would start very early. He’d go out to the field and do morning chores just after five a.m. It was always dark, and in the winter, very cold. He’d be at the road shed by seven. There was some sort of gathering to get assignments

On a couple of occasions, I went in the road grader with Grandpa. I remember being helped into the cab and sitting on the seat with him. The skill required to maneuver the blade is easy to underestimate; it was art with heavy equipment. Loa has a short growing season because of the high altitude. The first cut of hay is generally during the middle of July. I have memories of needing to finish hauling the first crop before we could go to the 24th of July celebration. When I started helping with the hay, Grandpa taught me to drive the tractor with a hay mower that was operated manually. Two blades moved back and forth on an arm about eight feet long. At the end of the row, the mower had to be disengaged and the tractor turned around, then the mower was reattached for the next move down the field. Once the hay was cut, it had to be raked with a device that swept it into windrows, then baled. We had to bale at night or very early in the morning to keep dew on the hay. We pulled a small sled behind the baler. I stood on the sled and stacked the bales in small sets of eight, then I’d take a pole and plant it in the ground as the tractor continued forward. The small stack of bales would slide off neatly. We drove to each stack, piled them on a truck or bale wagon, hauled them to the stack yard, and unloaded them. It was exhausting and highly labor-intensive. After a few loads, Grandpa stopped the tractor and climbed under the bale wagon where there was shade. We’d rest for a few minutes, usually enjoying a Coke and a bar that we’d picked up on the way to the field. One day, we were at the field and it began to rain. It just poured. The gullies started to fill, and water began to flood out of the Big Rocks area

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south of the corrals. West of where Grandpa’s corrals were located, there was a dry wash that suddenly became a torrent. We walked over to see if it was doing any damage to the field. As we stood on the edge, the bank suddenly gave way and we were washed downstream. Both of us began trying to save the other. It was frightening at first but soon we had regained a sense of control and we started to laugh. We were coated with brown, silty mud from head to toe. It was in our ears, our shoes, and hair. We took our pants off and drove home looking like chocolate men, still laughing and retelling the story to each other. Trading labor was a common practice. I used to haul hay for Thayne and Patria Taylor, and I think it was because Thayne baled Grandpa’s hay. I was about fourteen or fifteen. Thayne and Patria were among the truly colorful people in Loa. Thayne was Grandpa’s age; they literally grew up right across the street from each other. Thayne told wonderful stories about

Grandpa when they were children, and I loved to hear them. They have been recorded other places so I won’t repeat them. Patria had a loud but wonderful Minnie Pearl–like personality. She was a good friend but drove Grandma Okerlund crazy. There was always a little edge of tension in the way she felt about Patria. We would haul hay all morning, and then Patria would fix a huge lunch. And I mean huge. So big that when you finished, you were forced to lie down on the floor and take a nap. Getting restarted in the afternoon became a major effort. Through those experiences, I gained a nice friendship with them, and for years I would visit them while I was in Loa. When I was governor, they were honored for having a “Gold Medal Marriage” of more than seventy years.

Breaking a Header

I mentioned earlier that a part of every priesthood meeting was a discussion of the stake farm. During these meetings, labor assignments were

Dane, Mike (age sixteen), and Mark in Loa on a tractor

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issued. One day Wayne Torgenson and I were assigned to change the sprinklers. We drove Grandpa’s blue three-quarter-ton Chevrolet truck into the field located in the middle of Lyman Lane. As we inched to the edge of the field, there was an explosion and water shot everywhere. I had broken a header. Breaking a header is the cardinal sin of sprinkler changing, and I was about to understand why. Water shot into the air fifty to sixty feet. The geyser was visible from Lyman to Loa. And because the entire system is on the same water source, every other sprinkler system lost its pressure. I felt a sense of panic and embarrassment. Water was rapidly pooling. At the rate it was pouring from the ground, we knew we’d have a reservoir before long. We rushed back to town. Wayne knew who the head of the irrigation company was, so we called him on the phone. He told us to meet him at the main pump station in Lyman. We had to turn off a giant valve to keep more water from getting into the system. He told us it would take a couple of hours for the water to drain, and slowly the geyser in the middle of the valley began to diminish. As it did, we went to a machine shop that had riser parts and got a man to help us with the header. We were in mud to our waists before we were done. Others in the valley had stopped to help because the entire system was off. Finally, it was fixed, the water returned to the pipes, and we were able to go home. Needless to say, we were the talk of Wayne County for several days.

Real and Right

The summer between my sophomore and junior years in high school I worked in Loa. One of the other families in Loa had a grandson from California who had come to live with them. I’m pretty sure he was there to get away from a bad beach element. He had longer hair and wore surf shirts and board shorts. He didn’t have any interest in blending into the Wayne County cultural scene. As summer progressed, I noticed there was an entire section of cornfield on the family’s property that was barren. One day I asked this kid’s grandfather why he’d done that. He said, “It wasn’t

intentional. My grandson was running the drill and he wasn’t paying any attention and obviously ran out of seed.”

“

If you stick with what is real and right, we’ll be farming long after he’s been repossessed.’

”

It served as a law of the harvest metaphor. You harvest what you plant. If you fall asleep during the time of planting, as summer progresses, and the crops around you come up, yours won’t. I asked him why he didn’t plant it later. He said that by the time they had realized the seed had been neglected it was too late in the summer. After I was elected governor, I used stories from Loa to illustrate various points. There were two others I’ll mention that played prominent roles in my election campaigns. The first story was an experience with Grandpa and a neighbor called Don Anderson, and Don’s tendency to be overextended. Don seemed to fancy himself as a big operator. He had a lot of swagger and wore a hat well. The story I told in my first election was a conversation about Don between Grandpa and me. When I asked Grandpa how Don could afford to have a new tractor, he’d usually say something like, “Hell, I don’t know.” Grandpa was never judgmental; he left that to Grandma. But he made it clear to me that he didn’t think it would work out in the long run. We ultimately bought his place and it forms a large part of the Loa farm as it is now constituted I told the story in the campaign ad that profiled me, called the “Real and Right” ad. The closing lines were, “Grandpa said, ‘If you stick with what is real and right, we’ll be farming long after he’s been

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repossessed.’ And that’s exactly what happened. Real and right. It’s a principle I teach my children. It’s how I’ll govern this state.” In telling the story, I used a little license and brevity, but it made the point very well and framed my campaign and introduction to the people of Utah. The second story did the same thing for me during my third campaign for governor. I told the story of eating lunch on Parker Mountain. Grandpa had a wooden box on the back of his truck that always had a sack of seed in it. My job was to spread the seed around to improve the range grass. I complained about having to do it, given that we didn’t own the land. Grandpa gave me a sermon about leaving the collective better than I found it.

Uncle Clare

My uncle Clare—Grandpa’s older brother—was among the most colorful people in my life. I got to know him well during my summers in Loa. I won’t try to profile him at this point, though he deserves so much more treatment, but suffice to say he had some remarkably distinctive mannerisms.

Clare spoke very slowly but with precision, his conversation always laced with pauses that started with the expression, “Yeaaaah,” and ended with little afterthought expressions that added color and tone. He had a laugh that doubled as a throat clearing. He was college-educated and well-read but cultivated a persona that reinforced his status as an old sheep man. Clare had a memory that never failed him. When he was twelve, his father had him assist a surveyor in measuring the elevations on a potential reservoir on Road Creek. Seventy years later, we decided to investigate building one on the same site. He told us about his experience as a kid and then spelled out the elevations at all the relevant points. We hired a surveyor to do the engineering and indeed he was correct, to the foot. Clare could water witch, and with accuracy. Water witching is a mysterious but rather practical part of farm work. People who water witch use a stick with a fork in it to locate a drilling site for a

water well. They press on the two sides of the fork with their hands and walk. The point of the stick thrusts down when they cross a spot where there is water. He showed me once how to do it. I could locate water pipes in a field but I have never pursued it beyond that. There is a belief that it is an inherent talent for some people. Clare drove an old, green Chevrolet pick-up. In his later years, he drove it about seven miles an hour everywhere he went, cultivating the image of this old sheepherder character creeping along in this wreck of a green truck. People would not know that truck carried one of the smartest men I’ve ever met. I was with Uncle Clare the day before he died. He was in the Provo Hospital with a nosebleed that couldn’t be stopped. We had a wonderful visit, the details of which I cannot recall, but I do remember being glad I was there. His wife had passed and his only child, Kathleen, needed our support. She has never married. Grandpa Okerlund’s death was memorable to me in a different way. He had diabetes and heart disease, and I had watched both sap his energy and strength over the years. It was finally determined that he needed to have open-heart surgery, at a time when the procedure was rather new. The operation seemed to go well, but he had trouble during his recovery. I was at a National Guard drill at Camp Williams when I received a call that I needed to go to LDS Hospital; Grandpa had been taken back into surgery and the family was gathering. After several hours, a surgeon came to the family and said that they were having trouble getting him to transition from the mechanical heart and lung devices, and that his life was in peril. Our prayers intensified. I went to a private room and offered my own prayers. Some time later, another surgeon entered the small waiting room, dressed in green scrubs. He drew a deep breath and said, “I’m sorry. He’s gone.” I’ll never forget that moment. It was the first time I had experienced the death of a loved one.

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About half an hour later, the primary surgeon, who I think was Russell M. Nelson, met with us to explain what had gone wrong. He held a plastic model of a heart as he described his efforts to save Grandpa.1 We were taken to a room to see his body, where he was covered by a sheet. It was a deeply emotional experience, and David Okerlund fled the room in denial; he could not bear to see his dad. It was a hard moment. That night we stayed at the home of Uncle Rube, I think. I slept in a bedroom that was strange to me. The world seemed rather dreary. Grandma Okerlund’s death was different. She slowly weakened over many years, suffering increasing health problems. Her sight and hearing were nearly gone, which was the source of great frustration to her. She was clear-headed and herself for most of that time. For months my mother and aunt Doris attended to her in a fashion with which they can be enormously satisfied.

Phyllis Okerlund

During the final weeks of her suffering, I visited her in Cedar City. She was being cared for in the duplex next door to our family home. After we had visited for a while about her condition, she asked how I was doing. I told her, “Life is good.” She replied to my expression with a phrase that defined her current struggle, “And darn worth hanging on to.” It was hard to know if she was hanging on out of fear, or stubbornness, or just an obligation to fight, but she was reluctant to the end.

Clare Okerlund 1. The mention of Russell M. Nelson is significant because he is, at the time of this writing, the prophet and leader of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He was a world-renowned heart surgeon during his professional life and was one of the people who were integral to the development of open-heart surgery.

05 Elementary School 1960 to 1963 • Third through Sixth Grade; Band; Swimming; Boy Scouts; Junior Pentathlon; Ordained a Deacon; Navajo Lake Cabin Politically, the world was enduring a tense time. Relations between the United States and the Soviet Union were hostile. Discussion and threat of nuclear war were constant and real. At school we would be taught, tested, and drilled on how to react in the event of a nuclear attack. It was frightening, and in retrospect, silly. Like how we were taught to crawl under our desks and cover our eyes, or we were taught to lie in a ditch if one was available— neither of which would truly protect us. Bomb shelters were popular as a home or office building feature. Civil defense was a household phrase. I remember our home teacher Ralph Thompson coming to visit. He was a serious John Birch Society member and would read to us from the Naked Communist by Cleon Skousen. It was scaring us so badly that Dad asked him to quit talking about politically charged subjects. I remember the Cuban missile crisis when President Kennedy and Nikita Khrushchev were on the brink of war. I won’t recount the history except to say that these were times full of anxiety for children and adults. It felt as though the world would break into war at any time. There was a lot of talk about World War III.

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I remember Khrushchev going to the UN and pounding the table with his shoe, screaming, “We will bury you.” It was covered by the Weekly Reader and became a topic of discussion among my friends. The tone of the time created a sense of pessimism and worry. Despite these fears and the emphasis placed on them, my friends and I carried on with our play, as children do. One of our favorite pastimes was hut building. We would make huts everywhere and out of everything. We had huts in fields behind Cleo Woods’s house; we built huts with blankets on the clothesline; we had huts in the attic, in crawl spaces throughout the house. We found some orange bricks that were left over from a house remodel and decided to build a hut with them against the back wall of our yard. We completed our grand structure and decided to build a fireplace so we could cook food. The only available food was a couple of oranges. Not everybody cooks oranges, but we decided to. The first step in our orange barbeque was to build a fire. We had some difficulty doing that, and as the matches burned down to the bottom, we’d throw them over the fence. However, on the other side of the fence was a dry field, and soon we smelled something other than cooking oranges. The field had been used previously by the stake farm system to grow string beans. A stack of bean poles sat near the fence and the fire was burning a path toward them. We panicked.

While sitting in that hut I had one of my favorite conversations with Layne Spevak. We were discussing our aspirations for the future. I said I wanted to finish high school and go to college. Layne said he wasn’t going to finish high school. I countered that to get a good job one needed to finish school. Layne said, “My brother-in-law didn’t finish high school, and he has three good jobs.” That vacant lot was the scene of many of our activities during this period. We built high jump pits and filled the landing area with dirt we had softened with a shovel. We also built long jump pits by wearing a path and jumping into the same pit. It was in that lot that I broke my arm while riding Glitter, my horse, bareback. I just sort of rolled off the back and landed on my wrist. I immediately knew it was broken.

Elementary School: Third Grade

Midway through my first-grade year at West Elementary, it was announced that the school would close and a new building would be constructed a half block from my home. The opening was planned for the first day of school of my third-grade year, 1960.

By the time the fire department arrived, there was no sign of baked oranges, and it was concluded, without our help, that the fire had resulted from unknown origin.

The night before the opening of the new school, my friends and I were anxious to know where our classroom would be located, who our teacher would be, and who would be in our class. Around eight o’clock, we discovered that a third-grade class list had been posted on a classroom on the first level within the interior patio. The other third grade classroom was at the top of the stairs, on the upper floor of the school. Being on the upper floor with the upper classmen (fourth through sixth grades) seemed so much better than being on the bottom floor with the lower grades.

We built a rather elaborate underground hut in that same field. It included tunnels between rooms. Frankly, it’s a miracle it never caved in. Our

But I just had to accept that I had been assigned to the classroom on the bottom floor. The excitement of being in a new school building soon over-

We went for the hose attached to the house, but it wasn’t long enough to extend over the fence. I stood on the fence and began to spray. About that time, Alex Spevak saw the fire and called the fire department. Fortunately, we were able to extinguish the flames before they engulfed the bean poles.

method was to dig what seemed like a giant hole in the ground and then cover it with scrap lumber and cover that with dirt and bush. We entered the underground hut via a rabbit hole and used candles for light.

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took any location bias. Plus, we found that the ease of access in and out of school was a terrific advantage. My third-grade teacher at South Elementary was Avy Davis, a new teacher that year who played the guitar—something that was definitely cool. One memory I have of third grade still reminds me how vulnerable kids are, and how fragile their self-esteem can be. Many students from the North Elementary area were being bused to South Elementary, something they found greatly demeaning and which they regularly expressed. There was a little clique of students in that category: Ryan Fife, Stewart Fife, and Barbara White. I found Barbara White extremely attractive. One day that year she and Ryan Fife were on the teeter-totter, and I jumped on it and stood in the center to play what we called the candlestick. Barbara was not amused and saw me more an intruder than a suitor. She said, “Mike Leavitt, you think you’re so cool but you’re a big fat slob.” Barbara and I have a lifelong friendship, and I have long since forgiven her, but that comment took me a while to get over.

Fourth Grade

My fourth-grade year I had another new firstyear teacher, Delos Dalton. I think Dalos spent an entire career with the Iron County schools in a rather distinguished way. Our room was the first classroom in the long hall at the back of the school, closest to the auditorium. Finally, my classroom was located on the same floor as the upper classmen.

That year Mr. Dalton and his wife had their first baby. He was apparently up much of the night with the delivery. The next day, we were working quietly at our desks. He was sitting on a bench against the window in the afternoon sun. He fell fast asleep. And I mean fast asleep—so soundly that the class tiptoed out to recess without waking him up. That year was the 1960 presidential election between Richard Nixon and John F. Kennedy, so we held a presidential debate in our class. I represented Richard Nixon, and Danny Yergensen was John F. Kennedy. I remember preparing for the debate with my mother, trying to anticipate the argument Danny would use. This campaign was my first real interest in politics, and I desperately wanted Nixon to win. It felt like my future and that

Mrs. Avy Davis’s third-grade class, South Elementary, 1960. Front row, from left : Evan Lewis, Gilman Fife, Dale Urie, Merrill Williams, Steven Bulloch, unknown, Lorraine Clark, Diane Forsyth, Jolene Sorenson, Dawna Schoppman. Middle row : Kevin Bulloch, Bill Sherritt, Chad Nelson, Jon Hunter, William Leigh, Alan Darby, Lance Jackson, unknown, unknown, unknown, unknown, Hazel Dawn Murie, unknown. Back row : unknown, Mike Leavitt, unknown, Frank Adams, Scott Lunt, Lynn Jones, Guy Getz, Milton Parry, Ryan Fife, Barbara White, Colleen Sandberg, Mrs. Avy Davis.

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of the country was going to be different if he didn’t. I think it was a natural desire that I wanted the candidate I had portrayed to win, but it seemed really serious to me.

the hospital. I laid my bike on the lawn and climbed on to the sill of her window on the ground floor on the east side. She came to the window, and Eric and I got acquainted.

That year, I also discovered the biography section of the library. One section of orange-colored books featured biographies written at my reading level. I read dozens of them. My favorite reading has been biographies ever since.

I had read on the back of a baseball card about a big leaguer who had gone three-for-four on the day his baby was born. I thought it would be dramatic to do the same and told Mother that I was dedicating the game to her and Eric.

Another memory I have of this year in school: We studied magnets that year, and one of the projects was to magnetize the head of a pin and attach it to another pin hanging from the light fixture. We projected that the magnetic charge would last two or three weeks. Much to our amazement, it lasted the entire school year. The fact that I remember it more than fifty years later demonstrates the power of visualization in teaching.

Another Brother: Eric

On June 16, 1961, just after I finished fourth grade, Mother went to the hospital to deliver Eric. On the way to my Little League game, I stopped by

The game was against Elks, and I hit a triple, a double, and a single—my best game of the year.

Memories From Fifth Grade

My fifth-grade teacher was Jim Miller. Jim was perhaps my favorite teacher in elementary school. I liked his style and the relationship he fostered with his students. He loved to teach American history and play ball with the boys. He was in the military, and we loved his army stories. He also played the guitar, and we enjoyed his music. The way Jim Miller told the story of history and government stimulated my interest in those subjects.

Mr. Delos Dalton’s fourth-grade class, South Elementary, 1961. Front row, from left: unknown, Frank Adams, David Lavanger, Danny Yergensen, Paul Challis, unknown, Donna Schoppman. Second row : David Wood, Scott Lunt, Connie Grimshaw, Carol Grimshaw, unknown, Kathy Topham, Lynn Jones. Third row : Brent Whittekiend, Mike Leavitt, Steven Bulloch, Guy Getz, unknown, Wayne Jensen, Evan Lewis. Back Row : Dale Darby, Bernell Thorley, Larry Smith, Anne Milne, Ron Hunt, unknown, Randy Parks, Mr. Delos Dalton.

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Late one morning, our class had gone to the audiovisual room for a film. I took hold of a chair and started to walk away. Vanna Hunter, one of my classmates, tried to sit down on the chair at the same time. She fell to the floor. Mr. Miller saw her fall and instantly reacted by kicking my butt. I withstood the kick just fine, but it deflated my ego considerably. I tried to explain what happened, but he was upset and so was I. I went home for lunch and was feeling so upset by the situation that I didn’t want to go back because I was afraid that I’d cry, and that would be humiliating. When I didn’t show up at school, Jim walked to the house to see me. We talked it out and it turned out to be a bonding experience between us. He suggested I come back at recess, which would give me a seamless way back into class without having to walk in late. At recess, we had long continuous softball games. One day, Anne Milne was playing center field and a sharp line drive was hit right at her. Everybody cringed, thinking it would knock her down. She caught it right in the breadbasket—the

luckiest catch I’ve ever seen. We talked about it for the rest of the year as the play of the year. A fad during the fifth grade was soaking toothpicks in cinnamon oil and then sucking on them. I put one in my mouth and suddenly found myself with a severe fever, sweating profusely. I knew something was terribly wrong. Mr. Miller suggested I get some milk from the milk and cracker stand. The milk broke whatever it was that was happening. I’ve often wondered what it was. It was frightening. Jim Miller continued to be as an important influence in my life. He taught me American history in high school, mentored me into the National Guard, and later served under me as adjutant general while I was governor.

Sixth Grade

Levan Bauer was my sixth-grade teacher. He required us to do units of questions, some of them hundreds of questions long. I would put them off until the last minute and then my mother would have to stay up until all hours of the night helping me get them done.

Mr. Levan Bauer’s sixth-grade class, South Elementary, 1963. Front row, from left: Rodney Knight, Gary Banks, Jay Wilkenson, Steven Childs, Craig Berrett, Jon Hunter, Lynn Jones, Mike Leavitt, Gilman Fife, Chad Christensen. Second row : David Levanger, unknown, Mike Gale, Jolene Clark, Kathy Topham, unknown, Danny Yergensen, unknown, unknown, unknown, unknown. Third row: Alan Lewis, unknown, Connie Grimshaw, William Leigh, Larry Smith, Vanna Hunter, Phil Andrus, unknown. Back left : unknown student teacher. Back right: Mr. Levan Bauer

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Mr. Bauer segregated the class into different groups and openly referred to them as the advanced or remedial group, and he moved students from one group to another as punishment in a public way. It was humiliating. Kids declared themselves part of the dumb group and openly lived up to that expectation as a means of protest or as a way of rationalizing the humiliation. Looking back, it was unbelievable. Living close to the school had definite advantages. I ate my breakfast seated near the back door of our house. I watched I Love Lucy from 8:30 until 8:55 every morning. As the program ended, I ran out of the house. The five-minute bell would ring as I crossed the street, and I walked into class at one or two minutes before nine. During the time I was in sixth grade, my father was elected to the state legislature. There was a lot of controversy between the UEA and legislators at that time. One day Mr. Adams, the principal, got on the intercom and made statements critical of the Utah Legislature (or, at least, I interpreted them as critical). Teachers often commented about my father’s role to me. In fact, at times, some teachers showed hostility and genuine unkindness toward me—astounding behavior on the part of adults toward a child. Like most boys that age, there were girls that I liked, and the typical romantic dramas involving who liked who. Most of the opportunities for interaction with girls came at the Friday night movie or parties, and the most interesting parties were in Danny Yergensen’s basement. When Danny’s mother was upstairs, we’d turn off most of the lights and dance close. It was big romance. There were several girls that I considered pursuing, but the one that left the most lasting impression for several reasons was Joan Zubal. Her father was Greek, a miner in the coal business, whose family hailed from the Price area. Joan Zubal was a beautiful young woman. Actually, Joan was my first kiss, and it occurred during one of those parties. Mostly a dare sort of thing, but the memory of it has lasted all these years. I ran into Joan many years ago; life had been difficult for the entire family.

Music

Lest it be thought that athletics was the only thing that occupied my time, I should mention my music. When I was eight, my parents bought a piano and Mother arranged lessons with Loa Johnson, a wonderful woman and a serious teacher who lived on the corner of 400 South and 300 West. Her husband, Blaine Johnson, was the choral music director at the college. They had five or six children, all of whom I became acquainted with in one fashion or another over the years. Every week I would go to Mrs. Johnson’s home for piano lessons. In the summer, the lessons were taught at Thorley Music Recital Hall, a building at the end of Dewey Avenue. I admit I wasn’t the most serious of piano students. I progressed slowly because I didn’t put a lot of effort into it. I remember kneeling on the sidewalk just below Thorley Music Hall on Barrett Hill, filling in my practice record with exaggerated entries, which became painfully obvious the minute I tried to play the assigned pieces. I also remember sitting in a scorching hot room waiting to play my piece at a recital. Family, friends, and a few strangers were in attendance. I shouldn’t have felt nervous playing in front of this group, but my heart rate rose and a great big lump formed in my throat. I still get that feeling when my kids have recitals. In the fourth grade, interested students were invited to attend a meeting about joining the band at South Elementary School. Several students gathered. What motivated me to attend the meeting, I don’t recall, but I was there. Harold Boyce was the new band teacher. He had just taken over from Gene Helland. The band teacher in Cedar City was a position of some prominence because he handled the program at three elementary schools, the junior high school, and the high school. He taught literally every child. Few had private lessons, and if they did, they were probably from him. On the first afternoon, Mr. Boyce demonstrated several instruments and then let us play them. It was then I was introduced to the clarinet and decided I wanted to play it. I think my mother was at this meeting because when it was over, we had

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1 West Elementary School 2 Mike practicing the piano while Dane (on the saxaphone) and Mark (on the clarinet) add to the music. 3 Mike (eight years old), in the bathtub with Dane and Mark

4 Piano practice 5 Mike with Danny Yergensen (left) wearing one of Mike’s favorite hats, an Air Force officer’s hat from Barry Haight.

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quite a discussion about why I thought I would practice the clarinet when I wasn’t setting the world on fire with the piano. Somehow I convinced her, or she figured that giving me multiple experiences with instruments would increase the likelihood that something might take.

One morning, Mother came to my room and woke me up. She had been crying. She said, “I have bad news for you. Barry Haight has been killed.” His jet had crashed. I was crushed. He was the first person I had known who had died like that. He had always treated me like someone special.

My father played the clarinet when he was young, and I was likely influenced by that, but on any account, I made that my instrument of choice. Elementary school band music is never a thing of great beauty, but I enjoyed it, and I played the clarinet until I entered junior high.

I called Danny Yergensen on the phone and tearfully told him that Barry Haight had been killed. Danny thought I said that my dad had been killed. Word spread that Dixie Leavitt had been killed and people began to gather at the house. The misunderstanding was quickly rectified.

There were two moments during this time in my life where singing also had a profound effect on me. When I was about twelve or thirteen, the college music and drama departments combined to mount a production of the opera Carmen. I was recruited to sing in the chorus. I learned to love the music and felt the electricity of being part of a performance. I remember being in the dressing room, smelling the scent of grease paint, and hearing the chatter between the actors.

Swimming at the Pool

Then at church, our ward formed a youth choir with Frank Adams as the director. We practiced at the old stake house on 1000 West. I remember the announcement and the awkwardness we felt in going for the first time. The choir seats were turquoise-blue theater seats and provided a bonus of comfort during sacrament meeting. I felt a sense of something important as we sang, “Will the youth of Zion falter? . . . No!” The experience was a building block of my testimony.1

The chlorine smell of the swimming pool and the noise of kids splashing made a trip to the city pool a distinctive experience.

Barry Haight

I had a hat collection in my room at Dewey Avenue, featuring a cowboy hat, a painter’s hat, a baseball hat, and many others. My favorite was an Air Force officer’s hat that Barry Haight, who was a fighter pilot and a friend of my parents, gave me after sitting through a one-at-a-time showing of all my hats. I remember him bringing his fighter pilot helmet to the house and letting Danny Yergensen try it on.

During the summer, the Cedar Municipal Swimming Pool was the most popular location in town. Unless we had a baseball game, our habit nearly every day was to go swimming, in part because I often had swimming lessons in the morning. A favorite thing for my friends and I to do was to go early to swimming lessons so we could be the first in the pool. The water was smooth, like glass, but very cold.

The lockers were small closets that surrounded a concrete courtyard. At the east end, you could use a lock to protect your clothes. A lock was a good idea; it was not at all unusual for a prankster to sabotage clothes. The showers were located at the west end. Oh, they were cold. When you were finished swimming and showering, it was typical that you’d lie on your towel on the hot concrete to get warm and dry before dressing. Karl Lagerberg (who was the Bonneville Stake patriarch when me, my wife, and children moved to Salt Lake City) lived in Cedar City when I was young. He was from Sweden and lived an extremely healthy lifestyle that included a lot of exercise. He would go to the pool and walk on his hands to demonstrate his strength to the kids.

1. This is a common expression in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. A testimony, as defined by churchofjesuschrist.org, is “a spiritual witness given by the Holy Ghost” (“Testimony.” Gospel Topics, churchofjesuschrist.org, https://www.churchofjesuschrist.org/study/ manual/gospel-topics/testimony?lang=eng) Members use the word testimony in a similar way that they use the word faith—that they have a testimony of, or faith in, Jesus Christ.

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After swimming, we would carefully lay a towel on the floor, place the swimsuit in the middle, fold both sides inward, then roll it up. We put elastic bands around each end to keep it tight and then placed the roll in the basket or mousetrap of our bike, then headed for the park.

Boy Scouts

In Cedar City, the sheriff was Auto Fife. He was a wonderful man, loved by the citizens and the Scouts. He had quite serious tremors. He was on the stake high council and when he came to our ward and partook of the sacrament, he had to do it with both hands. It always made you wonder how he handled a gun. Auto Fife had a passion for the Zion Narrows and had hiked them more than a hundred times, most of them with groups of Boy Scouts or church groups because he was also a well-known and widely recognized Boy Scout leader. I was able to go a couple of times with Auto. He was full of campfire stories and jokes. I remember standing at the bottom of a canyon and having Auto Fife point to a cliff and say, “That’s Poison Peak. Do you know why they call it that? It’s because one drop will kill you.” The hike was about twelve miles and included wading in the water most of the way. You could do it in one day, but many chose to do it in two. About halfway, there was a cave where many a Scout troop stopped to camp. The hike ended inside Zion National Park. I remember another hike we took to Kolob Arches and West Zion. Darwin Maxwell was our Scoutmaster that time. I was the troop quartermaster and had access to all the cook kits and equipment. I ended up taking a pack that was too heavy, so when we got lost misreading a topographic relief map and walked several extra miles, I started jettisoning troop equipment. Then we ran out of water. Finally, we found a road and some construction workers who offered us water from a large Igloo water barrel. It was wonderful. I was so glad to find our way out of that place. Another time, we went to a Scout camp at Snow Canyon. We went climbing after dinner and it got dark on us. We had to find our way down in the dark

in what was a dangerous and frightening situation. Obviously, we made it. Morris Shirts was the ward Scoutmaster for several years and helped many young men become Eagle Scouts. I worked under him for a year or so. He was then released, and Darwin Maxwell took over. He was a good-hearted guy who, let’s just say, couldn’t have enjoyed the experience he had. We were not easy on him.

Junior Pentathlon

While I didn’t work under Morris Shirts in Scouts for long, he did have a rather important role later in my life. For years, the Deseret News sponsored a track and field event called the Junior Pentathlon. My father had participated in it as a boy and did well enough to earn a trip to Salt Lake City from his home in Bunkerville. His stories motivated me to want to participate. The events were the fifty-yard dash, long jump, high jump, shot put, and basketball toss. In the basketball toss, the participant started at the foul line and then made as many baskets as possible in two minutes. Morris Shirts took it on himself to train Randy (his son), Dale Hatch, and me in preparation. We worked out every morning at 6 a.m. for several weeks. I participated a couple of times, and each time took first, second, or third in my school, advancing to the regional competition in St. George. But I didn’t advance from there to the Salt Lake City meet. The reason was shoes. I had a paper route, and I sold a newspaper subscription to a CSU football player named Sonny Sudbury, who was very kind to me. He gave me a pair of old track shoes that I was convinced would make me run faster, despite the fact that they were a couple of sizes too large. My dad tried to talk me out of wearing them, but I would not be reasoned with. I ran a slow time in the fifty and missed the cut. I learned two good lessons: performance is more important than looks, and listen to your father. Sonny Sudbury went on to coach high school sports for many years in Utah. When I was a senior, we played his team in football. It was a nice reunion.

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1 From left: Randy Shirts, Mike, Dale Hatch. Junior Pentathlon, 1963 2 Cub Scouts 3 Taken on the occasion of Mike being ordained a deacon. From left: Vincen Leavitt, Melvin Okerlund, Mike Leavitt, Dixie Leavitt

4 Mike (10 years old) with Dane on Christmas morning holding a new BB gun 5 Mike (nine years old), with Dane and Mark, reading in the library. 6 Cabin at Navajo Lake

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Family Cabin at Navajo Lake

When I was about eight, our family began building a cabin at Navajo Lake. Dad got a lot from the Forest Service with a ninety-nine-year lease. At the time it seemed like the lease would never end. However, the lease has closed in on half completed. Even ninety-nine-year leases run out. To get to the cabin, you drive twenty-nine miles east of Cedar City, then follow the Navajo Lake road about five miles to the south end, past the road to the lodge road, past the two marked springs, and finally to a road posted, “Navajo Lake Summer Home Unit #2.” About a mile up that narrow little dirt road, right at the end, stands a large A-frame cabin with a lava rock chimney. My dad is one of the world’s great scavengers, and building the cabin caused all those instincts to come out. He got much of the lumber and the main beams from a smelter demolished in Midvale; the carpet came from the Flamingo Hotel in Las Vegas; he had the fireplaces and exterior walls built with lava rock we hauled from a site near the cabin; the front of the cabin was made up of eight or nine large pieces of surplus glass he bought from insurance companies; and the front door of the cabin was from Zion’s Bank in Salt Lake City. The interior furnishings came from secondhand places. Most of the furniture came from Hotel Utah surplus sales, purchased from a guy named Jim Madsen, who probably made a small fortune over the years from my dad. The cabin had a war surplus power generator and a tank for hauling water, which was made from the frame of an old truck.

The cabin was a wonderful summer home packed with memories, starting with its construction. I don’t recall the time period during which it was built but I remember each step of its construction: the concrete pad, the framing, and hauling the rock. Mom and Dad used to buy a lot of things for the cabin from a store called Trader Jim’s, located on Main Street in Cedar City. Mother found a bear rug, similar to one that Grandma and Grandpa Okerlund used to have at their house. They bought a huge elk

to mount above the fireplace. We had a pedal-driven sewing machine and a homemade swing set. They found a used piano, with my mother thinking that during the weeks we stayed there her children could practice. And, the truth is, we really did stay there quite a bit. There were times during most summers that we’d spend a full week or more at the cabin. Dad would drive up and down the canyon for work, and I’d go with him for baseball and other duties. An entire set of rituals and memories were developed around the cabin. The upstairs was a loft with four double beds and a single in the main area, plus a master bedroom separated by a large lava fireplace. There was a baby bed that was almost always being used by somebody. When the generator went off and the only light was the fire, we would tell scary stories. I could whip myself into a rather fitful condition that way. Sometimes my brothers and I would stand with our backsides to the fireplace and then run over and sit on the sofa to feel the burn of our overheated bottoms as they pressed upon the sofa. We would see who could stand up to the fire the longest before sitting down.

“

We are going to stay here until the two of you can take those fish a few at a time and find somebody on this lake to give them to.

”

One of our favorite things to do was to turn out all the lights and sit around the living room area talking and popping corn in the fireplace using a metal mess basket with a long handle. The fire would pop and crackle, and you could see your reflection in glass pyramids the front windows

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created. Mother got the popping baskets at Trader Jim’s, along with some extendable roasting forks with red handles. We kept them hanging from pointed stones on the fireplace. We slid marshmallows onto the forks and roasted them in the fireplace until they were perfectly brown or caught fire in a torch-like fashion. If that happened, we’d simply peel off the outer layer, eat it, and start again.

thinking, but we just kept catching fish all day long. Finally, mid-afternoon, Keith’s dad walked over to say he thought we should go. He asked if we’d had any luck. Keith and I looked at each other and said, “Come look.” We walked across the highway and revealed to him and to ourselves the full extent of our damage. We had caught more than a hundred fish.

Fishing at the Cabin

Keith’s father was livid. After a stern lecture he arrived at a remedy. He said, “We are going to stay here until the two of you can take those fish a few at a time and find somebody on this lake to give them to.” For hours, we walked up and down the shores of Duck Creek trying to give those fish away. Of course, nobody wanted our fish; they were there to catch their own. We ultimately gave a few away, cleaned several dozen and left the balance in the snowbank. It was a performance neither of us had an appetite to duplicate.

My brothers and I did a lot of fishing at Navajo Lake. We liked to sit on the dike and fish, or we had a parent take us to the north shore of the lake and we’d walk to a place referred to as the Spring, a deep hole on the southwest corner surrounded by rocks. Water was reputed to enter the lake there and hence, it attracted fish. On occasion we negotiated a ride to Duck Creek, about ten miles east of Navajo Lake. Duck Creek was really more like a pond but had a couple of good fishing holes in it. Every once in a while, somebody would catch a lunker out of there and get their picture in the Iron County Record, which gave the place a certain mystique. One year, on the opening day of fishing season, my friend Keith Pedigo and I accompanied his father to Duck Creek. I’d fished there enough that I knew the place. We had both just turned twelve and had to buy fishing licenses. That was an important event because it meant that our limit was ten, not four, as it had been up to that point. Keith’s father went down to fish the dike and the stream below it. I suggested Keith follow me to the Spring. On the opening day, the Fish and Game Division planted Duck Creek pretty heavily. I had developed a technique of rolling a night crawler on a hook through the bottom of the Spring, and it was so successful that by 9 a.m. we had caught our limit. People were coming and going from the Spring, but we kept fishing. Nobody knew how many fish we had caught, including us. We decided that it might be better for us to bury our catch in a snowbank across the road, both to keep them fresh and because we knew we had more than we were entitled to. I don’t know what we were

More Cabin Memories

On one occasion, I was fishing in Navajo Lake when I heard my mother calling to me from the road. I could tell she was frantic; I ran to see what was wrong. Eric, who was about three at the time, had gone into the bathroom in the cabin. He had pulled out a drawer so he could stand on it to reach something. The drawers were free-standing metal drawers with nothing in them, so his weight was sufficient to tip them over. A gallon of paint fell from the top of the drawers and struck Eric’s little hand, cutting off the end of his finger. She was headed to the doctor in Cedar City. I agreed to take care of the other boys until she returned. The doctor sewed the finger back on, although not straight. It was a traumatic moment for our whole family. After I turned twelve, we were occasionally allowed to rent a boat. The Navajo Lake Lodge owner was a colorful man named Gunner. He got to know the Leavitt children well, and there was a charge account that we could use when we needed it for authorized things. When we stayed at the cabin, there was almost always a trip down the hill and across the meadow to the lodge for candy or basic supplies.

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1 4

1 Fishing at Navajo Lake. Mike (thirteen years old), helping Eric bait a hook, with Dane in the background. 2 Mike and Grandma Okerlund at Navajo Lake 3 Working on the cabin at Navajo Lake

4 On the porch of the Navajo Lake Cabin. Mike Leavitt and Danny Yergensen standing. Sitting, from left: unknown, Mark, Dane, Ron Dobson 5 Dixie, Mike, Mark, and Eric prepping the cabin for summer.

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We swam at the south end of the lake where there was a gradual but muddy beach. Occasionally, we ventured down to the mineral springs at the west end of the lake. There was a sort of quicksand in those springs that both fascinated and frightened us. Once, two of my friends and I (I remember one was Bob Braithwaite and I think the other was Eric Marchant. We were around twelve years old) decided we were going to camp on the north side of the lake. We asked Mother to haul us and our gear. Once there, we lay out our sleeping bags and started to fish. They weren’t biting, and we started getting bored, so we lit a campfire and cooked our tinfoil dinners. It began to get dark, and we could see lights on the other side of the lake. It grew darker. As we talked, Eric thought he heard something in the trees. It was so dark by now that we could see nothing. We began to get scared. The momentum of our fears increased, and within an hour of darkness, we were walking down the road toward the cabin. We left our camp gear, figuring we’d return the next day to reclaim it. It was probably three or four miles back to the cabin and we were walking in total darkness. By the time we got there we were embarrassed and tired, but glad not to be sleeping on the scary side of the lake. I had games that I made up for the cabin. I spent hours throwing rocks against the trunk of a large tree. I would, of course, provide commentary for the games. Hit the tree, and it’s a strike. Miss the tree, and it’s a ball.

and strength to move it enough that it would roll. We loved when we heard it crashing through the trees, bouncing over logs and flying into the air. Next door to our cabin, the Held family had built a cabin. Dick and Betty Held had an only child, Forrest, who was my age. Betty was sort of a middle-aged hippy, always dressed in a sweatshirt. She was fond of the Cedar City area and spent nearly the entire summer at Navajo every year. Dick owned a business called Held Javelin. He’d been introduced to javelins through his brother, who was a javelin thrower in college. Dick’s brother asked if Dick wanted to make javelins—and those javelins Dick made became the most renowned in the world. His javelins were then and may still be used by all the worldclass performers.2 Dick had a product he called the Junior Javelin, which was designed to teach young people proper techniques of the sport. On several occasions, Dick would take Forrest and me down to the meadow by the lake and give us lessons. The Leavitts must have been a real blessing for Forrest. We represented his only social network during the summers besides his mother. Forrest was learning to sail, so we would often go to the lake to sail his small boat. I never got any good at it, but it was wonderful exposure to the sport. Whenever we were at Navajo Lake, Forrest was there, and for many years it was an important friendship.

We also used to walk along the hillsides at Navajo until we would find a big rock we thought might be moveable. We would use all our ingenuity

2. Ken Stone. “Dick Held Dies at 91; World’s Foremost Javelin Expert, Builder With Lakeside Ties.” Times of San Diego, March 20, 2018.

06 My Field of Dreams Little League Baseball; Basketball; Football Sometimes you may hear the phrase “misspent youth.” I’m sure that’s what people were thinking when they watched me spend hour after hour “batting rocks.” It was one of the ways I would entertain myself when I was young. I would find a stick that felt good in my hand, usually about the length of a baseball bat. I stood in a field where there were lots of small stones and formed in my mind a field of dreams. One such venue for me was on 600 West, facing the houses on 700 West. At the time there were no homes on that block, just pasture. The road was gravel, which offered an endless supply of rocks. I played imaginary games and provided commentary as I played. I kept track of the score, the number of runners on base at any given time, and the number of outs. It was a pastime from which I derived great satisfaction.

Mike (nine years old), Little League game day. Note the early development of 700 West: the road had been paved, but not curb to curb. Homes were just beginning to be built on Kayenta Circle.

I had established certain perimeters for various types of outcomes. For example, a highlofted shot into the center of what would be the outfield was an obvious flyout. A rock hit along the ground was fielded by an infielder and thrown out at first, unless there was a man on first, and that may well end up a double play. On the other hand, a rock hit deep into the corner was likely a double, if John Roseboro—the catcher for the Dodgers—was hitting, but likely a triple if Maury Wills was at bat. Any stone hit into the

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Jones’s backyard was a home run. Hitting one onto their roof was a towering home run, into the upper deck.1 In Loa, I made a wonderful little stadium in my mind just north of the corrals, hitting into the road shed area. I learned later that the boys at Ellett’s 66 station would watch with astonishment at the amount of time “that Leavitt kid” would stand over there and “bat them rocks.” Who can blame them? But they could not have known how much fun I was having in my own little world. If I wasn’t batting rocks, I was collecting baseball cards. I had box after box of them. A couple of people approached me about their old collections, and I bought them every chance I got. A box containing twenty packs of cards sold for $1.05 at Park ‘n’ Shop. I was filled with anticipation as I opened each pack, and at the end, I’d also have a stack of bubble gum.

“

. . . swings . . . it’s back . . . a waaay back . . . it’s gone!

”

I kept my baseball cards in shoeboxes or, if I could find them, cigar boxes. I’d separate the cards into traders and keepers, often by team. I had a great collection. I spent hours reading them, studying the backs of the cards. Trading sessions involved high-stake negotiations.

hospitalized. We developed games that highlighted the rivalry between the Dodgers and the Giants. We created lineups of players and acted out baseball games in the backyard.

Dodgers

My favorite major league team was the LA Dodgers (it had changed by this time from the Milwaukee Braves to the Dodgers). The Dodgers announcer was Vin Scully on KFI radio in Los Angeles. KFI, voice of the Dodgers, was a clear channel station. Around sundown I could get the broadcasts sitting in my dad’s Ford Fairlane on the driveway or tune in using a big wooden cabinet radio in our house. Later, with money I earned by selling newspaper subscriptions on my paper route, I bought a radio that could pick up distant stations. The broadcasts were sponsored by Union 76 stations. Vin Scully had a unique collection of sayings and inflections. I adopted all of them in my own broadcasts, no matter if the game was a backyard plastic ball game or if I was batting rocks by myself. A home run would be announced as “. . . swings . . . it’s back . . . a waaay back . . . it’s gone!” The Union 76 stations in California and Nevada carried the Dodgers promotional material. I just loved when my dad was going to Nevada because he would pick up the latest Dodgers picture of the week or Dodgers fan guide. I was a diehard Dodgers fan.

Years later, I found magazines which listed valuable cards, and I recognized cards from my collection. That was heartbreaking. Of course, that’s probably what creates the value: mothers who threw their kids’ cards away.

When I was in the fourth grade, I learned that the Dodgers and Cleveland Indians were scheduled to play an exhibition game in Las Vegas. I pleaded with my dad to take me. There was one problem: the game was on a Thursday, and I would miss school. My persistence paid off and he not only agreed to take me but also Brent Whittekiend, who was a fan of equal passion.

Bob Braithwaite, a good friend of mine, kept his collection. He concentrated on collecting Willie Mays cards and was a huge Giants fan; I had become a serious Dodgers fan. For the better part of a year during the heart of baseball card period, Bob lived at our house, because his father was

The game was held at the old Cashman Field in Las Vegas. I had fantasized catching a foul ball and getting autographs, so midway through the game, we concluded our chances of getting a foul ball would be enhanced if we left our reasonably good seats and stood on the concourse, where it seemed

1. Baseball stadiums often have two or three layers of seats, the ground level plus a second or “upper” level or deck. At a play it would be called the balcony.

MY FIELD OF DREAMS

1 Mike (twelve years old), at the All Star Game in Kanab, standing next to Ron Hunt. 2 Mike (nine years old), rookie year in Little League, leaving for the game with his baseball glove secured on his Red Schwinn bicycle, 1960. 3 Mike (twelve years old), stepping up to bat at the Cedar National All Stars in Kanab.

4 Mike’s Lions Club team playing the Elks Lodge team at the Cedar City little league ball park.. 5 Mike (twelve years old), pitching a Little League game against Safeway.

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more foul balls were landing. I got a clear shot at one but narrowly missed out. After the game, we ran down to the field to get autographs. Frank Howard, who was six feet seven inches tall, was running in from right field. I was amazed at how long his legs were. We tried to get his attention, but he ignored us—a detail I never forgot. The batboy for the Dodgers had a couple of bats that had broken during the game. One had been used by Jim Gilliam, the Dodgers’ second baseman, of whom I was a big fan. I had some silver dollars in my pocket and offered the batboy five dollars—a sum that probably overshot the value. He agreed to the sale. It was a treasure though, having Jim Gilliam’s bat. Jim Gilliam’s bat was kicked around our house for years. We repaired it using small nails and tape on the handle, and then used it in our backyard games. It was considered a treasure, not just by me but by every kid in the neighborhood who got to use a bat swung in a major league game. The behind-the-plate umpire for the game was a man named Jocko. I knew his reputation from the Dodgers radio broadcasts. After the game, we were walking around looking for players to approach for autographs. Jocko couldn’t get into his locker room and was kicking the door, cursing. It was another negative impression that would last a lifetime.

Major League Game of the Week

Every Saturday, we watched the Major League Game of the Week on television. We sat in the basement in front of the big black and white set. With a cold glass of milk and some Oreos or a sack of potato chips, you had the world by the tail.

The 1960 World Series featured the Pittsburg Pirates and the New York Yankees. While the Pirates had not displaced the Dodgers in my heart, they were my favorite in the series because Vernon Law played for the Pirates—he was pitcher who was a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and had nineteen or twenty wins that year. In the seventh game of the series, it looked like the Pirates were going to lose. I was home from school for lunch and was watching the game, seated on the stairs to the basement. There was a little shelf on the stairway where I could set a plate. It was the bottom of the ninth with two out, the bases were loaded, and I was beside myself with pessimism and sorrow. I could not bear to watch and turned to walk up the stairs. At that very moment, Bill Mazeroski, the second baseman for the Pirates, hit a baseball over the wall in left field. It was among the most remarkable finishes in World Series history.

Little League Baseball

All that time spent thinking and dreaming of baseball was leading to one thing: Little League baseball. In the summer of 1938, Carl E. Stotz gathered children from his neighborhood in Williamsport, Pennsylvania, to play a baseball game. Stotz loved the sport and knew, through observing his nephews and their friends, that children were drawn to it, too. He saw how they spent hours playing pick-up games in sandlots or streets, using whatever they could find to serve as bats and balls. After playing catch with his nephews, he came up with an idea for an organized baseball league for boys in Williamsport, to be played on a modified field with childsized equipment. The game that summer was the first of a series to test his idea.2 Stotz’s idea caught on fast. In 1939, Little League was born when Stotz organized a league of three teams sponsored by businesses in Williamsport: Lundy Lumber, Lycoming Dairy, and Jumbo Pretzel. Within a few years, Little League had swept the nation, with teams sprouting and flourishing in what seemed to be every town in America.3

2. Robert Mcg. Thomas Jr. “Carl Stotz, 82, Founder of Little League Baseball.” New York Times, 5 June, 1992. https://www.nytimes. com/1992/06/05/sports/carl-stotz-82-founder-of-little-league-baseball.html 3. Wikipedia, “Carl Stotz.” 13 June, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/1992/06/05/sports/carl-stotz-82-founder-of-little-league-baseball.html

MY FIELD OF DREAMS

And that included Cedar City, which responded to Little League with religious-like zeal and devotion. The entire community attended the games, valued the rivalries, and debated the outcomes. The Iron County Record, Cedar City’s weekly newspaper, included results and commentary on the Little League games and standings. KSUB provided live broadcasts of significant Little League baseball games. The post-game analysis went on for days at the barbershops. The Cedar City Little League had eight or ten teams of fifteen boys. Each team had a sponsor like Safeway, Columbia Iron Mines, or the Lions Club. The team rosters carried over from year to year, as did the coaches, which created an atmosphere of loyalty and competitiveness. From the time I was aware of Little League, I wanted to be a part of it. Little League tryouts were held in the spring. Talent was evaluated by age during two or three sessions, then a draft was conducted: a mysterious, closed-door session held by league officials and coaches, which created enormous anxiety among those hoping to make a team. Tradition held that the morning after the draft, a list of names of those who had been selected for a team was posted in the window of the offices of the Iron County Record. I dreamed for years about playing Little League before I became eligible at nine, so when tryouts had passed, saying that I anxiously awaited news of the draft is an understatement. In the chilly, early hours of a spring morning, my mother drove me to Main Street to see if the list had been posted. This was the second or third morning in a row we had made this outing. But on this particular morning, as we passed the offices, I could see a single sheet of paper taped to the inside of the window, with writing facing the street. That’s when the heart-pounding started. Main Street was deserted, so my mother executed a sweeping U-turn. Another mother and son were already at the window looking at the list, so I paused, waiting for the boy to have his moment

of judgment in the same privacy I hoped for. As they drove away, I walked to the window, my eyes madly scanning the list as I approached. There it was: Mike Leavitt, Lions Club team. Tom Cardon, Manager. Blaine Betenson, Coach. I have only three moments that rival the heart-thumping anxiety I felt approaching the Little League list: sitting in an assembly listening to the results of the election for eighth-grade class president; reading a similar list for the high school basketball team; and waiting for the election returns the first time I ran for governor. I was in the third grade at the time, a member of Avy Davis’s class. The day I read my name on the list, the principal, Mr. Clair Morris, came to our class to observe and listen to students read. He sat next to me with an expectation that I would read to him. “Guess what,” I said, “I made Little League!”

Lions Club

Tom Cardon was the coach of the Lions Club team during the four years of my Little League career, as was Blaine Betenson, his assistant. Tom and Blaine lived on 500 West, two blocks from my house. I don’t know how old they were—they just seemed like adults to me—but looking back, they must have been in their early to mid thirties. Both went to school with my parents at Branch Agriculture College; both of their oldest children were my age. Tom owned a shoe store on Main Street; Blaine was a mechanic with Lunt Motor. Both owned old Dodge pickups. Tom ultimately had five boys, just

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like the Leavitts. The Betensons had a couple of girls, in addition to a pack of boys. We practiced at 6 a.m. nearly every morning. I waited for Tom or Blaine at the curb, and one of them would drive by my house to pick me up. I jumped into the back of the truck and sat with the other boys, leaning on the canvas army surplus duffle bag we used for bats and equipment. Some days we rode our bikes to practice, often pedaling up 400 South. It was uphill all the way to Main Street, which in those days was also Highway 91 (the freeway hadn’t been built yet). At that time of morning, we glided all the way down the center of Main Street, sometimes without hands on the handlebars, shifting our weight from side-to-side to slalom in and out of the white lines. Those summer mornings were glorious, even to a sleepy-eyed, preadolescent boy. Whenever I hear the sound of a meadowlark, I am instantly transported to Little League practice. We practiced at the city baseball complex located on Cedar City’s east side, just across Coal Creek at the end of the Lund Highway. When those fields weren’t available, we used a field at the college. Practice always started with laps to warm up, and then infield practice. “Throw it to first,” Tom would yell as he hit ground balls to each position. “Take two,” he would say, hitting the ball to the shortstop or third baseman, expecting a flip to the second baseman and a throw to first. Batting practice would follow. There was an order and ritual about those mornings that my teammates and I loved. Game days were governed by strict rules: no swimming, never be late, miss practice and you don’t play. Uniform day was highly anticipated. After practice, about a week before the first game, the players lined up in order of height on the first-base line. Number fifteen went to the tallest player, number one to the shortest. As a nine-year-old, I was number 4; at age ten, number 8; at eleven, I wore number 11; and finally, number 14 when I was twelve. An unwritten style guide was handed down to rookies by Little League veterans: only clean, white

socks under the stirrup; a pair of sleeves with your team’s colors had to be worn under your uniform, no matter how hot the day; only rubber cleats should be worn as shoes; the baseball hat had to be creased in just the right way, the bill rolled with the right amount of curve; championship pins were affixed to certain places on the hat. We had a good team. The season was divided into two halves, and the winner of each half entered a best-of-five-games series for the league championship. We won the championship several times during four years. I formed lasting friendships with members of the team. I’ve lost track of many now, but I still remember the respect I had at nine for the twelveyear-olds. There was one, Curtis Anderson, who lived in the Indian Village and walked to practice every morning. He was a pitcher and could throw a curve ball. He had this really old mitt that was black with wear. Curtis was always humble and kind. Davey Jensen, a fiery redhead who played pitcher and shortstop, was a contender for the league home run title and was always ready to fight. He was a good high school player in three sports and went on to play football at the college, and later coached at Cedar High School. Wayne Knell was another redhead with a completely different temperament: funny and nice to me. I later played football and baseball with his brother Craig. Wade Roberts was a year older than I was and a remarkably gifted athlete in several sports, as were his brothers. Their father, Lester, was from Louisiana and had a thick accent. He was a fixture at games and practices; you could tell he lived through his boys. He would always say, “My boy Wesley . . . ” or “My boy Wade . . . ” The truth is the family was a Little League dynasty. Years later while I was Secretary of Health and Human Services, Hurricane Katrina devastated Louisiana, and I spent a lot of time working on the recovery of the health system there. When I heard people speak with a Louisiana accent, it made me think of Lester Roberts.

MY FIELD OF DREAMS

Baseball Mitts

Whenever I found myself in a department store, I sought out the sporting goods section and examined the mitts. I loved trying them on and breathing in the smell of the leather. I placed a mitt on my hand and slammed my fist into the pocket to emulate the sound and feeling of a hard-landing baseball. I always had a couple in mind, just in case a generous benefactor offered to buy one for me. The first glove I remember having an emotional attachment to was a Ken Boyer six-fingered mitt. Six-fingered mitts had what looked like an additional finger rather than a flap between the thumb and forefinger. It was a smaller glove and perfect for a boy’s hand. The Ken Boyer glove was named after the great Baltimore Orioles third baseman. I used the glove through my eleven-year-old season, but at the beginning of my twelve-year-old season, I made a case to my dad that I had outgrown it, and besides, Dane was going to start playing minor league the following year and needed one. I must have been persuasive because just before the season was to start, Dad and I went to Hunter Hardware on a mitt-shopping excursion. I had a paper route and was earning money but hadn’t saved any toward this purchase. I was thinking of a midline glove that would be around twenty-five dollars. However, there was one glove that I had loved for years called a Wilson A2000. It was a huge glove, made for professionals, and so expensive I had never seriously entertained the thought of owning one. Something in the way I held the glove must have communicated all of that to my dad. “That’s the one you really want, isn’t it?” he said. I confessed that it was, but explained that I knew it cost too much. Dee Cowan, the manager of the store, was helping us. He asked how much I had, then said, “I’ll tell you what. Give me the money you have and if you will pay me two dollars a week until it’s paid for, I’ll let you have it.” I looked at my dad for approval. “It’s your decision,” he said.

Dee Cowan handed me a sales ticket for my signature, and I walked from that store with a pro mitt and an entirely new view of the world. I loved that glove. It was, perhaps, my mostprized possession. I oiled it and shaped it with a ball and rubber bands at night. Sometimes I just wore it because I liked the way it felt and smelled. Each week I took money into Hunter Hardware until I had paid for the glove. I used my Wilson A2000 through high school and for many years after that. My brothers used it after me.

Game Day in Cedar City

Before I joined Little League, the organizers decided to add a couple of expansion teams and divided the league into the American League and the National League. Boys whose birthdays fell before the fifteenth of the month played in the National and the rest played in the American League. But the American League needed a field to play on. The National League park had been built by the Elks Lodge in Cedar City, so the Kiwanis Club, of which my Dad was a member, committed to build the second. Kiwanis Club was held on Monday night, and for several weeks over the course of about a year, the club held work parties at the park and members invited their sons. There was, however, a pay-off. Ernie Humphrey, a member of the club, owned the Arctic Circle in Cedar City, a drive-in restaurant next to the city park. After a few hours of raking, shoveling, or weeding, we went to Arctic Circle to eat. The deal was you could order anything you wanted until you were full. Oh my. Arctic Circle had the best fries and onion rings in town, and a hamburger the size of a dinner plate called the ranch burger. We ate like horses. Ernie also gave coupons to the league for those who retrieved foul balls during a game. A gang of kids at the games competed to get every ball. It was a market system that worked perfectly. The Elks Park where we played our games was an excellent baseball field. It was mature and

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well-groomed, with good dugouts and a set of concrete bleachers that extended back six or eight rows. Immediately behind home plate, there was a small scorer booth where mothers kept score or Jay Monson, the play-by-play man for KSUB radio, produced his broadcasts. The booth sat close enough to home plate that players could easily hear the commentary when they went to bat. Friends, parents, and siblings sat in the stands. My mother once confessed that she prayed for me from the stands when I was batting, which represents one of the great dichotomies: the mother of the pitcher was sitting next to her and praying for her son. Spectators who didn’t want to get out of their cars parked along the fence and watched. When somebody hit a home run or made a good play, they honked their horns. It was the ultimate praise. Car horns, to this day, are music to my ears. Some lowly, nine-year-old rookie from the visiting team passed the bucket at games to collect money for the league to pay for baseballs and other equipment—the equivalent of passing the offering plate. The league also had its lore. For example, it was reputed that only one person, Gary Anderson, had ever hit a ball into Coal Creek. That was the ultimate achievement. Gary Anderson was a great from the past who went on to play professional baseball.

“

You told me that jock strap would keep me from getting hurt.

”

My nine-year-old year was full of intimidation and improvement. It was like being a freshman rushing a fraternity. The upper classmen exacted a price to counterbalance the one they paid when they were nine. I always played right field or second base but rarely started. When I did play, I spent most of the time hoping I wouldn’t have to bat. My coach began to groom me as a catcher.

I had some highlights that year. Robert Smith was a fireball pitcher for Columbia Iron Mines. He was eleven but already had quite a reputation—he came from a long line of Smith pitchers, including two brothers who had played high school and college baseball. I came to bat in the fifth inning of a game against Columbia. My heart was pounding. However, once I had taken a pitch or two, it didn’t seem as hard as I had worried it would be. The next pitch I swung and hit the ball down the right field line—it was fair. I can remember running with everything I had, and as I rounded the bases, I heard car horns. Fortunately for me, my good friend Kent Barrett, who was quite heavy and consequently not very fast, was playing in right field and had a long way to travel to get the ball, which by now had rolled all the way to the fence in the corner of the field. I rounded second and slid into third. Few highlight reels have been run more times than my reliving every moment of that experience over ensuing days. It was not only a confidence builder for me but a rite of passage in becoming a full-fledged member of the team. We won the first half of the season, but Safeway, our rival, won the second half of the season. We were forced into a playoff. The Safeway team had Robert Garrick, who was slightly more than six feet tall. He was the most dominating pitcher in the league, and the thought of stepping into the batter’s box to face him scared me to death. So of course, early in the series, I was called upon to do just that. Tom Cardon, sensing my insecurity, called time-out and said to me privately, “You can hit this guy. Just stand in there.” With the second pitch, Robert Garrick drilled a fastball right into my chest. Tom picked me up. I think I went to first base, but I was pretty upset. Tom had insisted that I get a jock strap and a cup because I was a catcher. The smallest version was a lot of equipment for a nine-year-old. My next time at bat I jokingly said to Tom, “You told me that jock strap would keep me from getting hurt.”

MY FIELD OF DREAMS

We went on to win the playoffs. I can’t remember many details of the games. We got a pin for winning the first half, and another one for winning the league championship. The pins were carefully affixed to my blue Lions hat; one on each side of the white block L. The next year, Paul Roberts was our starting catcher. He was twelve. Boyd Hallman was our best pitcher. He was tall and threw with a sidearm delivery that distinguished him in the league. He had made the All-Stars the year before. Paul Roberts also pitched, which meant that I became the catcher. I was ten. Tom Cardon then developed me as a catcher for the next two years. I caught batting practice every day. It was hard, unpleasant work, but it was also good experience.

Little League: Eleven Years Old

The next year, I played catcher most of the time, did some pitching, and played shortstop. I started to feel some responsibility for team leadership.

I had expected to hit some home runs this year but didn’t. During one game I hit a hard line drive that drove Kim Matheson, who played centerfield for Safeway, to stand with his back against the fence and catch the ball. In another game against Columbia Iron Mines, I hit the ball very high and directly into a wind. It held right at the fence and fell directly downward, only to be caught by an outfielder leaning over the fence. During the season when I was eleven, I got into trouble for not doing my chores. After a couple of warnings, my dad told me that if I didn’t get something done, I would miss my Little League game. Looking at the situation now from the perspective of a parent, my idleness was one of those things my dad needed leverage on, but the consequence he bestowed was one which he later regretted. That afternoon I was lying on a bed on the deck when it began to rain. I rescued the bed, and when Dad came home to take care of it himself, he said, “That was a responsible thing to do, and as a reward, I’m going to let you play the game today.” I think we were both relieved.

All-Star Team

At the end of the year, the coaches picked an AllStar team. The selection took place during another one of those closed-door draft meetings, which everyone knew was happening and about which everyone was on pins and needles. I didn’t know if I had a chance to make it, but I did, and it was a big deal to make the team at eleven. We played in a special All-Star uniform, with an All-Star hat and All-Star pins. The first tournament was in Cedar City. That was somewhat of a disappointment because it was such a big deal to travel as a team. We had two strong pitchers: Alan Bratton, an eleven-year-old Elks club pitcher; and Fred Livermore, a stylish twelve-year-old who played for Safeway. We won the tournament and advanced to the state tournament in Nephi. The practice at that time was for the community hosting a tournament to provide housing for visiting players. I was assigned to stay with a family that lived across the street from the high school. The father’s business was kitty-corner from the Arctic Circle drive-in. So of course, we frequented the place and ate long, curly French fries. My team and I won the first game and then played Rose Crest, a team from Salt Lake, in the championship game. We lost three to two, as I recall, and the season was over. It was a real disappointment because the winner went to the district tournament in California. As my twelve-year-old year approached, I felt a strong sense of team leadership. I had been on the team for three years and was a league All-Star. I knew the younger players looked up to me in the same way that I had looked up to Davey Jensen and Curtis Anderson when I was nine.

The Dilemma

I faced a dilemma that season after I turned twelve: my Scout troop had been planning a hike from rim to rim in the Grand Canyon—but it would take place during the first week of the season. Luckily, I managed to negotiate a situation that required me to miss only one game. But then I had another problem that came up.

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Two or three days before we were to leave for the Grand Canyon, my team and I had an exhibition game. Just before the third inning, I was asked to warm Ned Lunt, one of my teammates, up to pitch.So we walked to the warm-up spot in the corner of the field next to the outfield corner. We threw the ball back and forth a couple of times, and then there was a play on the field that caused a cheer; it distracted my attention and I turned to see what had happened. Ned did the same thing, just as he let go of the ball. He turned to look at me just in time to yell. However, there wasn’t enough time for me to react. The ball hit me squarely above the right eye. Blood gushed down my face. Somebody took me to Dr. Broadbent, who was accustomed to seeing Leavitt boys for stitches. My cut was deep enough that it required two layers of stitches, eighteen in all. I was worried; what about my trip to the Grand Canyon? Gratefully, I could still go, and Dr. Broadbent was able to bandage it in a protective way, extracting from me a promise that I wouldn’t get it wet. The protective bandage essentially made me look like a mummy. I had white gauze wrapped around my head and draped over my eye. We left for the South Rim in vans and trucks loaded with backpacks and canteens It’s a nearly six-hour drive to the rim of the canyon, so we camped at the rim and readied the next morning for the descent. That time of year in the Grand Canyon, the days are brutally hot and get hotter as one descends into the canyon. The trail was narrow, switching back and forth. At various points we were walking along sheer cliffs. We stayed three days in the canyon. We also spent time at Phantom Ranch at the bottom of the canyon. By the time we started climbing out of the canyon, my protective bandage looked like a war wound. Every hiker coming the other way asked what had happened. After a while, I got tired

of telling people about being hit by a baseball, so my friends and I started spinning tales of spectacular canyon incidents—which was more fun actually. I returned after the first game of the season. Stitches out, I was ready to play.

1963 Season

Columbia was our biggest rival, and I was scheduled to pitch our first game against them. York Nelson, their coach, was a Little League legend. He worked in management at the mine, walked with a limp, and had an oversized shoe. There were all sorts of rumors about his leg, but I don’t know what really happened. He was a regional Little League officer and sort of a Woody Hayes figure—gruff and strict, feared but respected by his players. As I threw some warm-up pitches outside the dugout, Nelson said to his players, loud enough for me to hear, “He’s not nearly as fast as I thought he would be.” At first, it hurt my feelings, and then it began to make me angry. In the fourth inning, we were ahead 3–1. Their cleanup hitter was Alan Lewis. He was at the plate with two men on base. He hit the ball out of the park, but it was foul. As he was rounding second base, I was so excited that I started dancing on the pitcher’s mound, screaming at Alan, “It’s foul! It’s foul!” We went on to win the game. I had a good season. I don’t remember a lot of details, except that we won half the season, but I think we lost the playoffs. I hit two home runs, the first one was hit over the left center field fence, and the second dropped behind the scoreboard in center field. My favorite bat was an Adirondack 31. Years later, while I was administrator of the EPA, I spoke in Adirondack National Park and recalled that important connection with my youth. Once again, I was chosen for the All-Star team. This time the regional tournament was held in Kanab. We prepared with two weeks of practices after the regular season had ended. Alan Lewis, from the Columbia Iron Mines team, and I were good friends from school. We began to form a

MY FIELD OF DREAMS

friendship with Bobby Adams, whose father owned and operated Sullivan’s Café, where the three of us often went for breakfast after practice. This was one of the truly great things about having a friend whose father owned a restaurant: free food. We all ordered pancakes that arrived with whipped butter and syrup. Alan had never seen whipped butter before and thought it was ice cream. Alan and his twin brother Evan were boys I knew clear back from the Dewey Avenue and Miss Wanda days. Alan was a gifted athlete; Evan was less interested in sports. Both were good at art. Alan grew up to be an art teacher at the high school level. Evan was a mechanic, I think. Chad Lewis, the former star of BYU and the Philadelphia Eagles, is Alan and Evan’s nephew. Brent Whittekiend was also on the Lions team; I think he joined when we were ten. He was in my fourth-grade class and would have been considered one of my best friends. His mother and father held jobs outside their home, so nearly every morning in the summer, he would walk to our house and spend the day. He’d help with my chores and eat lunch with us. We were both big Dodgers fans and would play various versions of ballgames in our backyard for hours. We could make a baseball game out of any number of people, any type of ball on any-sized piece of grass. For example, we had a game in the backyard of our home we’d play with a basketball. We had rules with imaginary runners and creative ground rules. It was a small yard, and hitting the ball over the fence was not difficult, so we made it out and the hitter was the getter. That made the game one of strategy. Brent and I maintained a great friendship through junior high, but then he started running with a rougher crowd. He dropped out of sports, returning our junior year to play football. Our relationship, while always friendly, never regained the closeness we had when we were young.

On to Basketball

In addition to my obsession with baseball, I had hoop dreams, too. For years, I spent winter nights playing imaginary basketball games in the front

room of our home. A rolled-up pair of socks served as a ball. I stripped down to my underwear, making sure that my undershirt was a tank top, not tee, because a tank top looked like a basketball jersey. My pajamas were my warm-up suit. A big part of the games was my commentary. The games started with introductions and the players warming up, then developed into seesaw battles that went down to the wire and concluded with heroic endings. Interviews would follow, along with a post-game show. In that setting one can imagine how excited I was to learn about Bantam basketball. I was nine. The thought of having a uniform and playing in real, organized games was so appealing to me that I decided to try to sneak on to a team by telling them I was ten, which was the age of eligibility for the league. I went to the meeting but dropped my plan when I learned registering required a birth certificate. The next year I joined. Our games were played Saturday mornings at the junior high and our practices were held at the National Guard Armory, which was right behind the old rock church. I don’t remember much about the games. I wasn’t a gifted player but I was usually one of the best on my team. When I was in fourth grade, my friends and I organized a basketball game between Mr. Dalton’s class, which I belonged to, and Mr. Matheson’s class next door. Oh, I had such a big thing made of this game in my mind; I was close to delusional. We created tickets, negotiated rules, held tryouts and anticipated every detail with excitement. When the day came, both classes gathered at the basketball court on the playground. The first half was held during morning recess and the second half in the afternoon. It turned out pretty much the way we dreamed it except for one small detail: we lost the game. That we hadn’t planned on.

Frightening Fight

The rivalry between the college in Cedar City, then called College of Southern Utah (CSU), and Dixie College was intense, bitter, and reflected the broader tension which existed between the

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two communities. The colleges were, at the time, two-year junior colleges and played in the same conference. The schools battled for an axe, which remained in the possession of the winning school until the next contest. I remember a particular basketball game in Cedar City where the crowd became so agitated that police had to be brought in at every door. The manager of the college farm for CSU, Mr. Rigby, was responsible for sweeping the floor at halftime. He put a rebel flag, symbol of the Dixie Rebels, under his broom and began to sweep the floor with it. The Dixie side, of course, responded exactly the way one would expect. Soon there was a tussle in the center of the arena for the flag. It was a bench-and-bleacher-clearing brawl. Then someone turned off the lights. I’m not sure if it was done by the police to slow the momentum of the fight or if it was done by someone else to inflame it, but it was one of the scariest moments I remember having at that age, around ten or eleven years old. The police were able to restore order after using billy clubs. It was truly ugly. The field house had a storage place at the north end of the floor where wrestling mats were kept. There was a barrier about six feet tall and about eight feet from the out-of-bounds line where my friends and I could watch the game at essentially eye level with the players. If the game got boring, we would play on the mats. At the other end of the field house, on the second level, we skated in our socks down a concrete incline—another attractive place to spend a slow game.

college conference. CSU had played them to a close game. One of UNLV’s best players was deaf, and at the close of the game, he was at the foul line to win. The crowd began to chant and make noise to distract him. He coolly walked up and made both shots. I remember being amused by the crowd trying to distract a deaf player. Cleo Petty was the basketball and baseball coach at CSU. The college had been losing for some time, and he had become controversial for reasons I don’t remember now. However, I remember listening to the radio and being horrified by the news that Cleo Petty had been hung in effigy. My parents were out for the evening, and when they got home, I said to them, “They hung Coach Petty tonight in a place called Effigy.” I was relieved to learn effigy wasn’t a place.

Football

When autumn came to Cedar City, it meant the relief of cooler temperatures, the start of a new school year, and football. My passion for football may have been due in part to my dad. He was a gifted athlete who had come to CSU to play football. I used to watch college football practice with him. From the first day of school at CSU, I could hear the college players from my house, shouting in unison with the distinct cadence of a military squad while doing their calisthenics. That sound meant fall to me. I remember being five or six and listening to my dad explain to me how the linemen made a hole and the running back would run through it. I had strange mental pictures from that conversation, but I later figured it out.

On the other side there was a concession stand. Popcorn and hamburgers; the cheerleaders; the townspeople; Jay Monsen of KSUB radio, assisted by Dick Gunn in a little booth; were all part of the CSU basketball experience.

From the time I was five or six I had a football uniform, ordered from the Sears Catalog. Most of the kids in the neighborhood had some portion or version of a uniform. I remember opening the box and trying it on. The uniform was a flimsy little helmet and shoulder pads, pants, and a jersey. We played tackle football games with kids of every size and age. It’s a miracle more injuries didn’t occur.

University of Nevada, Las Vegas (UNLV), which, for a time, became a national power in basketball, would occasionally play in Cedar City. One year, the team was nationally ranked in the junior

I came up with ways of creating football games when I was alone. One time I dressed in my football uniform, gathered the dining room chairs and other furniture into the family room, pretended to

MY FIELD OF DREAMS

take a hand-off, and plowed through them like a fullback. (Knowing the approximate time your parents will return is an important part of pulling off that kind of amusement.) The college football games were another major community event. They were often played at night on a field that is now the site of the Southern Utah University (SUU) Library and the Dixie Leavitt Business Building at SUU. The games were nice, but the real action was at one of two places: the south end of the football field where we generally had a football game of our own going, or on the east side lawn where we played various games, one that involved getting to the top of the hill while avoiding kids who were trying to mow you down. Maybe it was the combination of the crowd and the fall evenings, but playing football during the football game just made things so much more enjoyable, and it inspired good play. Our games, played in the end zone, were suspended if either team was threatening to score. One reason was the opportunity to catch the extra point, which was an honor like catching the flowers at a wedding. Eric Gardiner was the quarterback on the college team, and one day I watched him throw a long pass for a touchdown. I waited outside the dressing room for him because I knew he would walk home and I could talk to him.

Bruce Osborne was the college coach for all those years. His son Rex was a year younger than I was, and they lived in our neighborhood. He always seemed like a rather scary and stern guy. He didn’t have a lot of patience for the distraction we sometimes created around practice. As strong as the Little League baseball program was in Cedar City, there was no Little League football until I was in the sixth grade. A group of men, led by Kent Hoyt, decided to organize it for the first time. Tryouts were held on the back lawn of South Elementary School. I decided I wanted to be a quarterback. The competition wasn’t intense, and I was successful at both making the team and winning the job as quarterback. The only problem: we were the only team. We had nobody to play. I think we played twice: an inter-squad game at the halftime of a CSU home game and when a team from Salt Lake City traveled to Cedar City to mop the earth with us. We had never played a game before, though we were able to score a couple of times. I threw a pass that was caught by Robert Smith. We weren’t particularly good but we did have real pads, helmets, uniforms, and real plays. It was the fulfillment of all kinds of dreams I had held since putting on my first Sears Roebuck football uniform.

07 Junior High School 1964 to 1966 • Boy Scouts; Sports; School On November 22, 1963, I was walking back to the junior high after eating lunch at home when my classmate Paul Cahoon, who was riding his bike, yelled to me, “Did you hear that President Kennedy has been shot?” Like every person in America at the time, I found it an unforgettable moment. I turned around and walked back home to talk with my mother. We watched the coverage on television, and afterward she gave me a ride to school in the car. At school, my classmates and I met for another class period and listened to the radio in stunned silence. The principal announced that school would be cancelled for the rest of the day; there was a palpable sense of anxiety and sadness in the air. President Lyndon Johnson was sworn into office later that day. He finished the remainder of President Kennedy’s term, then ran for president in 1964. That year the Republican vice-presidential candidate, William E. Miller, Senator Barry Goldwater’s running mate, addressed a Republican rally in Cedar City. Miller’s stop was the first time in the history of southern Utah that a candidate of his stature visited the community. About two thousand people attended the rally. My dad was in the legislature and so was seated

Mike leaving for National Jamboree

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near the front. I met Wallace F. Bennett, a U.S. Senator from Utah, that day. When I shook his hand, I noted how his hands felt soft, but his shake was firm. In November, when President Johnson won in a landslide, Utah went with him, but the Goldwater ticket won the popular vote in Iron County.

Boy Scout Jamboree

When I was thirteen, I heard President Johnson speak at the National Boy Scout Jamboree in Valley Forge, Pennsylvania. Not long before the Jamboree, President Johnson signed the Medicare Act, providing health insurance to senior citizens and low-income earners. Sitting at the Jamboree, listening to the president speak, I would never have predicted that I would later direct the Medicare program he had signed into law. Back then, all that concerned me was getting to the Jamboree. The minute I heard about it I knew I had to go. As I attended planning meetings, I got to know others from southern Utah who were making the trip, some of whom have become lifelong friends. Steve Snow for example, from St. George, and his grandfather Eric Snow attended. Steve and I remained friends through high school and college, and even at the height of Cedar High/Dixie High competition there was always a feeling of goodwill between us. We later served on the Utah State Board of Regents together as adults.

Before the Valley Forge event, the group I was with traveled to New York City, Philadelphia, and Washington, D.C. It was my first trip to those cities. One night we were at the candy counter of Radio City Music Hall laughing at the New York accents of the clerks while they laughed at ours. We stayed at the Taft Hotel in Washington, D.C., and we leaned out of the hotel window at night to drop pennies from several stories high. I remember seeing the monuments; they inspired me then in the same way they do today. At the Jamboree in Valley Forge, we earned badges and awards by completing certain tasks and skills, which included completing an obstacle course. One part of the course called for jumping,

grabbing a rope, and swinging over a pit of watery mud. On several occasions I tried and missed, falling in the mud. It was humiliating, but I kept at it until I finally got across. Eric Snow could tell I was embarrassed by the experience. He pulled me aside and said, “I just want to tell you how impressed I am that you stayed at it until you got across that obstacle course. That is such a good quality, and I am proud of you.” For a long time after that, Eric would refer to that event when we saw each other. It not only made me value him deeply—it had a positive effect on my self-esteem. Eric Snow’s grandson Steven Snow, also from St. George, was part of our southern Utah delegation. Steve and I developed a friendship during the Jamboree that endured many years. We competed against one another in high school sports, but then as adults served on the Board of Regents together. Steve was called to be a General Authority of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. While we were at the National Boy Scout Jamboree, we camped in tents, cooked our meals, and learned new skills. I remember getting up one night to go to the latrine tent and sinking up to my ankles in a sump hole we had dug for wet garbage. I spent the next morning trying to rehabilitate my shoes. The Jamboree trip was a life-changing experience for me in ways I cannot fully define; I returned feeling as if I understood better the larger world.

Teenage Shenanigans

My maturity may have increased at the Jamboree, but I still knew how to have a good time. It’s hard to justify what I’m about to report, but it’s true: my friends and I spent a significant amount of time throwing things at cars—mostly snowballs, but

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1 Mike (thirteen years old), before going to the Jamboree. Eric, Mark, and Dane are sitting in front of him. 2 Mike at the Scout jamboree with Lynn Jones and Cliff Anker

3 Mike and Tracy Williams 4 Mike at the latrine tent at Valley Forge 5 A note from Mom and Grandma Okerlund

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occasionally fruits, depending on the season. I’m fairly sure the appeal was the sense of sport and danger it presented. Generally, we would find ourselves a perch that resembled a sniper’s pillbox. We always had an escape route planned in case somebody got offended by the surprising thud, thud, thud our missiles made on the occasions they found their mark. One of our best spots was on the sun deck of my house outside my parent’s bedroom, which overlooked our yard and was situated such that we could easily hit cars driving on 400 South. The walls around the deck were about five feet tall and hinged halfway to provide more visibility if desired. Often, our victims would slam on their brakes, get out, and occasionally look around for us. We would lie still, watching them from our perch. When they left, we congratulated ourselves on another successful mission. Hoods and college kids were the preferred mark because they always stopped. One day, we pelted the truck of a Culligan Soft Water man. He slammed on the brakes. We went into our defensive position, lying on the deck; he left his truck parked in the middle of the road and began his search. Then, he disappeared. Suddenly there was a commotion behind us—he was coming up the stairs inside my house! Over the top of the deck some went; but it was too late for others, including me. The Culligan man was on the deck, and we were circling around an outdoor table to avoid him.

Two of us dashed into the house—we were darting around my parent’s room like cornered rats. The Culligan man reached the bedroom door before we did, shut it, and leaned against it. He chewed us out, then left the house, smiling to himself with satisfaction. On other occasions we figured numbers were our cover. Several of us would gather and fire a volley of snowballs in unison. One day we were on Mike Gale’s front lawn. (Mike’s home was right across the street from Oak Hall on 200 South, though the home no longer exists.) The thing that made it such a prime spot was the number of college students that drove past. Upon seeing us on the front lawn, arms cocked, hands holding snowballs, a fellow in a pickup truck applied his brakes to avoid our first volley. He sped up while we reloaded. Unfortunately, he had a lawn mower in the back of his pickup, and the city had just installed some speed dips on that street. When he barreled through the speed dip, the lawn mower took flight and landed in the middle of the road, breaking into pieces. That was another moment when my friends and I fled the scene, scattering like mice. Some of the other prankish things my friends and I enjoyed included toilet-papering friend’s houses, doorbell-ditching, and dropping water balloons onto unsuspecting passersby from my parent’s sun deck. There were a couple of novel ones, however,

Mike, second row, fourth from the left

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which included stretching toilet paper across the road between two signs to watch people stop to inspect it before proceeding. One of our favorites was screeching. Screeching is accomplished by tying clear fishing line to a straight pin that has been bent in half, then hooking the pin onto the window screen of the target’s home. Then we would hide in the bushes in the next yard, pull the line tight, and rub it with a wet rag. The net effect is the most awful screechy sound that reverberates throughout a house. Within seconds someone is out to inspect, but by then we would have loosened the tension on the fishing line, leaving no evidence of our presence.

Service

Not to leave the impression my friends and I were all about pranks and mischief, I did have moments of altruism and service as well. One remarkable fall day, we went to chop wood for Sister Dover, who lived in a tiny house on 800 West. We called the street Coxville because most of the homes were occupied by Cox families. As we chopped, she fixed a small, Danish pastry she called Aebleskivers. She told us stories of when she was a little girl and her mother would fix them for her.

Each year there were welfare farm assignments. Our stake cultivated corn in the valley. The young men rode to the fields in the back of a truck, then walked alongside it, harvested ears of corn, and tossed them into the bed of the pickup. The corn was taken to a canning factory that was located next to Coal Creek near the city ballparks. You can imagine that it didn’t take long for such an activity to involve corn fights and games, but at the end of the day we got the corn in from the field. After a few loads, each boy took a turn shucking the corn or cutting out the worms. One late summer’s day, I was assigned to do stake farm work. I went, but forgot to tell my mother. I was actually enjoying being there, and at some point in the day began to think, “Mother is going

to be mad that I didn’t tell her and was gone all day, but when she finds out I’ve been working at the welfare farm, it will all go away.” I worked nearly twelve hours that day, and when I went home, my strategy worked perfectly. She was understandably angry, and then rather proud when I told her I’d been slaving at the Lord’s farm for the good of others. That day, my mother said something to me that I’ve often repeated: “It feels good to do that kind of service. We get our self-esteem from the people we serve.” During that period, our congregation built a new chapel on 900 West.1 They appointed a construction superintendent, raised the money locally, and built them with volunteer labor. For nearly two years, every priesthood meeting included assignments to work that week on the building; I remember digging the Scout room and putting the roof on. The chapel meant a great deal to people after they built it with their own hands. My parents, as well as my son Mike and his family attend church in that building, and I am still flooded with memories when I visit.

Work: Important for Your Self-Image

When I was in eighth or ninth grade, I got a job with Larry Bohne, one of my dad’s clients and friends, to do basic jobs. The first day, I was given a stack of used lumber and told to remove the nails. What I remember about it was how good it made me feel to have a job; wearing the tool belt made me feel like swaggering. Work can be important to the self-image of people.

Another job I had for several years was a Deseret News paper route. The Deseret News was an evening paper that didn’t publish on Sundays, so on Sunday morning I distributed The Salt Lake Tribune. The Sunday paper was gigantic because of the advertising, and because it was difficult to carry all the papers in my paper bags, Dad would often

1: In the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, congregations are called “wards.” These wards are usually based on geographic area, though in some cases a ward may be created based on language. In areas with a large concentration of Saints and therefore multiple wards, wards are given different names, such as Cedar City 1st Ward, etc. A certain number of wards also make up what is called a stake, based on a larger geographic area. At this time, wards had to fund and build their own church buildings, but today the Church is able to fund and build buildings for congregations here and around the world.

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drive me on Sunday morning. Otherwise, it would be hard to finish before we had to be at church. One wintry Sunday morning, Mom and Dad were out of town. When I got up, fourteen inches of snow had fallen. First of all, there was no way anyone could ride a bike in that much snow. Second, I knew the paper would be large and the distances involved would take hours to cover on foot.

“

We get our self-esteem from the people we serve.

”

At the time, David Okerlund was living with us and going to school. That weekend he had gone to Loa but had parked his Chrysler in the driveway. I knew where he kept a key, so I woke Dane and told him I needed his help, and we fired up David’s car. (It was a 1959 model with long fins. It may have been the longest car ever made.) We backed it out of the driveway and headed to the paper shack where the papers were dropped off by the Wycoff truck. When we got to the corner of Second South and Third West, a policeman turned the corner. We panicked but he drove on. We parked a block away from the paper shack. We picked up the papers, carried them to the car, then started on our way. My paper route was a large geographic area. It stretched from 500 West to the Leigh Hill area and from 200 South to 400 South. Riding a bike on the route meant covering nearly ten miles. We got the papers delivered without incident. When Dad got home and saw the snow he asked about the papers. I was reluctant to tell him what I’d done, but I did. He was actually quite proud of the initiative that I had taken, and it became a memorable experience for Dad and me.

Grant Seaman was the Newspaper Agency Corporation distributor in that area. Grant would hire a person to supervise the paper carriers. For a while the supervisor was Bill Bailey, but then Loren Hirshi, or Hirsh as we called him, took over the job.

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I got to be great friends with Loren Hirshi. He liked me, and I liked him. He took me fishing one day at Kolob Lake. It was raining a torrent, which caused his old International truck to slide all over, and at one point we slid off the road and knocked out an aspen pole fence. It was a memorable day for both of us. Hirsh was probably sixty-five then. We made an unlikely pair, but we were pals. Every morning and afternoon the paper would be trucked by the Wycoff Company to a small garage in the alley behind Jackson Cleaners and just west of the El Ray Hotel. We called it the paper shack. It had a culture all its own; paperboys would gather about six in the morning and five at night awaiting the truck. Horseplay, teasing, and games were constant as we waited. Once the truck arrived, it was all business. The bundles were tossed off the truck, bound tightly by wires that popped when twisted with pliers. We called the driver of the truck “Speed.” I suspect the name referred to the pace with which he pulled into the paper shack, unloaded his cargo, and got on to the next stop. Each carrier carefully counted the number of papers he was allocated, loaded them into his canvas newspaper sacks, draped them over the handlebars of his bike, and headed out. There were times the paper route was pleasant—it was a chance to see people and make a daily survey of the neighborhood. Then there were times when it felt like a chore, on days when the paper was extra big, hauling eighty papers at one time was impossible, and I would have to make return trips to my house to get more papers. Other times, it felt like an imposition, like when I would have to leave a game we were playing, or my friends would be going to an activity that I couldn’t attend because I had to deliver my papers. But overall, it was a good way to learn discipline. I quickly discovered that having the college dorms within my area was an untapped asset. For one thing, it was a source of subscriptions. A couple of times a year, the newspaper sponsored subscription contests. If I got five subscriptions I earned a new basketball; ten earned a transistor radio; twenty-five, a new bike. It was my first experience with competition in sales performance, and I liked it.

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Not only were the dorms a fruitful source of business but it was efficient business, because if I could get three or four subscribers on each floor of a dorm, the papers could be delivered quickly. The downside was that students could be hard to collect from. Each month, the NAC sent a bill to each paperboy for the newspapers received. If I couldn’t collect, I paid. Looking back, it would have been much better to collect in advance, but that wasn’t the system, so occasionally, I ended up working for nothing. Different customers had specific requests on where they wanted their paper delivered. For example, Dr. Harding required that his paper be placed between the screen and front door. However, if the screen door slammed shut, there was trouble. The Thorley brothers lived on Leigh Hill in a house that was surrounded by their farm. They had peacocks, and it was not unusual to hear them early in the morning or late at night as far away as our house. On the paper route, we saw them strutting around the barn with feathers spread. Bob Thorley was blind, so we opened his door and tossed the paper inside. His brother read the paper to him. The most difficult papers to deliver were those at the top of Leigh Hill; it was hardly worth the effort.

Supporting a Friend

When I was in the eighth grade, Scott Thorley, who was one year younger than I, was working with his father on their farm. They were digging post holes with a tractor and drill. Scott’s coat became caught in the auger and tragically, the auger cut off his arm. It was a gruesome and awful event that traumatized all of us. My mother insisted that we go to the hospital to see Scott. It was a lesson in doing hard things—I did not know what to say or how to approach Scott, but I knew instantly upon arriving at the hospital that it was important that I had come. Scott needed to know that his new handicap would not impair his friendships. On the second or third visit, I took Scott a clipboard and said, “I know you’re going to have to learn to write left-handed.” The interaction felt awkward, but we got through it. Over the years, we all grew from Scott’s hardship. We watched him learn to do everything with

an artificial arm and hook. He became a great skier, an honored football player, and a fair golfer. Nothing held him back. He attended law school and became an assistant U.S. attorney. He and his family lived in the East High area, and our children eventually became friends.

Cedar City Theater

In junior high, the only place to be on Friday night was the Cedar Theater. It was often referred to as “rinky-dink night” because junior high students took over the place. (The more sophisticated high school and college crowd went to the second show or a show on Saturday night.) The hoods came and spent most of the show in the restrooms, smoking. The more romantically inclined boys would spend the whole movie trying to broker a deal to sit by a girl, then spend the balance of the night trying to finagle their arm around her. Then there was always the couple that would just spend the whole time making out. There was so much side action going on during the movies that the noise level would continue to grow until Glen Yergensen, the owner, would stop the movie, stand in the aisle and shout, “If you kids don’t shut up, we’re going to cancel the show!” The Saturday matinee was another social institution in Cedar City during that period. A cartoon and serial ran before the show. The serial was a running installment drama starring Superman, the Lone Ranger, or the Hardy Boys. It kept the crowd coming back. There were drawings for prizes and occasionally a magic show. It attracted the under-seventh-grade crowd and was the most popular venue for romantic matchmaking and intrigue.

I remember Danny Yergensen calling me from a Saturday matinee for West Side Story to report that Joan Zubal wanted to sit by me at the movie. I had seen the movie the night before and had to figure a way to convince my mother that I had to go right then. Danny Yergensen carried a lot of responsibility at the theaters. He counted the money and recruited his friends to assist with the cleaning duties. We swept trash from under the seats, then put it into boxes. We mopped the foot space and put the seats upright. We cleaned the restrooms

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where the hoods had been smoking. Then we vacuumed the lobby and stocked the candy case. Glen Yergensen had nice supplies of candy, which made that an appealing part of the job. Show tickets, all the popcorn we could eat, and drinks from the machine while we worked were our compensation. Another job that I participated in regularly was passing show calendars. Access to newspapers was limited, and of course there was no Internet, so the Yergensens published a monthly show calendar. In many homes it was prominently displayed on the bulletin board or refrigerator. Admission to the show was twenty-five cents for children under twelve and thirty-five cents for twelve and older. You could take a dollar to the movie, pay admission, get a Sugar Daddy, and still have enough to get french fries at the Candy Kitchen next door after the movie. The Candy Kitchen was a small Main Street eatery located next to the Cedar Theater. It was a classic 1950s soda joint with round stools, vinyl booths, a jukebox with three plays for a quarter, and whirling fans hanging from the ceiling that set the mood and pace of the place. The Candy Kitchen was owned by Elu Whatcott, who was also the candy maker. Think of the sitcom Happy Days: this was Arnold’s Malt Shop where Richie, Potsy, and the Fonz hung out. The Candy Kitchen had the best french fries on the planet and was a wonderful place to hang out and talk before or after a movie or swimming. A pack of bicycles was often parked in front and passersby would have to navigate through them. Homemade candy sat in long, glass, display cases and smelled so good. Another one of our favorite places to hang out was the student center at the college. It was in business for the benefit of the college students, but we found it a great place to gather. It had a snack bar, a jukebox, and several pool tables. At times we went there for lunch during junior high school. It was right across the street.

Junior High Romance and Intrigue

In eighth grade, I started having genuine friendships with girls. I spent hours on the phone with Pam Hunter and Annette Baron, for example. The

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subjects ranged from homework to romance. Kris Rowley and Annette Imlay were also friends. I had a crush on Kris Rowley; her family had a cabin next to ours at Navajo. We stayed friends throughout high school. When I was a senior, she wrote in my yearbook that she wished we had dated. Our lives had, by that time, taken different paths, but reading her words created a moment of regret for me, too. I hadn’t asked her out because I didn’t think she would welcome the invitation. Finding out she perceived me differently than I thought she had was both rewarding and disappointing—I had let the moment pass without asking. I think we pass up many opportunities because we misperceive the way others view us. We let the fear of failure kill the opportunity. The school dances in junior high were the social highlight of the year. They were held in the gym, which was decorated with crepe paper, war surplus parachutes, and fishnets. They were held during the Christmas season and around Valentine’s Day. Occasionally, there would be a matinee dance during the last period of the day. There were a few things all the dances had in common. First, nobody danced in the first half, waiting for courage or coolness to settle on the place. When the student officers finally got on the dance floor, then things would get started. We wore Sunday clothes to the dances, but the most important selection for the night was the cologne. There were a few which my friends commonly selected: Old Spice, Jade East, and Aqua Velva. However, if you really wanted to be sophisticated and have any chance to make the night a success romantically, the only real choice was Elsha. It was sold in Cedar City at Marsden’s Store for Men. It was expensive but known to be worth it. Of course, you had to put it on right. It was a smear behind the ear, and one on the neck. The strategy there was obvious. My first campaign for office occurred during eighth grade. I ran for class president against Marilyn Wood, a popular girl from East Elementary School. The campaign lasted a week and consisted of a few campaign signs. The results were announced at an election dance in the afternoon. The anticipation was debilitating; I remember being at the dance but not much else, only that I was wearing the

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Pendleton shirt that I got for Christmas and sported a fresh crew cut. When the music stopped, and in the moments before the announcement was made, my heart was pounding in my chest. I was genuinely surprised when my name was announced. Something I have laughed about over the years is a conversation I had at the end of eighth grade with Charles Garfield. Charles had been a student officer as a ninth grader and, as an upperclassman, was one of the more respected student leaders. One day he pulled me aside, and in all seriousness, said he needed to tell me about a secret organization that was formed years ago at Cedar Junior High called UUBA: the Utah Underground Bear Association. He said there could be only a few members; he specified the number and then said that there were strict rules covering the conduct of business. For example, the minutes had to be kept in red ink. Charles impressed upon me the importance that it be held in secret and stressed what a disappointment it would be if, after all these years, I allowed it to fail.

After I was appointed to the presidential cabinet for President George W. Bush, I got talking to George Tenet, who was the director of the CIA at the time. We were talking about underground organizations. I told him about UUBA, and we both had a good laugh about it. He said, “If you can find Charles Garfield, I will write him a letter on CIA letterhead inquiring about his role.” We never followed up on that, and a short time later George resigned, but it would have been a wonderful “gotcha” to even the score after all these years.

Beach Boy Shirts, Beatles Hairstyle

My junior high school wardrobe included an assortment of surfer shirts: T-shirts with broad, horizontal stripes. The shirts reflected the influence of the Beach Boys and my hairstyle reflected the influence of The Beatles.

I didn’t know whether to laugh or feel honored. He gave me the instructions which were handwritten, just like he said, in red ink.

I heard The Beatles for the first time when I was in seventh grade. My uncle David Okerlund was serving a mission in Scotland. He had sent home a reel-to-reel tape where he talked about his mission, and also spoke of a British singing group who was taking Great Britain by storm called The Beatles. He included a small tape with some of their music on it.

At the end of my ninth-grade year, while I had not fully organized UUBA on my watch, I could not bear being the one who let the tradition die, so I chose a worthy person to pass the burden to. For all I know the organization is still in existence.

I liked The Beatles’ music. I took the tape to school and played it on a recorder we had in Spanish class. A short time later, The Beatles appeared on the Ed Sullivan Show and began their U.S. tour— the beginning of a major musical trend.

7th Grade

8th Grade

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The Lions Club sponsored a talent show each year. Lance Whetten, Danny Yergensen, Scott Lunt, and I, in large part as a joke, decided to enter the show with a Beatles lip-sync. We did it in wigs, wearing our swimming suits and playing brooms as guitars. Lance played drums. We auditioned, and to our surprise, we were selected. The finals were held at the college auditorium. The house was packed. People thought our act was hysterical and laughed until they were sick. We didn’t win, of course, but had a good time doing it and making people laugh.

My Brothers

By the time I was in my early teens, our family included four additional sons, all under the age of eight or nine. I am five years older than Dane, my parent’s second child. At this time, Dad was traveling a great deal. He was in the legislature and at the height of building the business. The consequence was that Mother depended on me some. While I still inflicted many of the pains of adolescence on my mother, we were also very close.

One night we were in the kitchen having a long, searching talk about some subject, well after midnight. Suddenly, we heard the front door open. We froze. Who could that be at this time of the morning? I finally ventured an anemic, “Hello?” No answer. I grabbed a large carving knife from the drainboard and, with Mother behind me, began to search every room to see what, if anything, had entered. When we reached the front door, to our complete surprise we saw Mark, six years old, standing aimlessly in the center of the sidewalk. He was walking in his sleep, something he did occasionally. We tucked him into bed, had a good laugh at ourselves and Mark, and headed for bed. That story symbolizes, in a way, the relationship we had in those days: companion, helper, and protector. With all those little boys, life was never dull at our house. I pitched in as I could, and not always in the most subtle ways. Mark refused to eat almost everything. One night, we offered him big money

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to have one bite of scrambled eggs. He refused. I finally decided if incentives wouldn’t work, compulsion would. I tackled him, sat on top of him, and Mother tried to force-feed him scrambled eggs. It was all in the spirit of fun, and fortunately he was laughing because I’m not sure the home teachers, who came to the screen door unexpectedly, found it funny seeing the two of us bent over trying to put a spoon between his lips.

Pony League

Once a boy in Cedar City turned thirteen, he had to put away childish things and would move on to Pony League baseball. The ballpark was bigger; we played with metal cleats on our shoes; we ran on full-sized base paths; runners could lead off base; and the games were played at night. I loved the sights and smells of night games: the refreshment stand, cigars in the stands, cooler temperatures, and more fans. Girls our age congregated at the ballpark at night, and like the ballpark lights attracted moths, their attendance attracted the boys. I played on the California Pacific Utilities team. I played catcher and made the All-Stars that year. Jack Clarke, the local State Farm adjuster, was my coach, and he was a good one. Clifford Craig, one of my teachers at junior high, was the assistant coach. They just seemed like adults to me then, but from my perspective now, I’m guessing they were both in their late twenties or early thirties. The Pony League tournament that year was held in Vernal. I don’t remember much about the games, but I do remember walking in downtown Vernal with my teammates, feeling stylish wearing my All-Star baseball hat, blue Levi’s with the bottoms folded under to show off my white Adler socks (the brand name of a popular wool-knit sock), and black, low-top Chuck Taylor Converse gym shoes. The games on the first night of the tournament were delayed by more than an hour because a foul ball hit one of the lights, creating a shower of sparks and shorting the entire system. The play of the game was the utility man climbing the pole to fix the light as everybody watched.

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In the spring, I made a habit of riding my bike after school to the ballpark to watch the CSU baseball team practice. Several players were from Cedar City: Steve Cahoon, who ultimately played a couple of years in the minor leagues; Denny Slack; Robert Smith’s older brother Larry; and my friend Sonny Sudbury.

The faculty/student games were attended by the entire student body. The rivalry was a lot more intense than it should have been from either side of the equation. But with the macho sense that would naturally exist in a bunch of junior high teachers and the puberty-bound instincts of fourteen-yearolds, there was plenty of competition.

I began looking for ways to be helpful at practice, like picking up the bats or shagging balls. I began to warm-up pitchers by catching for them. Soon I had carved a place for myself as the batboy—a position which was filled with adventure for me. I wore my baseball uniform to the games and even leveraged my new position into getting out of school early a few times. I had a fantasy that Coach Petty would ask me to travel with the team on an away game. It was just that—a fantasy.

I can’t remember who won the games. Nor can I remember who won the games with Woodward Junior High School in St. George, but I have a clear memory of how important they felt to me in the global scheme of things, as I knew them.

Cedar Junior High Basketball

Cedar Junior High had a ninth-grade basketball team, but the team played only four games. Two were against the faculty and two were against Woodward Junior High School in St. George. Although I had played a fair amount of basketball, I did not think of myself as a good player. Nearly anyone who wanted to play made the team, so I went to practice, but there were others in our class who seemed to concentrate more on basketball than I did. I slowly began to accept that my opportunities for stardom would be football in the fall and baseball in the spring. One day, Wally “Red” Osborne asked a student teacher to take over the team. At the time, I was on the fourth team and pretty serious about quitting. A few days into practice, the student teacher had us sit in the bleachers after warm-ups and organized two teams to scrimmage. He called out the names of the usual first team players, but to my complete surprise he said, “And Leavitt, you play the other guard spot.” I was always a streaky kind of player but in that particular practice, I was in the zone. That day, perceptions changed—the other players suddenly thought of me as a serious player and so did I. I finished that year as a starter and continued to pursue basketball as one of my sports. In a simple way, my life and my self-perception changed that day. It was a small but significant turning point.

From the time I was nine or ten, I had a practice of jumping to touch everything within my reach. I would never walk through the house without trying to touch the door frames, and eventually, I could reach the ceiling beams, and then the ceilings. It was a way of measuring my growth and prowess, I guess. On any account, being able to touch the rim of a ten-foot basketball standard was symbolically important, and it happened at a game against Woodward Junior High.

Skiing

When I was fourteen, skiing gained popularity in southern Utah. Before this, a few families had built a towrope in Cedar Canyon for their use, but the only other resorts were in northern Utah, and consequently skiing was not widely pursued—until Brian Head resort was built. While the resort was under construction, Georg Hartlmaier, an Austrian skier who had been hired to manage the Brian Head ski operation, began to promote the sport in southern Utah. I decided I wanted to learn. I asked for skis for Christmas and was obliged with a pair of wood skis with Marker bindings. I also got a ski sweater that my mother had knitted; it was massive, bulky, and stretched but I wore it. During the Christmas holidays, I went to the towrope for my first lesson from George. I liked it and found I could do it, but late on the first day, I accelerated too quickly on the last hill and fell. Initially, I thought I’d broken my leg, but it was only a sprain. However, the injury was miserable. I couldn’t sleep and couldn’t get comfortable. It was my first experience with an injury like that. In

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addition, I had to explain to my Bantam Basketball coach, Ralph Edwards, why I was going to be out of commission for at least two weeks.

Football at South Elementary

On those glorious fall evenings all the boys in our neighborhood gathered to play football on the lawn at South Elementary. The first order of business was to define the rules of tackling. Usually we’d play two hands on the back or two hands below the waist. Once in a while, we played single touch or flag. One evening we were playing at South and some girls walked down the sidewalk. We took a timeout and walked over to the fence to talk to them. I didn’t have shoes on (I must have worn out a thousand pairs of socks playing shoeless football). It was nearly dark, and I saw what I thought was a paper sack on the ground. To sort of show off, I ceremonially kicked it, like you would a football for an extra point. The darkness had disguised it; it was a large rock. Oh, it hurt! I didn’t want to show my pain because it would have been humiliating to let the girls know I was stupid enough to kick a rock with my bare foot.

A Love of Golf

My interest in golf started early in life. Cedar City didn’t have a golf course, but Beaver did, and later St. George decided to build one. I find it ironic that the vision for a golf course was realized first in Beaver, when St. George had the climate and has today become the golf capital of Utah. St. George has twenty, 18-hole courses. Danny Yergensen’s parents had golf clubs they kept in their garage, so sometimes Danny and I would take the clubs out and swing them. His father had some plastic wiffle balls we would hit around. I’d never seen a golf course at that point in my life. One day, I was in Bunkerville and my uncle Grant Lindsey, who was a tournament-quality player, was talking about golf. He had his clubs with him and he agreed to hit some balls for us. We went to the grass strip in front of Grandpa Leavitt’s house, and he hit a ball, with what must have been a nine iron or sand wedge, into a field

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across the street. I was absolutely transfixed by the flight of the ball and just the entire feel of the swing. A short time later, I suggested to Danny that we take his father’s clubs to the football field at the college and try hitting some real golf balls. He agreed. When we got to the field, on my second or third swing, I connected squarely with the ball, which flew the length of the field, across the street, through the parking lot of Juniper Hall, coming to rest when it hit the dorm’s brick wall. I was hooked. I had never experienced anything like that. About that time, Cedar City decided to open a course, but had money enough for only three holes. Danny and I used his parent’s clubs on those three holes. To say those holes were rough is an understatement. There was no clubhouse, just a maintenance shed with a note that instructed people to leave their money in a box. If you wanted to play nine holes, you would play the three holes three times. I encouraged Mother to buy golf clubs for my dad’s birthday. I’m not sure if it was with the thought that I’d get to use them or if I had purer motives, but we bought him a pair of Sam Snead, Blue Ridge clubs. The set had two woods and three, five, seven, nine irons and a putter. They sat for a while, and then I started using them. Dad never did.

Cultural Depth

Cedar City had remarkable cultural depth for a town of over six thousand people, including orchestras, choirs, plays, and art exhibits. Every school had an instrumental program, supported by a talented music faculty at the college. I took advantage of the instrumental program in junior high and supplemented it with additional study. In the seventh grade, I was first chair clarinet player, but two players challenged my position. I was not well prepared and learned a great lesson when I was demoted two chairs—a humiliating experience I knew I deserved. That moment may have been the catalyst for a change in direction. One day, Mr. Boyce said, “You’re doing OK on the clarinet, but I don’t sense your heart is in it. Would you like to try the French horn?” We had no French horn players at the time,

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and when he played it for me, and then let me try, I loved it instantly. He gave me several lessons, and for the first time in my young music life, I began to practice music because I enjoyed it. The basic background I had on music theory because of those years in piano and clarinet meant I progressed quickly. By the time I was in the ninth grade, I had given up the piano and stuck to the French horn. When I arrived in high school, I was first chair, and as I will detail later, played during my high school and college years at a reasonably high level. I suppose the lesson there is that basic music education is a good thing, and when combined with lots of different experiences, the chance of music becoming a big part of your life is pretty high. By the time I was in eighth grade, my interest in the French horn had begun to develop. Harold Boyce suggested that a summer music camp would be a good experience and recommended Utah State University. Dale Hatch, who played the clarinet and took piano lessons from Loa Johnson, also decided to go. The music camp was a great away-from-home experience and a solid music experience as well. I made new friends and matured musically. Every day we ate rich ice cream from the Utah State Dairy, we lived in dorms and ate at the cafeteria, and at night we attended dances. I met a girl from Tremonton at one of the first dances. We had a little romance during the two weeks I was there. Although my primary purpose in going to the camp was to hone my band skills, my mother and Loa Johnson conspired to have Dale Hatch and me study for two weeks under Irving Wasserman, a famous piano professor at Utah State. I think they hoped it would spark a new fire of passion in me as a piano player. Dr. Wasserman was great; we really enjoyed each other, but he could tell I wasn’t going to become a great piano player. At the end of the two weeks he said, “Mike, my advice to you: learn to sight-read.” I think he had more hope for Dale Hatch.

I attended a similar camp the next summer as a ninth grader, this time at Brigham Young University (BYU). I don’t think I had any romances at this camp, but I did have a great time. Lance Whetten and I were roommates. We met a kid whose last name was Lowe. He had wild boxer shorts that were big and baggy and looked like Bermuda shorts. We loved them. We decided to wear them miniature golfing and we felt rather daring in what we knew were just underwear. I performed in the orchestra and band at the camp, and I sang in a choir conducted by Robert Cundick, the director of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir.2 I also met some students from Brigham Young High School who were serious musicians as well as talented athletes. Among them were the Bergeson twins, who were all-state basketball players and good violin players. It was exposure to a different level of seriousness about music. One summer, I was invited to play as a page in Two Gentlemen from Verona during the Utah Shakespeare Festival. The festival engaged a headline actor who had played the lead several times and was not able to join the company until a couple of days before opening. My job was simple—no lines, walk on and off stage. At one point in the play, I carried a tray of goblets and held them while the lead actor poured drinks. On opening night, after he poured the drinks, the goblets began to leak. “My good man, the goblets are leaking,” he said, looking right at me. I didn’t know what else to do, so I replied in my best fourteen-year-old, southern Utah version of an Elizabethan accent, “So they are.” It was my only speaking part of the season. My costume included white tights. That was rather traumatic, but I got through it. In the early years, the Utah Shakespeare Festival remained mildly controversial in Cedar City. Every year it seemed to import a group of actors whose values differed from those in the community. It took a while for them to be accepted and embraced.

2. The Mormon Tabernacle Choir changed their name in 2018 and are now known as the Tabernacle Choir at Temple Square. I will refer to the choir by that name hereafter.

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1 From left: Mark; Dixie holding infant Eric; Mike (ten years old); and Dane 2 Eric, Mark, and Mike

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3 Cedar City Junior High 4 Cedar Theatre 5 Mike (fourteen years old)

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Cedar Junior High School Faculty

Cedar Junior High School was located on Third West and Center Street in Cedar City. It shared space with the high school the first year I went, but the second year the high school moved to another location. That made a big difference because we not only gained the space but we lost the intimidation factor of having the upperclassmen there all the time. The faculty was a colorful group of people, with Kent Hulet as the principal. I can still picture him wearing a tweed sport coat and horn-rimmed glasses. He had an underbite. Mrs. Vivian Palmer was in my mother’s book club and her maiden name was Leavitt. She was a kind woman made to look a little harsh by the fact that her face was paralyzed on one side. She spoke with a high-pitched voice. She was an old-school teacher; she believed in diagramming sentences and reading the classics. If there is a special place in heaven for junior high teachers, she deserves to be at the front of the line. She had to constantly tell me to stop talking and that I was not meeting my potential. She was right on both counts. Mrs. Frame (you can imagine what we did with that name) was similar to Mrs. Palmer but taught ninth graders most of the time. Mr. Truman was our science teacher. I remember him wearing a red plaid Pendleton jacket. We would spend lots of time watching films in a series called Industry on Parade. The introduction of the movies was always the same: The announcer would say, “Industry on Parade, a Peabody Award–winning production from . . .” It became a ritual for the whole class, or at least the males in the class, to say in unison, “Hey, careful with that pee, buddy.” We’d all laugh, thinking we were clever. Mr. Olds was a math teacher. We called him Flash behind his back. I’m not sure why we called him that, but I know he hated it. He had a paddle, something that he’d never get away with today. He used it liberally. Mr. Norm Adams, who was our neighbor through the block on 600 West, also taught science and math, and he had a paddle too. Maybe it was something to do with the subject.

Mr. LeFever was the shop teacher. During the two years that I took shop, I made a small cedar chest. However, I carried it home in a windstorm and the finish wasn’t completely dry. To this day, sand is in the finish of the chest. From sheet metal, I made a toolbox that kicked around our house, first with tools in it, then fishing tackle. Mary Anne Bentley was an excellent history and English teacher. The kids liked her, as they did the other history teacher, Cliff Craig, who ultimately went on to teach geography at Utah State. Wayne Hinton was from Hurricane, Utah, and was a first-year teacher. He taught English and history, but later got his PhD and taught at Southern Utah University. He was a Democrat and made that very clear. I took a political science class from him the summer semester of my freshman year. Mr. Boyce, the playboy band teacher who drove an MG car, wore a silk ascot, and dated the most attractive single women in town, also became college faculty before I got to college. LaVell Chamberlain was a math teacher. Everybody liked Mr. Chamberlain. He was father to a large family of children and seemed to like the students. He was a high school referee in several sports and loved to talk about the games. It was a tradition on the day of a test to get him talking about high school sports to see if we could delay the test a day. It often worked. Mr. Chamberlain also taught business math. The students in that class ran the school store, which carried school supplies and candy. Once a week, a couple of students were deployed from school during his class to walk several blocks to a distributor to get supplies. It was a great excuse to miss class and was therefore a highly sought-after privilege. The classic of the bunch, however, was Wally “Red” Osborne, the physical education teacher. He ruled with an iron fist. At the beginning of each class, he would whistle through his lips to signal class was starting. Everyone knew that meant you had to line up in an assigned place because he’d then have you count off. If you didn’t say your number, you’d be marked absent.

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Mr. Osborne had lips that appeared to be custom-made for whistling; they were split in an unusual way. He ran the city swimming pool in the summer and at times took care of the ball fields. He wore a Jungle Jim safari hat, which was his trademark.

Junior High Girls

There was a group of older girls at the junior high that I thought were amazingly cool. I remember walking up the stairs behind Bobette Linford. She was wearing a pair of yellow Adler socks and Bass Weejun penny loafers, which I thought was stylish. Another older girl that I had a huge crush on was Diane Bowman, the sister of my friend Spencer.

Low-top Chuck Taylor Converse gym shoes were the thing for boys. I got a pair that wasn’t the Converse brand but I thought they were the greatest.

Learning Spanish

One of my regrets in life is that I have not learned a second language. In seventh grade I took Spanish and found that it didn’t come naturally to me. It was a notable academic failure. One day after class, my Spanish teacher Mrs. Flake informed me that I would be getting an F on my report card. I started to cry. Mrs. Flake took pity on me and raised the grade to a D. I think the second quarter I got a C and felt like I’d won a big victory. Those grades felt like clear indications that I was not good at languages, so I avoided any contact or need to learn any new language skills. The conclusion of the bad Spanish experience was a Spanish Fair held at BYU where I recited a poem in Spanish. I think I got one of the only fair ratings ever given at a Spanish Fair. There was one good thing about the trip. We went with the students from Parowan High School, including a couple of ninth grade girls whom I will protect by not mentioning their names. Parowan girls had a reputation for being quite flirtatious. I found it to be true, and it made my Spanish rating less important.

A Fire at our Home

On a Sunday afternoon in February of my eighthgrade year, my family was home, gathering for

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dinner. Suddenly, the house began to smell intensely of smoke. My father opened the door to the stairway that led to my bedroom, which was once the home’s attic. Smoke billowed upward. I was sitting in the living room when I saw him open the door. He ran out the front door, turned on a hose and pulled it into the house. My mother called the operator and said, “Get me the fire department.” I gathered my brothers to get them out of the house. When the water hit the fire, sparks flew. Turns out a space heater that was plugged into the wall of my room had shorted, sparked, and ignited. We got everybody onto the street only to discover that Eric, who was about three, had gone back to finish the food he was eating at the kitchen table when all of the excitement erupted. We were able to go in and bring him back out before anything happened to him. It seemed like it took a long time for the fire truck to come. Cedar City had a volunteer fire department, so when there was a fire, a siren rang from the football fields of the high school and junior high (I’m sure arranged by Wally Osborne, who was also a firefighter). The fire truck would usually arrive first, driven by the full-time attendant, and the firefighters would arrive one at a time, generally in their pickup trucks or cars, having stopped by the firehouse on First East to get their gear and directions. Firefighters climbed onto the roof of our house, and with axes broke the windows and began chopping their way into the roof. Neighbors by this time had gathered to help or give support. Snow started to fall. Within a relatively short time, the fire was extinguished, but that entire upper section of the house was destroyed either by fire, smoke, or heat. That night my parents and younger brothers stayed in a hotel; for some reason I stayed at Danny Yergensen’s house. There was an immediate problem: I didn’t have any clothes except the church clothes I was wearing at the time of the fire. The next day at school brought a new sense of celebrity and a wonderful excuse why I hadn’t

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completed a science report. I had put it off for days and had every intention to do a forced march on it that very night. It was far superior to “the dog ate my homework” excuse. Still, Mr. Truman seemed unduly skeptical; but I held my ground, never claiming it was finished, just that I needed more time. There were many acts of kindness shown to our family after the fire, one that lived on for years: Orma Wood, the wife of Howard Wood and mother of Morris and Brian Wood, brought us a large box of clothes she had set aside for hand-me-downs. It was a gold mine. Howard Wood owned Wood’s Store for Men on Main Street in Cedar City. The Wood boys were very cool dressers. There were sweaters and shirts, pants and jackets, accumulated from several of her boys. Those clothes were in our house for years, worn by me and my brothers. I think, given the combination of insurance money and Wood generosity, the state of my clothing situation improved markedly.

The fire was just the excuse my dad needed to engage in a serious remodeling of our house. Once the roof was off, an entirely new section of our home was added. Dad built up and back. Overall, the fire improved our lives considerably. One summer after the fire, Dad and I laid a red sandstone patio together in the backyard of the house. We worked on it in the hours after he came home from work. Dad would pick the stone and move it into place, then hold it up on an angle while he filled in the sand and leveled it. We assisted each other in filling in the mortar between the stones. Every time I see that patio I think about what we did together.

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08 High School Years 1966 to 1969 • Driving; Kelly Hansen; First Jobs; Sports; French Horn In the autumn of 1966 when I entered high school, film actor Ronald Reagan was elected governor of California, having campaigned as a Republican against Governor Edmund G. “Pat” Brown to clean up “that mess in Berkeley.” The “mess” was the Free Speech Movement led by university students, who used sit-ins and rallies in support of civil rights, to protest university administrations, and later, to protest the war in Vietnam.

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As schools desegregated to comply with the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the nation was gripped by demonstrations and race riots. Scenes of placard-carrying students urging equality—and others bearing signs that railed against it—filled the evening news and newspapers, along with shots of burning buildings, rioting and looting. The war in Vietnam raged on, with significant numbers of U.S. troops entering the fray in 1965.

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Though the war was fought overseas, its reach affected the residents in every community in America. Several residents of Cedar City served in the war, including Bob Braithwaite’s older brother Doug. The Braithwaites were close friends of the Leavitt’s, which made the United States presence in Vietnam very personal to me. For the first time in history, vivid scenes of war were broadcast every night on the evening news into living rooms around the world, heavily influencing public opinion and leading the U.S. to withdraw its troops.

Dragging Main

In Cedar City, things were much more peaceful. The 1960s dawned with a series of studies on an issue that was characterized as a serious social ill: dragging Main. The practice was enormously popular but considered enough of a problem that surveys were conducted to explore possible causes and solutions. Survey results showed that 95 percent of high school juniors and seniors dragged Main—24 percent with their own cars and 76 percent with a family car. One resident said, “Main Street in Cedar City more often looks like State Street in Salt Lake City.”1 Main Street was also a state highway at the time, so the practice was considered a potential traffic hazard. The only regulation preventing dragging Main was improper turns. Recommendations from traffic engineers were sought. In November 1960, the Iron County Record reported: Many tourists have written to the Chamber of Commerce stating that Cedar City is the noisiest community they have visited. It seems that no matter how many times one teenage driver meets another teenage driver he must sound his horn in greeting. Multiply this by the number of cars dragging Main and add to it the screeching wheels and racing motors and you can readily see what the visitors are talking about.2 But oh, how I loved it: the cruising, the community of drivers, the “racing motors” and “screeching wheels.” Dragging Main became one of my most

favorite pastimes. Long before I was eligible for a driver’s license, I started rehearsing for my debut. My father had given me ample experience and early exposure to driving a car during our trips to Bunkerville, leading to a strong interest in driving. I concluded that one place I could drive on my own was our driveway; I’d get in the car and pull it in and out of the driveway over and over again. We called it dragging driveway. Needless to say, I was excited to get my driver’s license.

Driver’s License

In February 1967 I was eligible to get my driver’s license—one of the most anticipated day of my life up to that point. I had completed the driver training course, which consisted mostly of gory films about car wrecks and drills on driving laws, from my football coach Jack Sawyer. I was able to log several hours of driving time for driver’s education from away games for football. Jack Sawyer got paid by the hour for driving with students, so he’d always let us drive, which saved us from having to ride the bus, where sophomores were abused by the upperclassmen for amusement. The process of getting a license was well known to every sophomore. The driver’s license examiner from the state was in Cedar City every Wednesday at the old city/county building next to the police station. The first step was to take the written test and eye exam, and when you passed, you got a learner’s permit, which allowed you to practice driving with an adult. After two weeks with the learner’s permit, you could take the driver’s exam. Nearly everybody knew the exact route that the examiner took: come out the alley in front of the police station; take a right turn onto Main Street and drive to the light on Lund Highway; drive a couple of blocks; make a U-turn at the Elks Lodge; and then return to the police station. We had practiced that route dozens of times and recorded a complete list of the precautions from previous test-takers,

1. James L. Evans, “What About Dragging Main? College Research Paper Gives Some Details to Problem.” November 17, 1960, Iron County Record, Digitized by J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah. https://newspapers.lib.utah.edu/ark:/87278/s6kw6dhq/4356374 2. James L. Evans, “What About Dragging Main?

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like making sure you come to a complete stop at Main Street behind the sign and then pull forward to see what is coming. Randy Hoyt, who was a couple of days older than I, managed to try for his license a full week before I did. My friends and I were jealous and excited for him. He checked himself out from school, and we waited to see him drive up fully licensed. In the early afternoon, he returned.

“

Life will never be the same again. I have wheels.

”

“Hey Hoyt, let’s see your license. That’s so cool. What does it feel like?” No answer. Finally, he confessed, “I flunked the driver’s test.” That was just unthinkable. For Randy Hoyt, who had been driving for the past couple of years, to fail the test was somewhere between frightening, funny, and tragic. He got it the next week, but it was a moment I’ve never forgotten. I’m sure he hasn’t. Finally, my day came. With my learner’s permit in hand, I drove my mother’s white Pontiac Bonneville station wagon to get my license. That car was about the size of an eighteen-foot boat. I had made a carefully considered decision to use it because it had power steering, and I figured that would help on the U-turn and parallel parking segment. The examiner instructed me to take the route I had anticipated, and I completed the course without a mistake, including the U-turn at the Elks Lodge. We pulled into the parking lot of the city/ county building. He took out his book, filled out a temporary license, handed it to me, and exited the car without a word. I sat there for a moment just staring at the paper. I was, at long last, a licensed driver. I folded it carefully, placed it in my wallet, and drove up First East. I thought to myself, “Life will never be the same again. I have wheels.”

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Once I had a driver’s license, whenever I had access to a vehicle at night I loved to drag Main, starting at one end of Main Street and driving slowly to the other end, honking with a casual wave to other cars driven by people I knew. There were two or three primary turnaround places: on the south end of Main, it was the parking lot of the Cedar Crest Motel. On the north end, it was Premium Oil service station/Arctic Circle/Park Motel parking lot, or the Little Kitchen Restaurant a couple of miles further. It was not unusual to have thirty or forty cars driving up and down Main Street honoring that ritual. Generally, you had to have a drink from the Dairy Freeze or Frost Top in your hand. Three or four years before I got my license, my dad bought a green Ford F-100 longbed pickup and placed sideboards on it that advertised Dixie Leavitt Agency. Over time, I established fairly liberal access to it and began to customize it. I put some carpet on the floor, added new seat covers, replaced the gearshift, and gave it a name: Buckley. Where the name Buckley came from I don’t know, but it was adopted by my friends. If we were discussing transportation somebody would say, “Is Buckley coming?” The truck was part of my personal brand, but it also had a personality of its own. It was treated and spoken of like one of the guys.

Getting in Trouble

One Sunday night, Kelly Hansen, Lance Whetten, and I were dragging Main in Buckley with drinks from Frost Top in our hands. As we drove south on Main Street, we returned to a frequent topic of conversation: how the 7-Up Bottling Company had a habit of leaving its trucks, loaded with bottles of soda, parked in front of the building. For reasons I can’t explain or defend, we decided to get a case. I turned on to a road giving access to the rear of the building, let Kelly and Lance out of the truck, and proceeded to drive up Main Street. I made a U-turn at the Elks Lodge on First East and headed back to pick them up. The Painted Hills Golf Course was next door to the bottling company. Brent Orchard was the golf professional, and his pro shop had been robbed the week before. When he saw me drop off my friends at the bottling company, he thought another robbery was about to take place and called the cops.

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As I approached the bottling company, I saw two police cars behind the building, their lights spinning. Figuring a run for it might not prove a lasting success, I pulled up behind the police. I could see the back of Kelly’s head and Lance’s head through the rear window of the police car.

of adults. The degree to which we felt the seriousness of this is probably indicated by the fact that we announced, “We need to talk with our parents now.” My mother later told me that she had assumed, by the look on our faces, that somebody had been killed.

An officer approached me and I rolled down the window. He instructed me to get out of my car and join Kelly and Lance in the police car.

The next several days were miserable. First, it took about a half-day before everybody in Cedar City knew of the events of Sunday night. As word traveled, so did the exaggerations. Mrs. Hunter, who helped my mother with housekeeping, came to the house on Tuesday and said, “So, I heard Mike and his friends knocked off the 7-Up company.”

Once in the car with my friends, no words were exchanged—just silence. Soon the policeman got in the car. “So,” he said, “What do the three of you have to say about this?” When things go seriously wrong, I sometimes get a distinct feeling of emptiness and anxiety in my stomach, and this was one of those times. All I could say was, “It looks like we’re in pretty serious trouble here.” The policeman said nothing to dissuade me. The others sat quietly, apparently having said their piece before I came back. This formed quite a picture: my father was the state senator from our area, Kelly’s dad was on the city council, and Lance’s father was the mayor; we were driving a pickup truck with the name Dixie Leavitt Agency plastered on the side; and my father and I were the home teachers for one of the owners.3 After several minutes, the policeman returned from the other car where he had been consulting by radio with somebody. He said, “Boys, you’ve got yourself in a pile of trouble here. We’re not sure what the outcome is going to be because we can’t get a hold of the owners. Here’s what we’re going to do. First, you boys are going straight home to tell your parents what you’ve done. Second, when Mr. Randall returns this week from his trip, he’ll decide if he wants to press charges.” We got into the truck. Kelly and I dropped off Lance at his house. Kelly and I knew exactly where our parents were. They were having study group at Kelly’s house. We entered the front door and faced a living room full

Soon, the story was we had broken into the building and stolen money. The rumors became more and more rampant. Early in the week, Randy Hoyt, whose father was the chief of police, told us two of the three Randall brothers disagreed on how to handle the situation. It turns out somebody had stolen all the soda off the truck a week or so earlier and one of the brothers figured we were coming back for a second dip. The third brother (the one I home taught with Dad) was out of town and would be back on Thursday. He would be the tie breaker.

“

Boys, you’ve got yourself in a pile of trouble here.

”

Needless to say, the three of us were sweating bullets. We concluded as soon as Mr. Randall hit town, we would go to his house and ask him for forgiveness. The meeting went well but he gave no indication of his intention. The following week, we were invited to see Chief Hoyt at his office. It was an old-fashioned butt chewing, and it was heard by all of us loud and clear. He talked about our reputations and the damage this kind of thing does to our futures, our families and their reputations. We left, shaken.

3. In the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, every member who regularly attends is assigned a person or family to minister to, which usually includes visits to the person or family and serving them in whatever way they may need. Usually two men are assigned to work together to minister to specific families, while two women are assigned to work together to minister to other women. Before 2018, this ministering was referred to as “home teaching” when referring to men visiting a family, and “visit teaching” when referring to women visiting an assigned sister. In the Church today, it is simply referred to as ministering.

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In the end, the Randalls decided not to press charges, but we were told they would if we got into any trouble in the future. I’m sure any punishment would not have been worse than that week of uncertainty and having to endure the rumors and stories generated by our foolishness. I’ve hated trouble ever since.

Buckley and Rabbit Hunting

Buckley was my companion during thick and thin. Thick was 7-Up capers; thin was rabbit hunting, one of our favorite things to do with a car. We drove to Cedar Valley on the sagebrush flats, usually at night. Sometimes we’d use shotguns, but usually .22 caliber rifles were our weapons of choice. To people who aren’t familiar with this culture, the practice seems cruel and barbaric. I lost interest after my mission, but at the time, it was not just enjoyable—it was viewed as a practical way to keep rabbits from overrunning the land and inflicting economic damage. When we hunted at night, a couple of shooters sat in the back of a pickup, with a driver in the cab, and a spotlighter. We’d drive along roads or out on flat areas and as rabbits ran by, the spotlighter would try to hold a light on the rabbit while the shooters did their best to accomplish the mission. Often the rabbits would run erratically through the brush and the driver would follow. Part of the challenge was to shoot and ride at the same time. My friend Alan Averett had an old open-air Jeep that we used for hunting expeditions. One day we were outside Cedar Glass, his father’s business, trying to get the Jeep started. I suggested we prime the carburetor. I dripped some gas into the carburetor, and Alan turned the key. There was an explosion and a massive fireball blew toward me. Gas sprayed all over me, and I caught fire. I was wearing a Levi jacket and tried to get it off, but it was new and the buttons were rigid. I began to pat myself with my hands and realized within a couple of seconds that wasn’t going to work. Fortunately, I kept my head and dropped to the ground. I did exactly what I had been trained to do as a child: stop, drop, and roll. The fire was extinguished and the only damage was singed hair and eyebrows. It was one of the truly close calls of my life.

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My friend Gary Ott had an old car he bought for fifty dollars or so. He got it running, and we used that as a rabbit-hunting car. He named it Irving. Ultimately, Gary cut off the top and made quite an outfit out of it. I think Irving died running the trees at Leigh Hill. Running the trees at Leigh Hill was an activity Buckley used to do regularly. We drove on a narrow, winding road through the juniper trees near the water tank; it was like driving an obstacle course. We also used to try climbing the tank hill in Buckley. I don’t think we ever made it up but did navigate it down. I remember one occasion when we were rabbit hunting, I had a quart of oil in the bed of the truck. One of the shooters stepped on the can by accident and turned the bed into a skating rink. Another time, Dave Fotheringham jumped out of the truck and chased a rabbit into the darkness, only to disappear into a dry wash as he ran blindly into the dark. One night, when Pat Major was reloading in the bed of the truck, I started after a rabbit. Major wasn’t ready for the quick start and fell out of the truck. We didn’t realize he was gone until Kelly Hansen exhausted his ammunition and yelled, “Get ’em, Major,” and didn’t get a reply.

Jack Rabbit Pranks

Once in a while we used the dead rabbits in creative ways. We had a basketball game the night following a major dance and the coach didn’t want us out past eleven. So, rather than attend the dance, we decided to go hunting. We collected a significant number of deceased rabbits, several dozen I’m guessing, and then with baling twine tied them to the axles of all our friend’s cars at the dance. We were quite amused by the thought of the girls in their formals and guys in their tuxes dragging dead rabbits around with them. The evidence of our caper was easily seen on the streets of Cedar City the next morning. I was also the victim at times of that kind of prank. One notable prank occurred at a Record Rally, a stake-sponsored Saturday night dance. At times KSUB radio would broadcast live from the dance. The station’s DJ was playing the music there

HIGH SCHOOL YEARS

anyway, and it helped attract people to the dance. Most of the time the dances were held at a church, but in the summer, the patio at South Elementary School, just across from our home, was the venue. I have good memories of those events: the warm evening air, music, good company. One night while we were at a dance, somebody tied a water hose about two-hundred-feet long to the axle of Kelly Hansen’s VW. After the dance we were driving down Main Street. Hansen looked in the rearview mirror and said, “What the hell is that?” It looked like a giant sidewinder snake moving from one side of the street to the other, bouncing off cars and curbs. I have no idea how much damage may have been done behind us. We disconnected the hose and left it, which may not have been the most responsible thing to do in that situation, but it seemed like the most expedient one. It was an elegant prank; I still have no idea who did it. Kelly’s VW was the vehicle of choice for many of our adventures. Kelly was so tall that if we took out the front seat, he could steer from the backseat. I would sit on the floor and run the gas so it looked like nobody was driving. It was worth some second glances on Main Street.

Trips with Kelly Hansen

The summer I was sixteen and Kelly fifteen, our families decided to cultivate a garden together. We negotiated with our parents that if we got the garden ready for planting, they would let us take a trip to Salt Lake City in Kelly’s VW. Our part of the deal completed, Kelly and I left Cedar City early one morning for what in those days would have been a five-hour trip to Salt Lake City. There was no freeway, so we drove on Highway 91: a two-lane road that wound through every small town along the way. I knew the route to Salt Lake City well because I’d driven it—literally—so many times with my dad. (I guess I should confess that Dad received a ticket once for letting me drive. He was asleep in the passenger side, and I was driving his old Thunderbird to Salt Lake City for legislative meetings. I saw the patrolman pass and turn around; I knew

it was trouble. Dad took the fall and I didn’t get a ticket, which would have delayed my driver’s license for a year. The judge in Fillmore knew Dad was a state legislator and was rather indignant and unpleasant about the matter. I don’t know what the fine amounted to, but the judge didn’t give him any breaks.) Kelly and I stayed at my aunt Jane’s house on 2500 East, just below Foothill Drive. Salt Lake was truly the big city to us. I’d never driven in Salt Lake City before and so navigating that was new. We had two funny incidents happen while we were driving: The first was when I made a left turn off Main Street and a Salt Lake County ambulance driver pulled me over. I told him I was from Cedar City and we had only one light there. It was sufficient to get me off with a verbal warning. The second occurred at Seventh East and about 2500 South. We were at a stoplight, sitting on railroad tracks. Suddenly we heard a train blow its horn, and it sounded close. Panic filled the car. We nearly abandoned ship but the light turned green and we pulled off the tracks. Whenever I pass that spot, I think of that memory. We stayed two or three days, with about twenty dollars each. Our major objectives were all met: We played eighteen holes at Bonneville Golf Course (the first eighteen-hole golf course we had ever played). We went to Lagoon. Most of our time was spent in the arcade game section, I think. We also went to a movie at the Center Theater, though I cannot recall what it was. The trip was a turning point in our independence and a bold thing for our parents to let us do. It created confidence and made us both feel like we could navigate the wider world. That wasn’t the only trip Kelly and I took together. On several occasions we were allowed to go to Las Vegas—which, retrospectively, was an even more surprising leap of faith on our parents’ part. Again, we always liked taking Kelly’s VW because it got such great gas mileage. We would leave on a Friday afternoon, stop in Bunkerville, and arrive in Vegas when it was dark. I would arrange with my uncle Bert for us to sleep in

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sleeping bags on the floor of the Leavitt Agency in Las Vegas. We would stay out until two or three in the morning, wandering from place to place. Our parents knew we wouldn’t drink or get into any serious trouble, though I’m not sure they knew that we would gamble to the extent our resources and legal limitations allowed. Generally, Kelly and I could get a few hands of 21 in at a table or play the slot machines for a while before getting kicked out by the security officers. The first time we slept at the agency, we woke on a Saturday morning to the doorbell ringing, and ringing . . . and ringing. I jumped up and opened the door, but nobody was there. This happened several times, and we were convinced somebody was pranking us. I assumed it was one of my cousins. We organized an effort to catch the perpetrator, but we were never successful. It turned out that on Saturday mornings the phone was hooked to the doorbell so those working in the back could hear it. My adventures with Kelly were not limited to dry land. One day, when Kelly and I were in the middle of Navajo Lake in the motorboat my dad had won in a raffle at the county fair, the motor quit. We were not well-equipped and did not have a paddle. A significant storm was coming in and we had to get off the lake, so we jumped into the water. Swimming with one arm and dragging the boat with the other, we were able to reach the shore before the storm hit. Some years when there has been a lot of snow, the runoff from the melted snow raised the level of Navajo Lake is so high it covered a man-made dike that was built to deepen the water level. This was one of those years, so instead of beach at the far east end of the lake, lava beds formed the shoreline. Kelly Hansen and I were going full-on toward the lava beds, and I tried to pull the throttle back to slow the boat. As I did, the cable on the throttle broke, leaving it at full speed, headed for the lava bed shore. We were going too fast to turn in the short distance between the shore and our position. We panicked, with only seconds to act. Our choices were to attempt a turn and risk swamping the boat or don’t turn and abandon ship. We opted to jump off, despite the boat running at top speed. Just as we were scrambling for the sides, I realized another

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option existed: I reached over and turned off the key. The engine died and we slowed enough that we were able to avoid the lava beds. Occasionally, Kelly would come to Loa with me to help Grandpa Okerlund. On one occasion, we were trying to round up all the cattle that were grazing on the field stubble to get them in the Parker corral. Slowly, we had worked them from the fields into a bunch. It had taken a couple of hours and we were ready to move them into the corral. You want to do that all at once because if you get the lead cows in, the others will follow. Just as we were getting the first cows in, for some reason Kelly jumped in front of a cow headed for the gate and it spooked the entire herd. The cows immediately stampeded back to the fields. We had to start the whole process again. It may have been the only time I remember Grandpa showing any anger. He was just plain angry but he didn’t want to hurt Kelly’s feelings. He turned to me and said, “My good hell Michael, when you’ve got ’em headed for the gate, you don’t step in front of them.” I’ve tried to apply that lesson in politics.

High School: Sophomore Year

Cedar City today has two high schools, but when I graduated in 1969, there was only one, and it was located two blocks directly south of my family’s home. It was, at that time, a medium-sized, class-B school in a two-tiered system. The high school housed grades ten, eleven, and twelve with roughly two hundred students in each class. The school building opened in 1964, I think, so when I entered in 1966, it was still being referred to as the “new” high school. Retrospectively I would say that the curriculum was not academically rigorous. One could skate through pretty easily, and I did. The virtue was that in a small high school you could participate in a wide array of things that provided experience and confidence. The faculty at Cedar High School included some colorful people. Pratt Bethers had been principal for many years and taught geometry. His nickname among the students was Bebop Bethers. He always wore a black suit and white shirt, with a black string tie.

From top : Mike, Dane, Mark, Eric, and David. All the boys on the stairwell on Christmas morning waiting to see if Santa had come—a Leavitt family tradition that has been passed from generation to generation.

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I took sophomore biology from Mr. Sorenson. The highlights that year were supposed to be dissecting a frog and sex education. The frog was great, but sex education was a huge disappointment. The approach to the discussion was purely—and regrettably—academic, unlike what any of us had hoped for. Delbert Dabb was the business education teacher. Scott Nelson and I decided to drop chemistry midterm and needed a fill-in course, so Mr. Dabb agreed to provide a self-guided course that required a certain number of assignments each week, and we completed these assignments in study rooms designed for small groups of students. Scott and I would sit in one of these small rooms, finish a week’s work in about two days, and then I would lift Scott through a skylight and he opened a door that allowed us to leave. We would take off for an hour and return just in time for Mr. Dabb to see us leave the study room. We both earned A’s for the course. Many times during my stint as administrator of the EPA, I wished I’d paid more attention in chemistry and not left halfway through. That is an example of what I mean when I say my high school experience lacked rigor. I was the victim of two new doctrines of education. The first was the sight-and-memory reading system where students were taught to read by recognizing words, not by learning the sounds of the alphabet. The second was a scheduling system called the module system, where the day was broken into twenty-minute blocks, and classes of different lengths could be constructed. It provided a lot of flexibility for students by providing study periods, which was good for the motivated but was a license for fun and adventure for those who had yet to catch the academic vision. I was in the fun and adventure category, so I got the basics but missed a lot of things. I’ve had to learn them in an alternative fashion over the years. My sophomore year I also signed up for debate and entered the mock legislative forum event. I adapted to it quickly. I don’t remember much about the specific meets, only that participating came naturally, and I didn’t feel reluctant to make arguments in a public setting. I enjoyed the debate. Each year there was a subject that was debated routinely.

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It required that we study the topic, prepare bills, and get support for them. It may have had a significant influence on my interest in government and public policy. While I had chosen to pursue student government in junior high, I opted not pursue it to my first two years in high school; I was too busy pursuing other interests. Senior year, however, I had a series of close election defeats. I filed for student body president and missed the finals by just a few votes; senior class president and Key Club president with the same result. If I remember right, the aggregate of the three election defeats was twenty-two votes. I was actually relieved on the senior class president election. It would have committed me to organize reunions for eternity. Thankfully, that responsibility fell to Tom Beck.

“

My good hell Michael, when you’ve got ’em headed for the gate, you don’t step in front of them.

”

The most sophisticated club at Cedar High School was the Key Club, sponsored by the Kiwanis Club. To gain membership you just had to apply, and upon admission you had to attend a meeting after school once a week and then there were service projects you could join. A couple of times a month, as a member, I was required to wear my Key Club blazer: a sharp, navy blue blazer with gold buttons and a patch on the pocket. Membership in the club—and the jacket—were serious status symbols. However, the big advantage of the Key Club was the parties, widely reputed for the party games. Pass the orange, for example, was a favorite. To play, you would put an orange under your chin and pass it down a line of participants—requiring nuzzling to make the exchange. Close dancing, however, was the most anticipated activity. If you took a well-regarded date to the Key Club party, it really added to your status.

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Each fall the student body sponsored the annual Sadie Hawkins dance—a tradition that had gone on for years modeled after the comic strip Li’l Abner. At the heart of it was a girl’s choice dance, but it was much more complicated than that. Each girl was assigned a boy that she had to “catch” by simply touching him and saying, “You’re caught.” The chase was for two or three days, and then a free-for-all period commenced where a girl could catch any boy. Boys would go to elaborate lengths to avoid capture, while girls went to elaborate lengths to catch the boys. Some would go in the middle of the night or conspire with mothers to catch their sons. One year my friends and I retreated to our Navajo Lake cabin to hide. Another time, we just drove from place to place in a car, but ultimately, I was caught each year, and as I remember, by girls I didn’t mind. The first high school dance that I took a girl to was the sophomore Sock Spree. I asked Diane McDonald, a tall blond girl who was the stepdaughter of Dr. Broadbent, our family physician. At the Sock Spree, the girl had to make a pair of socks for the couple that had some relationship to the theme of the dance. Another activity my friends and I did often was play pool in my basement on a tournament-sized pool table my dad bought from an insurance claims adjuster for our basement. It was a compelling reason for my friends to spend time at our house. The pool table got a lot of use between church meetings on Sunday. For example, priesthood meeting was at 8:30 a.m., Sunday school at 11:30 a.m., and sacrament meeting was held at 4 p.m. (When the Church moved to the consolidated meeting schedule, it was a wonderful move.) Between priesthood and Sunday school, the gang would hang out at our house or go to the Sugar Loaf Café for a hot chocolate and a heated roll (a form of rebellion that lasted a year or so). Pat “Skinny” Major and Kelly Hansen were among those who always came.

Heywood family started their business, they competed by offering service at the car after you called in the order. They also had a bunch of trampolines people could rent. The most revolutionary of the competitive moves was the Top Spot drive-in, which added self-service gasoline to the menu, alongside burgers and fries. It was the first time anybody in town had offered self-serve gasoline. The price was in the range of twenty-five cents a gallon—ten cents less than the full-service competitors. You simply worked the pump yourself, washed your own windows, and paid at the Top Spot window. It was a smashing blow to the service stations in Cedar City and a fascinating lesson in free-market economics. The market changed instantly: every gas station began to offer a self-service pump in order to compete. It seemed like such an odd mix of products—gasoline and cheeseburgers—but Top Spot quickly became the innovator in the market and a price leader. My friends and I knew all the girls who worked at the drive-in restaurants. We were treated as special customers, getting extra meat on our sandwiches or larger drinks than we asked for. Occasionally, we would make a call-in order, then wait an hour to pick it up. We’d say, “Has anybody abandoned their call-in order? We’d be glad to take it.” Our friends would either give us the order or discount the price because we were taking it off their hands.

Working at the Golf Course

The summer of my junior year, I decided to work in Cedar City rather than Loa. Motivated by my growing enthusiasm for golf, I applied for a job with the grounds crew at the golf course. Brent Orchard, who had called the cops the night of the bottling

A Lesson in Market Economics

My observation, from a young age, of the drive-in restaurant business in Cedar City was an education in market economics. When members of the

Top Stop Drive Inn

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company incident, was the golf professional of what was by then called Cedar Ridge Golf Course. It had been expanded to nine holes, but the clubhouse was still a twelve-by-twenty-foot metal building, originally used for equipment storage. Brent’s wife Susan was my key to getting that job. Following the 7-Up caper, I obviously had some ground to make up with Brent. Susan was a close friend of Jack and Jackie Sawyer, and therefore followed closely the high school football team, which I think that helped my case. Every member of the grounds staff started on the night-watering crew. It was a bad job. Watering started at 8 p.m. and continued until 6 a.m. The water system was driven by a couple of small reservoirs and pumps, with pipes running down the left center and right center of each fairway and Rain Bird sprinkler holes every sixteen feet. Because the golf course is in a series of canyons on the northeast corner of Cedar City, at night it is extremely dark and therefore difficult to find the sprinklers. To make things even more difficult, grass would grow around the sprinkler holes in a way that made them difficult to find. We tried painting the sprinkler holes with florescent paint in order to see them in the dark, but it didn’t work. Once you found one, you would walk with a flashlight and count sixteen large steps, pushing a wheelbarrow full of sprinklers. Once the steps had been paced off, you set down the wheelbarrow, used a flashlight to find the opening, activated the sprinkler, and moved to the next one. The nine holes were divided between two of us. Once we had completed that line, we went back and picked up a line that had been running forty-five minutes to an hour and began the process of moving it to another area where it was needed. This would go on all night long. Occasionally there were times when the sprinklers were set and we could meet and talk, but for the most part you were out there working in the dark, alone, all night long. There were a handful of things that were particularly frightening. One was turning off the pump. I had to walk down a path lined with willows into a shed with no lights to flip the pump switch. It took every ounce of courage I could muster to keep from turning back; it was the scariest place on the

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planet. Another task I didn’t enjoy was taking a set of sprinklers to a large tool shed with huge double doors that squeaked and creaked when opened. Occasionally, strange things would happen, like the night I was walking down the fairway and a couple of city police officers pulled up on a hill and started spotlighting rabbits, shooting at them with their .357 Magnums. I yelled at them so they would know I was there. They just got into their car and drove off. Another night, Russell Heap, who was the other night-watering guy, picked me up during one of the times we were waiting for our water to run and we started spotlighting rabbits. He had a .22 pistol, and with a rabbit in his sights, shot his spotlight out. It scared us, big time. Then we started to laugh. I had installed a four-track tape player in Buckley and would play music while I worked. The music on a four-track tape rolled continuously, and given that I didn’t have many tapes, there are a couple of albums, like The Mamas & the Papas, that always take me back to changing sprinklers Occasionally, I would take Dane with me. He was good company and good help. At some point, I began to work days. The golf course was new, and it struggled. It had an inadequate water system, poor soil conditions, and no money. For example, they had only one old truck that was surplus from the city or somewhere. In order to mow the tees and green aprons, I had to drag an old reel mower around the course. It was just awful. I spent a lot of time cutting weeds and completing other hard jobs, but I used the course for free and the job paid $1.10 an hour, so what was there to complain about? There was additional compensation: good practical joke opportunities. One day I was cutting weeds on a side hill of hole number seven when a blow snake slithered out of the weeds. I’m not one that subscribes to the some-snakes-are-good theory—no snakes are good in my book. Anyway, I took care of the snake. Then I saw opportunity: it was Thursday morning, ladies day. I walked up to the green on number seven, which was concealed

HIGH SCHOOL YEARS

1 David and Mike in the library reading Childcraft stories 2 Kelly Hansen playing pool at the Leavitt home. 3 Kelly Hansen and Mark playing pool in the basement between church meetings.

4 Mike (sixteen years old) in Loa in front of Grandma Okerlund’s house 5 Cindy Bess and Mike at the junior prom. Senior year, 1969

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from the tee box by the hill. I coiled the snake in the hole, replaced the pin, and returned to my post, just as a foursome of ladies-day regulars made their way up the fairway. The reaction was what I expected; unfortunately, so was Brent Orchard’s. When I graduated from the night-watering crew to the daytime grounds crew, Pat Major took my place. I trained him, so I knew exactly when he would arrive at the big equipment shed with the giant squeaky door and no lights to deposit a group of Rain Birds. One night, at about 2:00 a.m., Kelly Hansen and I arrived ten minutes ahead of Major and hid ourselves in the back of the shed. Right on schedule, Major opened the door, and with his flashlight cased the joint. He picked up four Rain Birds in each hand, which was a big load for a guy who had earned the nickname “Skinny.” Hansen and I simply stood up from behind the cabinet that concealed us. “Hi Major,” I said in a normal voice. He screamed and eight Rain Birds flew into the air. It was years before he saw the humor of that moment.

Building Fence on the Utah-Nevada Border

Mid-July of that summer, my dad told me that Langford Brothers Construction, a fence-building contractor client of his, had a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) job on the Utah-Nevada border. The job required that they pay federal wages, which were $3.68 an hour. They needed two workers; would Kelly and I be interested? We were, so a couple of weeks later we drove on a Sunday afternoon to Enterprise, Utah, where we met the Langford Brothers. We met in Enterprise because it was the closest community to the rugged area where this fence was to be built. We drove about an hour into the mountains to the Langford campsite. We set up a small tent, which would be our quarters for the next six weeks. The Langfords had their families with them, which included several young children. What we didn’t know is that while $3.68 an hour seemed like a lot of money, it was cheaper than mules and that essentially was our job. Each

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morning we drove as close as possible to the fence site. We carried packets of green metal fence posts to the site, scattered the posts about a rod apart, and then, using a fifty-pound post-pounder, hammered them into the rocky ground. If a post was not deep enough after fifty whacks, we used dynamite to get the post in. Every quarter mile we stopped and built a stretch point. It was the hardest physical work I have ever done. We left before the sun rose and quit when we couldn’t see because of the darkness at night. Some days, we worked sixteen hours. (No overtime pay, which I now know to be illegal.) The lack of overtime was not the only place the Langford brothers ran afoul of the law. The second week, when we arrived Sunday night at camp, both Paul and Harvey had the same children with them but different women. We had suspected they were polygamists because they were from Colorado City, but to be confronted with it that directly was startling. The Langfords became our friends and colleagues, and we talked directly and frankly about their practices and beliefs. Polygamy is clearly against the law—and should be. (I write later in this history about an experience I had as governor when I got myself in hot water on the subject speculating as to why prosecutors and law enforcement people do not enforce the laws.) However, living and working with a polygamist family humanized this complex and controversial issue for me. Not only was the work hard that summer but the living conditions were rugged. Each day the Langfords sent lunch with us, but it was generally some kind of sandwich that felt entirely inadequate. Some days we ate white bean sandwiches, though one day we had honey sandwiches, which by noon were essentially two pieces of bread stuck together. Each week when we went home, Kelly and I ate heartily and returned with ten dozen cookies, which we would devour within a couple of days. After tiring of having no meat, Kelly and I discovered that in the stream next to our camp we could catch small fish with our hands if we cornered them in a pool. We even decided we would shoot

HIGH SCHOOL YEARS

1 Mike, sophomore year 2 Mike, junior year 3 Mike, senior year

4 High school orchestra 5 Sophomore football, Mike, #13 6 High school debate team

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a deer with our .22 rifles, but ultimately lost the courage; it was out of season. One day, a powerful storm moved in on us as we worked. It produced the most severe lightning that I have ever witnessed. It was simply overpowering, striking all around us. We were in significant danger and knew it. We didn’t dare move around the mountain or sit under a tree, so Kelly and I just lay on the ground trying to form the lowest profile possible. Devastating explosions of thunder occurred simultaneously with ravaging lightning. It was a frightening episode; we literally prayed to be spared. Because we arrived at the tent each night after dark and left prior to sun-up, our ability to improve our campsite was somewhat limited. About the third or fourth week, Kelly and I found a box spring and mattress and hauled it to camp. Kelly got the mattress; I slept on the box spring. Sometimes at night, I could hear something in the box spring that made a crunching sound. Several days later, when the Langfords concluded it was time to move camp, we pulled up the box spring and a large rat (I’m talking as big as a small cat) ran out from under it. We were dancing around, screaming. Kelly unloaded his .22 pistol at it but missed. Somewhere along the way, we also found a giant frog and named it Cliff, a rather unkind reference to a man we knew at a Cedar City gas station. When we finished the job and headed home, we put Cliff in the back of the truck, but he never made it to Cedar City. We don’t know if he jumped out as we drove or climbed into the backpack of a hitchhiker we picked up.

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morning, I decided to walk in a circle around some trees in an effort to break the boredom and get warm. As I approached the lava rocks where I had been sitting, out of the corner of my eye I saw something move. It was a cat-like animal moving across the lava beds. I raised my gun and shot; my aim was good. As I walked toward the animal, I thought to myself, “Why did you do that?” It was a bobcat, and as I stood over its body, I felt a sense of remorse that I had killed for sport, not for food. It was a powerful lesson about the value of life, and it has remained with me.

Cindy Bess

During my senior year, I began to notice a sophomore girl named Cindy Bess. She was pretty, with long, blond hair. Part of her appeal to me was that she was Stephanie Bess’s sister. Stephanie Bess was a senior the year I was a sophomore, and one of the most attractive women I’d ever seen up to that point. Stephanie worked at the Sugar Loaf Café as a waitress, so one day, sitting at the coffee counter, I asked Stephanie about Cindy, like could she date? That sort of thing. When school started, I danced with Cindy at a Record Rally and began paying more attention to her. I honestly don’t recall many of the details of our early relationship, except to recount that over time we started to date and become a couple. We dated steadily, though not exclusively, for a while, and then toward the spring of my senior year, things narrowed to the point that we were exclusive.

We made good money and had great experiences. Our last paychecks bounced at first, but they ultimately cleared—the perfect and symbolic end to our summer.

I remember the relationship with enough fondness to acknowledge that I had genuine feelings for her, and that our friendship was deep and had roots. Her mother really liked me; I liked her. Cindy had younger siblings that I felt close to, and we spent a lot of time together.

With our earnings, Kelly and I bought new deer rifles at Hunter Hardware—.284 Winchesters. I had hunted with my Grandfather Okerlund for years on the Parker Mountain range, and the fall of 1967 was the first time I was able to carry a rifle with a caliber large enough to kill a deer. On the first morning of the hunt, I implemented a long-planned strategy by placing myself among some lava rocks on the ridge just east of the Parker Rim. Late in the

Cindy and I developed some rituals between us, like one where I would pick her up after work at the Dairy Freeze. Another one was whenever I took her home, we would empty our pocket change into an old juice can that we used as a bank and hid it within a large, wall-hanging clock in her front room. We agreed that when it was full, we’d go to Las Vegas—which we did—to see a performance of singer Tom Jones.

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I dated Cindy until I went on my mission, and then we wrote to each other during most of it. Toward the end of my mission, she started to rekindle the pace of her letters. I sensed that our relationship was close enough that if I started dating her when I returned, dating others would become difficult and we’d likely marry—something that didn’t feel like the right thing.

My senior year, I moved to shortstop and also started to switch hit. I could hit a curve ball breaking toward me easier than one breaking away.

I have always regretted that I didn’t handle the situation better; I just didn’t call her for a few weeks after I got home. Then I bumped into her mother at Safeway. She was a mild-mannered woman, but when she saw me (for the first time in two years), she pointed her finger at me and said, “You go see my daughter right this minute.” I was properly chastened and did just that. Seeing Cindy again was an uncomfortable experience, and one I should have handled differently. I know I hurt her feelings deeply, and I regret that.

An All-State game was held each year with one team representing the southern part of the state playing against another team representing the northern part of the state. That year, the game was scheduled to be in Vernal one day after our high school graduation. Due to the distance between Cedar City and Vernal, in order to play, we had to miss our graduation—which I was more than happy to do.

Cindy didn’t marry for several years. She was working in Salt Lake City when she learned she had a brain tumor, which was removed during an operation. During her recovery, a boyhood friend of mine, Randy Hoyt, began visiting her. I have heard secondhand of Randy’s compassionate friendship with Cindy, and how it evolved into romance. It caused me to feel gratitude and happiness for both of them. They ultimately married and had a child. After a few years, however, the cancer returned, and Cindy died. When I heard of her death, I had feelings of loss I did not expect. They were feelings of fondness and warmth—gratitude in a way. Our friendship was clearly the first time I had felt deep-bonded affection, and there is a feeling of tenderness that has remained.

High School Baseball

High school sports dominated my life for several years. Wayne Esplin and I were the only two in our class to earn varsity letters in three major sports. The sport I excelled most at was baseball, though I think I may have enjoyed playing basketball more. I made the varsity baseball team my sophomore year and played second-string, third base behind Blaine “Fella” Johnson.

We had a good team but lost the region championship to Dixie. However, I was chosen to be on the All-State team, as were Steve Rollo and Wayne Esplin.

We practiced together for a couple of days. The coach of the southern team was Don Lay of Dixie. He chose to start one of his players at my position, something that seemed like an understandable bias. I still played a good game though. I played from the third inning and got two hits in three times at bat, drove in a run, and made a couple of good defensive plays. I remember feeling very good about the game, which we won. My dad spoke at the high school graduation, so in order to make it to the game, my parents chartered a small plane to Vernal. I realize now what a heroic effort they made to be supportive of me. Wayne Esplin was a professional baseball prospect. One day a pro scout came to watch Wayne. My teammates and I were aware of the scout’s presence, so we set out to be discovered as well. During infield practice, the first three balls hit to me at shortstop literally went through my legs. It was almost like it was meant to be. I remember thinking that my pro career had just gone down the drain, but since I wanted to go on a mission, I didn’t need the complication anyways. Between my junior and senior years, I played on a Colt League team (in Colt League, we played seven-inning games rather than nine). I pitched for some of the games. In one game, I went with two outs in the last inning with a perfect game. Then

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Mike Gale got a blooper single to ruin it. It was still a fun game, and there were members of the high school team on the other side. I remember having great control, my curveball was working, and I kept throwing a knuckleball that I had goofed around with. I was in the zone, and it really impressed my teammates. During the summer we played in a tournament in St. George. I remember telling my parents I wanted to play because the victors received a trophy. We didn’t win the tournament, but after the last game my parents gave me a trophy, which was kind of them, but sort of embarrassed me. I realized it wasn’t the trophy I wanted; I wanted the respect of my peers. That same summer, my arm broke when it was hit by a pitch from Dale Hatch. The ball hit the front side of my left arm. It didn’t seem like the ball was moving very fast, but it was moving fast enough to break the bone. When I got to first base, I looked down and a great big lump had already formed. I knew it was broken. I drove to the clinic and was upset that they made me fill out forms and wait a long time. The broken arm may have hindered me in baseball, but it didn’t stop my golf game. That summer I played some of the best golf I had played up to that point. The last couple of weeks I was able to break the cast at the wrist and it didn’t slow me down at all.

High School Football

Cedar City had not had a winning football tradition for many years. About the time I got to high school, Jack Sawyer became the football coach. He had played at BYU and took over as a rookie coach the year I was a sophomore. Frankly, the sophomore program was pretty rag-tag. The coach was Kent Bishop, who had more experience as a drill sergeant than a football coach and approached the job that way. We played very few games. In fact, the only games I remember were with the juniors. I played quarterback, a carryover from my only other formal football experience, which was the Little League football team where we played one game. But it was a good way to begin learning better fundamentals.

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I expected my junior year to be different. I was still playing quarterback, now varsity and second-string behind Dale Hatch. One of many important lessons I learned from competitive sports occurred at the beginning of that year. Our first game was in Las Vegas. We had a good team and felt there was a chance we could win the region and get into the playoffs for the first time in many years. The Las Vegas game would be our big test. We won the game, but I didn’t get to play a single play, and it seemed like I was the only one. It deflated and discouraged me. There were circumstances at play that I can’t remember, but the combination of things left me thinking I should’ve been like Wayne Esplin and others who passed on football to concentrate on basketball. Over that weekend, I had an honest self-assessment and concluded that I hadn’t been working very hard, and that before I quit I should probably give more of myself. I resolved that the next week I would exaggerate everything to demonstrate my enthusiasm and desire. If they didn’t use me, then I’d quit. Within a couple of practices, the coaches started to use me. My attitude and feelings about the team, the coaches, and the season had turned around. There were other testing moments that season, many of them social dynamics more than athletic ones. There was a group of seniors that took some pleasure in pushing my buttons. They resented me in ways that I didn’t understand, and they were always looking for ways to belittle me. One night at grass drills, which is a one-on-one battle to control a line, I faced the leader of this group, one of the best athletes on the team. He played three sports; he had strength and speed; and he was smart. I knew this guy would try to drill me into the ground and not just beat me but humiliate me as well. Frankly, I was feeling intimidated, and if I could have gotten out of the drill I would have. As we squared off, out of self-preservation physically and emotionally I summoned everything I had and exploded toward him on the whistle. To my surprise, and his, I pushed him back and won the first of three confrontations. The second, we fought

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until it was a draw. The third, again, was a serious struggle and hard hitting, but he won. Overall, it was a draw. Two things happened: I earned this guy’s respect, and I walked away with more confidence. Another incident involved a player on the team who I thought was often taken advantage of by others. We were good friends, but one day in the locker room, when I bent over to retrieve something out of my locker, he walked up behind me, and with a twohanded swing of a paddle, whacked me across the backside. It was excruciatingly painful. I shot up like a rocket and turned around to go after whoever had done it. There stood this friend. I confronted him; he was combative and wanted to pick a fight. It was completely out of character for him and our friendship. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I saw the group of seniors who liked to aggravate me laughing about this. The whole picture came into focus for me. They had put him up to it, and he wanted their approval so badly that he had violated our friendship. I was angry, hurt, and in pain all at the same time. My instinct was to throttle him, but somehow I just turned to hide the tears that had welled up in my eyes and said, “Don’t let them do this to you.” The paddling left a welt that remained for days, but

the experience created a lasting bond between us. He knew my restraint had saved our friendship and him from being humiliated by their manipulation. I learned the long-term value of restraint. Another moment when I learned confidence was the last game of the season. I began to play positions other than quarterback because Bruce Blackner, who was a sophomore, was emerging as the real quarterback of the future. That was fine with me; I knew I would be better at other positions. I had played quarterback because I was the only one that could throw a spiral pass. I began to migrate toward various positions, mostly fullback. In this last game of the season, we had to win a playoff in Hurricane in order to get into the state playoffs. I played much of the game and began to feel my capacity to play in that league. Even though we lost, that one game was the best preparation I could have had for the next year, because I knew I could play. Then, the summer before my senior year, Bruce Blackner broke his leg in an industrial accident. When practice started, it was clear he wouldn’t be able to play until the end of the season, if then. Once again, I was the only guy on the team who had a clue about playing quarterback, and I knew I was not that good. However, I was all the team had.

Mike, Quarterback, #17, 1969

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I was the quarterback for four or five games. In the first game with Delta, former state champions, I threw five interceptions and had an embarrassing moment at the line of scrimmage where I lined up to take the snap from the guard rather than Karl Jones, the center. We lost blow-out games against Kanab and Dixie. They were just far superior teams. I look back on it now, and we didn’t have the foggiest idea what we were doing; I called all the plays in the huddle with no help from the sidelines. We did win a couple of games while I was playing quarterback, but nobody was more pleased to have Bruce back than I was. Perhaps my most memorable game was our homecoming game against Hurricane. Nobody expected us to be close. They had two all-state candidates: their quarterback who was also an AllState basketball player, and their center. That night, I played eleven different positions. It was the most fun I ever had playing football. When I played middle guard on defense, I lined up over their All-State center. Several practices before, Scott Thorley, who had only one arm but was really fast and tough, had knocked me on my can by firing out at the snap and hitting me head-on with his helmet. It was effective, so I started doing it to Hurricane’s center. He was very large but not nearly as fast as I was, so I would watch his hand and just explode forward. It was like one ram hitting another. Because he had to deliver the ball, the impact of the blow would literally make him fall backwards, and I would just run around him. I was having a field day. I remember very vividly finding myself in the backfield chasing the quarterback, with the crowd screaming. I caught him by the jersey from behind and dragged him to the ground. That night I played in the backfield, on the offensive line, I did the long snaps—I was everywhere. We won the game something like 13–7. It was a big victory for us. Another memorable victory was against South Summit, Sonny Sunbury’s team. I even completed a couple of passes and scored a touchdown. The biggest disappointment was the Milford game. We needed to win the game to have a winning

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season, but we lost 7–6 from a point we missed that I still think should have counted. The loss also meant we finished the season four wins and five losses—a victory would have reversed the equation. If I could go back and redo my high school career, I would have become a lineman. I could have been an All-State lineman, as I possessed the size and speed necessary to be a dominant force. I was a slower-than-average linebacker.

Basketball

When football season finished, there was a break for about a week, and everybody hit the gym trying to make the transition to basketball. I made the sophomore team but didn’t play much; the juniors on the varsity team would play in the games and the sophomores were basically practice meat. My junior year I didn’t have confidence that I’d be selected to the varsity basketball team because I hadn’t distinguished myself particularly on JV, and there were limited slots on the roster. Then a bad thing happened: on the first day in the gym after football, someone’s knee knocked my tailbone, bruising it badly. I could hardly walk, let alone play. I did my best but felt certain that since I was on the bubble anyway, the chances of making it were slim. I remember the anxiety of waiting to see if I had made it. The coach simply put a roster on the bulletin board and left. I made the team, but knew it was on the basis of my reputation, not my performance in the tryouts. I gained most of my experience in JV games. I was a member of what we called the “green-light gang.” That was the crew that got to go in during the last few minutes when the outcome was certain, one way or the other. Ned Lunt was also a green-lighter. He would try to make the most out of every minute, just going crazy trying to affect the game. You had to admire his hustle, but he quickly earned a reputation. One game he got onto the court for the last two minutes and ten seconds and fouled out.

One experience that year I’ll never forget—Dick Hobbs, our coach, had made some calls to our homes to see if we were in on time that night. I think I was in a few minutes late. The next night

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before the game, he asked for a show of hands of who had been in on time. I figured I’d better be honest about it and didn’t raise my hand. None of the seniors had been on time and he benched them all for the entire game. Because I’d been late, I missed a great chance to play. However, that wasn’t the most dramatic moment that night. He also asked if anyone on the team had gone skiing that day—a direct violation of the rules.

“

That night, I played eleven different positions. It was the most fun I ever had playing football. I was in the zone.

”

Burnell Thorley and Harold Marshall raised their hands. Coach Hobbs said, “Turn in your jerseys. You’re gone.” That was a stunner. They were among the better junior players, and both had made basketball their primary pursuit. Later, I heard Hobbs saying to some of the players, “I heard Leavitt was skiing too. Was he?” I walked around the locker and said, “Coach, I wasn’t skiing. If I had been, I would have told you.” We had a good team that year. We won the region and did well in the state tournament. We had a great shot at taking state but lost to our archrival Dixie, who we had beaten three times earlier in the season. I started to get some serious minutes at the state tournament. In fact, I found out later that Dick Hobbs was on the verge of starting me the third night but didn’t at the last minute. In game two he put me in, and I scored three quick baskets and jumpstarted the game. I remember the spurt; a couple of them were nifty little moves along the baseline. I found myself jumping so well that day that my head was reaching the height of the backboard.

Senior Year Basketball

My senior year, I became the starting point guard. I averaged ten points per game, but we had other more valuable scorers. My role was as the ball handler on the team; I had to get the ball downcourt and to set up plays for our primary scorers: Wayne Esplin, our All-State power forward; and two juniors, Eric Marchant and six-foot-seven center Robin Haight. Two junior guards, Tom Cardon and Brent Blackner, rotated at the other guard position. I was slightly more than six feet tall and weighed about 185 pounds. For a person that size, I jumped well. A good measure was that I could jump high enough to grab the rim and dunk a volleyball, but my hands were not large enough to grip the basketball. I was quicker than I was fast. Cedar High played in the Class B (smaller school division) in Utah. The state was divided into regions, and the top three teams in each region advanced to the state tournament, which was always held in Provo at BYU. The measure of success for the basketball team, as far as the student body was concerned, was whether they were eligible for the state tournament, because it was the most highly valued adventure of the school year. As in nearly every activity, Dixie High School in St. George was our biggest rival. It was bitter rivalry, and a source of seriousness in the community. Historically, Dixie was better in football, but Cedar High excelled in basketball and baseball. As a result, the team knew that history would judge us by whether we qualified for the state tournament and if we beat Dixie.

In the years since, both communities have grown substantially, but the St. George area has grown exponentially. But in 1969, both communities were about the same size, so the competitive tension was intense. Games between the Cedar Redmen and Dixie Flyers were not simple high school basketball games; they were community events. It was both communities—always a thousand or more fans from the visiting team would make the fifty-mile drive to be present, which meant the in-person crowd always exceeded the four-thousand-seat capacity. The games were loud, aggressive, and combustive. Often, fights between people from the two

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1 Mike, #23, playing point guard his senior year. 2 Cedar City High

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3 Graduation, Cedar High School, 1969

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communities broke out before and after the games, so there was always heavy law enforcement presence. I recollect multiple scary moments when fights broke out within the crowd during games. Typically, each school in the region played two games—home and away. My senior year we played Dixie High School three times. The first game of the series was in St. George, where we pulled off an improbable victory on Dixie’s floor. The second game was in Cedar City on February 7, 1969, and is still known as “The Game” by anybody who was there. The following Thursday, the Iron County Record led with the headline: “Redmen Steal Victory From Dixie in Last Seconds of Game.” The article went on to describe how after trailing by as much as fifteen points and being down six points with ten seconds to go, we tied the game and won in overtime by five points.4 When the final heroics occurred, I was defending against a long pass at the other end of the court, but it was a remarkable moment. During the overtime while Robin Haight was polishing things off from the foul lane, I looked over at Dixie’s potent player, who had tears rolling down his cheeks. I heard Wayne Esplin say to him with full affect, “Well, this should about finish it off.” A month later we played again in St. George in the region tournament and won, giving us the Region Eight championship and a trip to the state tournament. The State Basketball Tournament was a big deal for everybody in Cedar City but especially for the student body, because it was like an unofficial school holiday, approaching Mardi Gras in the level and type of parties that were conducted. Kids made reservations at motels a year in advance and planned their parties. The hot spot for action was the Columbian Hotel; it was sin central during the tournament. The team stayed at the Travelodge on Provo’s south interchange. The first game of the tournament we drew Monticello High School in the first round. They

had a point guard named Mike Adams, who was a great athlete. He had been AllState in football and was essentially their whole team; he scored thirty-two points that night. We just couldn’t stop him. However, we won the game.

During the 1960s, music had transitioned from vinyl records to 8-track tapes, which held the equivalent of a playlist.

The second night of the tournament I can’t remember who we played, but I got a hot hand in the first quarter and everything I put up went in. My shots were long bombs from the outside. I thought I was in the zone, but I lost the touch at halftime and only scored a couple points in the second. We still won. The third night we were playing to earn a spot in the finals of the state championship, something that would have been highly unexpected. We played Richfield, who we had beaten before. I had what felt like the most unfair calls of my life. In the first quarter, a referee called me with charging four times. I was not charging; when I had possession of the ball, the player guarding me would try to get the ball and he was clearly reaching in. I would drive to my left or right using my shoulder to protect the ball from the defensive player’s reach. To this day it angers me. It was exactly what any point guard does and it is the only time it has ever happened to me; in fact, I’ve never seen it happen to anybody else. Coach Hobbs had to take me out and use me sparingly in the second quarter and again in the third. We were ahead going into the fourth quarter and Richfield began to press us. I was a good enough point guard that I could manage the press. However, with about two minutes to go, I fouled out on another charging call from the same referee. None of my replacements could get it down the floor, so Richfield stole the ball three or four times in a row and came from behind to beat us.

4. “Redmen Steal Victory From Dixie in Last Seconds of Game.” Iron County Record, J. Willard Marriot Library, February 16, 1969. https://newspapers.lib.utah.edu/ark:/87278/s60042wh/4467753

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1 Mike playing basketball his senior year. 2 Front row: Mike Leavitt, Wade Roberts, Dale Hatch, Randy Shirts, Harold Marshall, Ned Lunt. Back row: Ron Wolfe, Mike Pratt, Wayne Esplin, Eric Marchant, Kim Matheson, Randy Clove, Coach Dick Hobbs, Principal Clair Morris and team manager Dan Yergensen

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3 Redman Region 8 Basketball Winners. Front row: Mike Leavitt, Wade Roberts, Dale Hatch, Randy Shirts, Harold Marshall, Ned Lunt. Back row: Ronnie Woolf, Mike Pratt, Wayne Esplin, Eric Marchant, Kim Matheson, Randy Clove, Coach Hobbs, Principal Morris, Manager Danny Yergensen. 4 Mike, Senior Year

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Had we won that game we would have had a real shot at the championship, which would have been remarkable. So, on the last night, we played for third place. But we were badly deflated and our play showed it; we lost. I sprained my ankle partway through the game and could not finish.

A Barrier to College Sports

I have often wondered if I could have played one of my sports in college. I’m sure I could have at some level, but my mission created a barrier that was not nearly as well understood as it is now. At the end of high school, I went to Cleo Petty, the SUU coach, and told him I wanted to try out for the baseball team. I had been All-State in baseball, and a good athlete in basketball and football. I figured that based on all I had done over the years as the batboy I at least deserved a tryout. He said, “Are you going on a mission?” I told him I was. “Don’t bother to tryout. You won’t make the team.”

It was devastating to me at the time. Looking back, it was understandable, given the way most coaches viewed missions then. Russ Peterson, who was also on the All-State team, didn’t go on a mission and made the team. I was better off. If I had played before my mission, it may have changed my life path. Things worked out.

French Horn

In addition to sports, my other passion was music; I found great enjoyment in being a member of the band and orchestra. Playing the French horn came quite naturally to me. I was able to produce sounds that reached a place deep within me; I felt the music. It was not mechanical or mathematical. In fact, my most significant limitation as a musician was the math involved in reading music. It took real effort and did not come as naturally as the creative aspect of interpretation. I have come to observe the same thing about myself as a leader.

Front row, from left: Paul Proctor, Knudsen, Jim Shumate, Steve Kunz, Steve Christensen, Brent Blackner, Alan Averett, Eric Marchant, Alan Lewis, unknown, unknown. Second row: unknown, Coach Jack Sawyer, Bill Ronnow, Tom Cardon, Mike Leavitt, Alan Roper, Lance Whetten, Kurt Tullis, Elmer Evans, Gary Webb, Kelly Hansen, Scott Thorley, Coach Charles Brinkerhoff. Third Row: Robin Haight, Todd Bennett, Brent Whittekiend, Randy Hoyt, Ross Miller, Paul Cahoon, Karl Jones, Bill Sherritt, unknown, Frank Christensen, Robert Olds, Rick Robinson, Steven Gunn, Howard Christiansen.

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My senior year, Harold Boyce left the high school and Bill Silvester was hired. He was a French horn player, married to Nancy Clare Johnson, the daughter of my piano teacher Loa Johnson. He had just finished graduate school and was in his first teaching position. Bill Silvester became a good friend and willing mentor, and we both shared a love of the French horn. However, Bill was rather sensitive, and one day got angry at the class, slammed the baton on the stand, and stomped out, saying he’d return only when we learned to behave. That was all the challenge we needed. Mr. Silvester had appointed me as student conductor, a role I now see as an effort to mentor the promising musician in me. The band told me to take charge, and for several days we had a standoff between the entire band and Bill. We had a music festival coming up and plotted to drive to the festival in our own cars and perform. We were sure we could get a superior without him. He could have claimed brilliant manipulation, but he wasn’t that skilled. We got more preparation done in defiance than we ever would have had the incident not occurred. However, there was a peaceful settlement. Another one of my favorite music moments during high school involved Bill. The college needed some players for the orchestra during graduation, so Bill and I agreed to play French horn.

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They put the horn section on risers about four feet off the ground. During the closing prayer, Bill rocked his chair back on two legs, but in doing so, one of his chair legs missed the riser. All I remember seeing were the soles of his shoes, his arms, and his French horn flying into the air. I can’t imagine what it sounded like on the radio. The orchestra and the audience were in stitches; the guy at the mic had to just keep praying; Bill was unhurt but not amused. It was a remarkably funny moment, and I can’t think of it to this day without breaking into a serious belly laugh. I was the first-chair French horn player in both band and orchestra during my three years of high school. I made All-State band and played second chair to a more devoted musician who later became the principal French horn player for the Utah Symphony. In a solo context as a senior, I played one of my beloved Mozart horn concertos at a state band competition and received a superior rating. To this day, I listen to the horn concertos when I need to relax, unwind, and think. I played the horn in college band while still in high school and continued after graduation but set it aside after college— always sure I’d pick it up again “later.” Later has not yet arrived, but I will never lose the love of music I developed during high school.

09 Basic Training 1969 • Fort Campbell, Kentucky; Fort Sill, Oklahoma Significant events in my life have coincided with times of war: I was born during the Korean War; I graduated from high school during the Vietnam War; I ran for governor during the Gulf War; and my service in the Bush cabinet occurred during the war in Iraq. Utahns have served nobly and notably during each of these conflicts. During the Korean War, five battalions of the Utah National Guard and the entire Utah Air National Guard were called to active service—a little more than two thousand guardsmen, including the Cedar City unit. Utah’s National Guard contribution was more than that of many other states, including Washington and Oregon, whose units were not called up. When asked about this obvious disparity, Sixth Army Commander Lieutenant General A.C. Wedemeyer responded that he wanted to win the war and needed the nation’s best and brightest. This response did little to assuage Utahns, who were not in favor of the war. In the 1952 presidential election, having voted Democrat during the five previous presidential elections, Utahns shifted their support to the Republican party. The overwhelming number of guardsmen called to service in Korea also directly impacted the missionary program of the Church of Jesus

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Christ of Latter-day Saints. In 1953, the number of missionaries serving plummeted to 2,189—down from 4,847 in 1951.1 The Church of Jesus Christ negotiated with the Selective Service for an agreement that would allow missionary work to continue during the war. The agreement was not ideal for the Church or for young men who wanted to serve missions—each ward could send only two young men per year who had not satisfied their military obligation.

The Draft and Me

This policy, and the draft, was still in force nearly two decades later when I was nearing nineteen years old. To create more equity in the draft, Selective Service implemented a lottery system. Each year, 365 balls were placed in a hopper, one for each day of the year. Each day was given a number in the order it was drawn. So your number was determined by your birthday, and if you had a high number you were safe; those in the middle were never sure; low numbers had been struck by fate. I, along with every seventeen- or eighteen-yearold young man I knew, had to work through the question of the future, because unless I had a deferment (as a student, deemed medically incapable, or engaged in some other activity to disqualify me from service) I would be on my way to boot camp. One of the activities you got a deferment for was missionary service, but this was a serious problem for me because our ward had a slug of boys my age. By my count, there were eleven young men who turned nineteen ahead of me. I had limited options. I could go to school and wait until a spot opened up in our ward; I could move to Loa or Bunkerville and hope that a spot would open up there; or I could join the National Guard, committing myself to six months of training and one weekend a month for five-and-a-half years, plus two weeks annually. If you joined the Guard, you didn’t count against the quota of your ward.

As soon as I turned eighteen, I registered for the draft as required by law. (The lottery numbers would not be selected until the following summer.) I put my name on the waiting list for the Cedar City unit of the National Guard. The Cedar City unit was nearly always at full strength. The unit has a distinguished history and with the draft in place, there were few openings and many trying to get in. During my senior year of high school, Kent Bishop was the teacher of my American Problems class; he was also the first sergeant of the Cedar City unit. Jim Miller, my fifth-grade teacher, was now the principal of the high school and had also advanced to battery commander of the unit. The actual sequence of the next events is not possible for me to fully reconstruct, but as far as I remember, in February, one of them told me after class that there were a handful of openings, and that if I went to the armory by 2 p.m., I would be given one of them. In one conversation, my whole life came into sharp focus. I had four hours to make a decision that would affect the rest of my life. I left school and went home. My mother was surprised to see me, so I explained the situation to her. My dad was in Salt Lake City because the legislature was meeting there, so I called and talked to him. He was leading a bill on the floor, and I’m sure he felt frustrated and worried but there was little he could do to help me. I went to my room, knelt down, and prayed. I didn’t know much about prayerful decision-making, but I basically laid out the situation to the Lord. There were so many uncertainties. It was possible in the summer I would get a high number and not be vulnerable to the draft; the opposite could also be true. There was certainty about my mission if I enlisted, but it would require six months of duty and a long obligation. Then there was a clear possibility my unit would be activated. I sat in my room that morning for an hour. Finally, I made my decision. I marched down to the National Guard Armory on First East and enlisted. I do not remember my feelings exactly, but I had enough confidence to act.

1. Benjamin Urrutia, “Korean War and Utah.” Utah History Encyclopedia, University of Utah Press, 1994, https://www.uen.org/utah_history_ encyclopedia/k/KOREAN_WAR.shtml

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After I enlisted, I called my father in Salt Lake City to tell him of my decision. I can’t remember much about that conversation, but I feel confident he told me he was proud of me for making the decision. I’m confident my mother was equally supportive, but probably close to panic.

Beginning Service for the National Guard

Processing the papers took a few weeks, but in the late spring I attended weekend drills. We did not have uniforms or any of the traditions or rituals. Drills always started with a formation where the roll was taken, then each section undertook the tasks for the day. We spent a lot of time watching first-aid movies in the furnace room of the armory. The room was aptly named; it was stifling in there. I remember Steve Bulloch passing out during the movie on how to deliver a baby. The drills were held on Saturdays and Sundays. On the Sunday of our first drill, the unit participated in riot training in Parowan. The National Guard was doing a lot of riot duty throughout the country then. We were trucked into Parowan during the middle of the Parowan ward meeting for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I was assigned to guard the post office. I didn’t have a uniform, only a work shirt, Levi’s, and a pair of boots, as well as items issued to me by the National Guard: an M14 rifle, a steel pot helmet, and a canteen belt. As church ended and people began to stream out of the chapel, I realized there was no other sign of the National Guard unit. Just me, standing in front of the post office with a rifle and steel pot helmet, walking back and forth. If that moment was intended as a practical joke, it was a beauty. We continued to attend drills, with the expectation that we would be shipped to basic training in the early summer. I had been hired to work in the stockroom of J. C. Penney, a clothing store on the corner of Main and Center streets in Cedar City. It paid only $1.35 an hour, but I enjoyed the interaction with people. As time went on, I worked as a salesclerk. It is not natural for me to operate without a clear sense of purpose, so that summer was a hard one. I

had graduated from high school, and I knew I would be going to basic training, but I didn’t know when and I didn’t know where. It was hard to concentrate on anything; transitions make me anxious, even though I live my existence more in the future than in the present. The whole summer seemed to be about “waiting.” Finally, my orders arrived. I was to report to Fort Campbell, Kentucky, in August for basic training. Several of my friends who had been inducted at the same time were also going there; Dave Fotheringham would be at Fort Campbell, but two weeks ahead of me. Steve Bulloch, Kevin Bulloch, and I would go at the same time. It was wonderful to have friends in similar situations accompanying me.

“

I didn’t have a uniform, only a work shirt, Levi’s, and a pair of boots.

”

This would be the first time I had ever been away from home for an extended period of time. I greeted it with the normal mix of apprehension and excitement. There was the tension I felt about leaving my girlfriend Cindy, with whom I had spent a lot of time during that rather aimless summer, and I was apprehensive about leaving the comforts of home. But I was excited by the adventure—and looking forward to getting it over with.

Fort Campbell

My family took me to the Salt Lake International Airport. I remember nothing of the flight other than the fact that one of us had been given the orders and appointed as leader of the group. When we arrived at Fort Campbell’s reception center—where we had orientation, got our uniforms, shots, and haircuts—military life began. From the moment we got off the bus, people yelled at us; the army didn’t have particularly hospitable hosting. For the next couple of days, we were herded from place to place, wearing civilian clothes, trying to march in formation. The first day, we got haircuts—or should I say, we had our

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1 Mike leaving for boot camp, Salt Lake City Airport. 2 Mike, Anne, and Dane before Mike leaves for boot camp. 3 Mike and Mark

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4 Brothers 5 Kevin Bulloch, Mike, and Steve Bulloch off to Basic Training together.

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heads shaved. We stood in a long line to get our shots, which were administered with an air-compression gun. A blanket was hung as a barrier separating those getting the shots from those waiting to get them. When it was my turn, the air gun was placed on my arm and the nurse pulled the trigger. The serum was shot into my arm without a needle. I could hear the compression of the gun each time it went off, and then guys would walk around the blanket with blood streaming down their arms. A couple of them passed out. Not a happy moment for a guy who can’t even watch a shot being administered on TV. But I survived; it didn’t hurt all that much. We also filled out forms and attended orientation classes, and then we were given a duffle bag and went through a long line of people handing us clothes, boots, coats, and head gear. I returned to the temporary barracks and changed into my new OD (olive drab) green uniform. When you’re walking around a processing center without a uniform on, you are so clearly the newest guy on the block that you are bound to be the target of some discrimination. I witnessed for the first time another kind of discrimination: racism. For example, the second or third night, at about 4:30 a.m., a Black man about my age was sent to wake everybody up. As he walked around in the dark, some guys with thick Southern accents began a dialogue with, “What’s that noise?” The other said, “It’s dark, and all I can see is a smile.” It made me angry, and I remember feeling empathy for the young guy they were harassing. He was a trainee just like me and must have been even more worried. The day after we got our uniforms, Kevin Bulloch and I were put on kitchen patrol (KP). We quickly discovered that guys with uniforms, even if they were scrubbing pots and pans, could order around guys without uniforms. We’d only had uniforms for two days, but guys just off the bus figured we knew what we were doing. We went to church during our stay at the reception center. They assigned a guy who knew the post to go with us, but he got impatient and made us leave early. We had walked several miles to get

there, so it was maddening that we had to leave. Fortunately, once we got set into a basic training area, supervisors were very respectful of our desires to go to church and let us take time off to attend church in town.

Basic Training

After several days in the reception center, we were transferred to a training unit at Fort Campbell. The unit was a melding of personalities from across the country, men ages eighteen to twenty-eight from different races, backgrounds, and intelligence. I think Steve Bulloch ended up in a different company, but he was nearby. Kevin and I were able to stay together. There were two returned missionaries with us from Cache County. I remember the name of one of them: Wayne Marler. Both men turned out to be wonderful mentors and provided stability for both Kevin and me. They were good examples, told us stories about their missions, and helped Kevin and me keep our testimonies grounded during our first time away from home. Their mission experiences made them less intimidated by the system, and plus, both were married. They had a positive influence on all the men. One day, an older guy in the platoon saw me reading the Book of Mormon. He asked me about the time period of the Book of Mormon, but I couldn’t immediately tell him. It made me realize how much I had to learn before my mission. The drill sergeants were simply amazing in their harshness. I heard combinations of vulgar language that I was not sure had ever before been strung together. The first sergeant was a grisly, tall, thin man who had served multiple tours in Vietnam. He called everybody Horsefly. The barracks we lived in were built during World War II. They were two-story firetraps. The front end of the barracks became the social center. There was a bulletin board, stairs, and a latrine. Everybody but the platoon leader slept in double-bunked beds in the open and each soldier had a footlocker and a small, wooden closet where you could hang some clothes.

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Part of the training was learning to work together to care for the barracks, which included posting fire guards full-time during the night. When it was my turn, I sat on the stairs watching for fires, and then every hour I was supposed to walk around checking locks on footlockers. I must say, that many men sleeping in an open room produces a set of strange and amusing noises. At times, there were so many people talking in their sleep, it sounded like a debate. One night, I was sitting on the stairs talking to the guy who was on first watch. A second lieutenant from the office climbed up a ladder on the back of the barracks, tiptoed over to us and announced that we had just allowed our barracks and unit to be captured by the enemy. Our lack of attention could have cost our comrades their lives. It was all I could do to keep from laughing, although I worried for a couple of days we’d end up doing some extra duty or something. Nothing ever came of it.

Daily Routine

Lights-on was at 5 a.m. or so, physical training at 5:30 a.m. and then morning formation was at 7. There was always a crowd in the latrine in the morning and perpetual jockeying for the cleaning stuff. We had to split the cleaning duties; some would handle the latrine, others had to empty the butt cans, and others waxed and buffed the floor, especially the center section where only the drill sergeant could walk. Meals were in the mess hall. We would stand in line between OD green sandbags that lined the path, sign in at a table, and go through the line, and then we had just a few minutes to eat. I will admit, I actually liked the food. Periodically, I was assigned to KP, which was simply abusive. I reported about 4:30 a.m. and I’d work until all the cleaning was done three meals later, which was around 10 p.m. The traditional vision of KP is pretty accurate: I peeled potatoes, scrubbed pots, mopped floors, and served food. Kevin Bulloch and I had KP together a couple of times. We always appropriated extra food for our later use, like cookies and candy. Ice-cold chocolate

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milk was served from five-gallon containers, and during the days we were on KP, I’m sure I drank two gallons of that stuff. I think of the fat content, and it’s a wonder it didn’t kill me.

Training Regimen

Our training regimen was varied. We were given instruction in weapons fire, grenades, first aid, military procedures, and war. Each day was full of exercises and lectures. If I hadn’t been enduring the stress of being away from home for the first time, I would have taken more interest in it. I remember well my first exposure to tear gas. With each of us wearing a mask, we entered a building filled with tear gas, then removed our masks. I felt like I was burning everywhere, my eyes were inflamed, and I was coughing. I exited the building immediately, but the sensation was unforgettable. Our exercises included tossing grenades out of a concrete bunker, target practice on the rifle range, low crawling under live fire, war games with BB guns, hand-to-hand combat, and obstacle courses. One of the worst moments occurred on an obstacle course. Tires of different sizes, threaded on a cable like a Cheerios necklace, were suspended between two trees. We crawled through the tire tunnel, which was probably twenty feet in length. A big, heavy kid got stuck in the middle, right in front of me, and couldn’t get through. I had people behind me, and he was in front of me going crazy with claustrophobia, kicking and screaming. I couldn’t go either way. Just writing this brings back the horrible feeling. I had to really concentrate on relaxing because I knew I was on the verge of losing it. Our training was almost entirely oriented to prepare us for a Vietnam-style conflict; we learned about jungle ambushes, bungee pits, and Claymore mines. Bungee pits were used by Vietcong jungle fighters. They would dig a large hole and line the bottom of it with bamboo spikes, which had been dipped in poison or contaminated with human waste. The pit was covered with a tarp, soil, and foliage, and was designed to trap soldiers walking through the jungle. Even if the soldiers weren’t killed by the

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spikes, they would get serious infections and usually die. All of the drill sergeants and instructors had been in Vietnam and made the simulations seem very real. I remember looking around me, at the men I was training with, thinking that some of them would end up in Vietnam and likely be killed. These moments were sobering.

“

I was in basic training the day men landed on the moon.

”

I enjoyed the firing range. I had handled guns all my life, though many hadn’t. There is a cadence and ritual at a military firing range that creates the discipline of safety. The range official in the tower used a megaphone to say, “Lock and load four rounds of M14 ammo and point downrange.” Then he would say to the NCOs (non-commissioned officers) on the range: “Ready on the left? Ready on the right?” When the signal was given, he would give the command, “Commence firing.” Occasionally, somebody would shoot early or late, poor soul. When this happened, the drill sergeant running the rifle range ran over to the shooting station, got in the soldier’s face, humiliated him, and ordered fifty to one hundred push-ups. We practiced shooting at twenty-five, fifty, one-hundred, and three-hundred meters. I earned an expert marksman badge, which had a certain level of status to it. When we went on marches, we were almost always in full field gear. Occasionally when we went into the field, trucks took us but only for destinations that were miles away. As we marched, we sang “Jodies,” little limerick-type songs usually about life in the army or life at home. The songs resembled country western music because they addressed how much we missed home or our girlfriends. Singing the songs also kept people in step and kept your mind off the march. I was in basic training the day men landed on the moon. The event was of enough importance

that we were allowed time off from training to watch the events on television in the day room, a place set aside for relaxation with the company. As I watched those pictures being transmitted from the moon, they seemed surreal. That night I stood on the road in front of our barracks and looked at the moon, which was near full. I stared at it with wonder trying to imagine the Apollo landing craft sitting on its surface. It was so far away, so remote. What courage it took and what a remarkable human feat. Once we had been in basic training for a month or so, we were given a pass to leave the base for a weekend or a night. The procedure required that we go to the commanding officer’s office and sign out. When we returned, we signed in. Usually, we would stay in Fort Campbell, but a couple of times we went to a restaurant in town. On one occasion we traveled to Nashville with a member of the Church to a stake dance. It was such a relief to see the outside world and to remember what it was like to have a sense of unrestricted movement.

Business Deal

One weekend, Kevin Bulloch and I went to the PX, which was a store on base. Polaroid cameras—a new technology in photography—were for sale. We began to scheme: what if we bought one of those and took pictures for guys to send home? How many would we have to sell to cover the cost of the camera? Our salary was $128 a month, and the camera was about that much. We went to the barracks that night with a business plan in our heads. First, we had to do some market research to confirm our instincts. We casually talked to people one at a time and asked them, “If we got this camera, would you like to have a picture? We think we can take them for two or three dollars each.” We got enough interest that we concluded it would be worth the risk, and the worst that could happen is we’d have a camera. The next day, we walked a couple of miles to the PX and made the big investment, with a month’s salary on the line. We also bought several boxes of film. Back at the barracks we took pictures of ourselves in very conspicuous ways around the barracks. Everyone was interested and immediately

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1 Mike standing on the steps of the barracks at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, with his M-14 rifle. 2 Mike and Kevin Bulloch eating leftover donuts and chocolate milk after KP duty.

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3 Mike standing next to his bunk in Fort Campbell, Kentucky, during basic training. 4 Basic training, Fort Campbell, Kentucky

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wanted a picture taken so they could send it home to their girlfriend, wife, or family. Within a few days we had recovered our investment. With our business plan validated and all the pictures we wanted to take, we then resolved to sell the business. One of the guys in the unit offered us $75 for the camera. It was the liquidation event we had been waiting for.

Physical Training

The PT (physical training) test was a major component of finishing basic training. It comprised seven or eight events; I had trouble with only a couple. One was the overhead bars, but when the day for the test came, I was able to score the maximum on it. The agility run, I always maxed that. The fireman carry was another one that I was good at. The low crawl event required you to skid on your belly about ten yards and back in something like twenty seconds. I was good at it, but on the day of the test, I reached out to slap the line and missed it, had to turn around and missed maximum points by just a few seconds. My biggest challenge was the mile run. I completed the mile, but in order to max it, it had to be in less than six minutes, thirty seconds. I can’t remember my time, but I didn’t get under the maximum time. Kevin Bulloch missed the max by only a couple of seconds and was given an award for being one of the top scorers in the unit. Sometimes we would have to do the overhead bars, for example, before we could eat. We did lots of push-ups—it was the punishment for everything. I could knock out fifty push-ups and not bat an eye by the end of the eight weeks.

draft, found out that his number was 286—clearly safe. He was in pain. He had gambled by enlisting and lost. With his high number, it’s safe to assume he wouldn’t have seen combat, but because he had enlisted, he was committed to three years of service rather than the two years required of draftees. My number was 227, also fairly high, but since I had decided to join the Guard to ensure I could serve a mission, I was fine. Another memorable day was just before graduation when the MOSs (military occupational specialties) were handed out. The National Guard guys knew their assignments, as did most of those that had volunteered, but among the draftees, that was essentially the day they found out if they would be fighting in Vietnam. Those assigned to infantry knew their ultimate assignment would be in the bush of Vietnam. It was a rather traumatic moment, exceeded only by the experience we had after our advanced training when I watched men open their orders to Vietnam. That’s where most went, though a couple got Germany and Korea.

Graduation

Basic training was coming to an end, but it seemed like I had been there for a lifetime. I remember how senior guys seemed that were a week or two in front of us. Whenever I hear the song “Age of Aquarius” by the Fifth Dimension; the music of Blood, Sweat & Tears; and songs by The Carpenters, I am transported back to basic training.

I also got a taste of bureaucracy in the army. In early October it snowed. We had field jackets and liners in our closets, but they wouldn’t let us wear them because an army directive said it wasn’t winter until a certain date in October. So we froze instead.

We wore our dress greens for a graduation parade; some of the parents came; the commanding officer inspected the troops while a military band played. Speeches were given, then the troops marched to the barracks as graduates of basic training. The event had a real patriotic feeling to it. But that feeling was tempered by knowing that some of the guys there would likely be killed in action.

While I was in basic training, the Selective Service picked the lottery numbers for the first time. I remember standing in at parade rest (feet apart and hands behind my back) in the breakfast line as the guy next to me, who had volunteered for the

I had a feeling of satisfaction. It was a “bigger world” success. I had measured up to a universe bigger than the one I knew in southern Utah. It exemplified an experience I’ve had many times since of walking into a new experience, worrying

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that the world I was accustomed to had standards lower than this new place, and then finding out I was well prepared or could expand for success. I’ve seen that experience repeated in almost every setting I’ve been in, from basic training to being governor.

Fort Sill, Oklahoma

Leaving Fort Campbell, Kentucky, was a pleasure. My next assignment was to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, for artillery school, specifically fire direction control (FDC). FDC was a specialty within artillery; the objective is to receive information from a forward observer and calculate the amount of charge and direction the guns should shoot. It was a big step up. The facilities were nicer and newer, almost dorm-like. I shared a little cubical unit with three other guys, and my bunkmate was Kevin Bulloch. We had a drill sergeant who was noticeably nicer than the guys in basic training. However, the rituals were about the same. We would fall out in the morning and march to chow. The mess hall was huge, with long lines and cold winds. Kevin and I developed a scheme to beat the system: when the unit walked to the mess hall, we fell out of line and completed our cleaning assignments using the brooms, sponges, and other cleaning equipment we would’ve had to wait in line for after breakfast. We then entered the mess hall through the back door, avoiding the line. Kevin Bulloch figured out that if we weren’t in a formation, we could walk in the back door of the mess hall without anybody questioning us. We signed for our breakfast as though we were part of another unit, ate, then walked back to the barracks as the other soldiers fought for the cleaning equipment. If the drill sergeant ever asked why we weren’t going to eat with the rest of the group, we told them we were on a religious fast, something they couldn’t protest. They must have thought we were the most religious guys they had ever met.

We developed efficiency in cleaning our cubical as well. We discovered that if we slept under the dust cover (a blanket you put over your pillow) and left our beds made it saved several minutes of bed-making. That trick and others we developed allowed us to sleep another thirty minutes in the morning. I have vivid memories of the fire guard walking through the barracks in the early morning,

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switching on the lights. Each unit appointed one or two people to rotate as fire guards. Once an hour, the fire guard walked around the barracks. When I was on fire guard duty, I used the time to polish my boots and write letters. At Fort Sill, we were free most weekends. Most of the guys would go to Lawton, Oklahoma, to drink. When they returned to the barracks, some would get sick and throw up in the head (military-speak for bathroom). It was a good reminder of the virtues of clean living. Another reminder was a former college football player who saw himself as a playboy. He was constantly regaling us with sordid tales of his sexual encounters with women. It was a rather shocking experience for a church-going guy from rural southern Utah. As for Kevin and me, each week we went to church in Lawton, Oklahoma. We met a colonel there who was also a member of the Church, and he invited us to have Thanksgiving dinner with him that year. When he came to get us, it caused a big stir. It was tradition to call the barracks to attention when an officer came in, so everyone knew when the colonel arrived. Usually only a lieutenant or captain came in our barracks, but a full colonel coming to get Kevin and I added considerably to our stature. We had a great day watching football games with him. One of the few personalities at Fort Sill that I can remember was a guy named Newman. He was a college graduate and had worked for a Phillips 66 gas station. The guy just seemed squared away. He was good at math and wasn’t intimidated by the rigor of the school or tests. Thankfully, he was willing to help me with the difficult math required by FDC. FDC required lots of math, and because I had never done particularly well in math in high school, I lacked confidence and had to scramble to keep up. The prospect of getting “recycled” or washed out of FDC was more than I could deal with, so I worked really hard and ended up doing well. We had weekly tests, and I spent several nights a week studying. As an example of the math involved in training, we had to calculate how far a 155-millimeter howitzer projectile would go given a certain amount of powder and existing weather conditions. A forward observer positioned himself close enough to the enemy to call in coordinates for us to work with.

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We, in turn, called orders to the guns. When the first rounds were fired, the forward observer called in corrections, and we recalibrated until we hit the target. In a wartime situation, the work would be done from the back of a truck or inside a tent a few miles from the front. On the eighth week of our training, I saw my first computer. It was called FADAC. It was about the size of a card table and twelve-inches thick. I’m guessing it had the computing power a fraction of what you can buy today in a chip the size of a dime.

“

I had a feeling of satisfaction. It was a ‘bigger world’ success.

”

In the final week, we learned to do calculations using the computer. I figured it would be years before the National Guard got FADAC so I wasn’t all that interested. One hot afternoon, we were seated in what seemed to be an endless class of about five people. We were in a small, hot cubical and the computers made a high-pitched humming sound. Subconsciously, I began to hum at the same pitch and then modulate my voice slightly to make sound waves that hurt everybody’s ears. The instructor snapped at me, “Is that you?” Kevin Bulloch quickly said, “I think it’s a guy out in the hall.” The instructor jumped up and ran into the hall. Nobody there. He came back and looked at me with a scowl. Bulloch’s quick thinking saved me.

During an afternoon inspection, our drill sergeant was checking for dust in the cleaning closet and put his finger in whipped cream. He wasn’t amused.

Arriving Home

One Sunday night I walked to some pay phones and called home. The conversation made me feel homesick, and I had tears in my eyes. Then I ran into Ross Miller, a guy I had gone to school with and who was in my unit at home; he was also at Fort Sill. When I saw Ross, I was embarrassed by my tears. No soldier returning from basic training looked forward to coming home more than I did. I’d been gone less than six months but it seemed like an eternity. The day I came home was in late December, and that night a high school basketball game was on. I had dreamed about this moment. Kevin went with me, I said my hellos to the family, and headed for the gym, where I had played as starting guard the year before with most of the guys on the floor. The game was in the second half. As we walked into the gym, students began to notice us. We walked the full length of the court at a timeout and sat behind the team in a place where, traditionally, former team members sat. Cindy Bess was a cheerleader at the time, and people began to tell her I was there—she didn’t know I’d be at the game. We eyed each other and waved until the game was over. Our reunion in the middle of the gym floor— me with my shaved head and slightly larger frame, and she in her cheerleading outfit—had a little drama to it.

We occasionally had KP at Fort Sill. It was an exhausting, twenty-four-hour ordeal that Bulloch and I had together three times. On one occasion, we helped the bakers make pies. We each appropriated a pie, hiding it in the liners of our field jackets, and when we got back to the barracks, we shared our bounty. We didn’t finish them and needed a safe place to hide them. The top furnace ducts in the cleaning closet seemed like a perfectly safe place.

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Mike: second row from the top, third from the left. Kevin Bulloch, Mike’s bunk mate from Cedar City: fourth from from the top, fifth from the left.

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10 Reap and Sow: A Mission to Oregon 1970 to 1972 • Jerome, Idaho; Ontario, Oregon; Portland, Oregon; Hillsboro, Oregon; Coos Bay, Oregon; Eugene, Oregon; The Stucki Family I am a religious believer. Faith in the existence of a divine creator came naturally as a child and adolescent. Clearly it was cultivated in me by my parents and others, but it felt as if I have always known those things. It is simply not plausible to me that the complexities of the human body and all the other biological systems of the earth and universe happened without the deliberate intelligence of a creator. Nor can I conceive or rationalize the creation of this planet, mankind, and the sundry forms of life that dwell here, in the absence of a deliberate plan, purpose, and order. I accept as true that we lived before our mortal birth; likewise, that we live on after our earthly death. I will also declare my belief in a spiritual realm of communication, teaching, learning, and believing that allows us to feel the existence and presence of our Maker. For me, the ability to connect to those feelings ebb and flow. This chapter recounts in general terms the events of two years I served as a missionary for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. They were extraordinarily formative years for me.

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Mike and his companion attending church in Jerome, Idaho, 1970.

REAP AND SOW: A MISSION TO OREGON

For a reader of this history unacquainted with this type of service, it will be useful to understand that while not a requirement of membership in my church, it is highly encouraged.

baptism. Today, missionaries also provide service to local communities. During my time as a missionary, most of the effort was on finding and teaching new members.

In 1970, when I made the decision to serve, the entry age for young men was nineteen years old, and for women, it was twenty-one years. (The age requirements have since been reduced to eighteen years old for young men and nineteen for women.)

The virtue of missionary work is not simply expanding the number of people who are members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints; it is an extraordinary period of training and refinement for the missionaries.

The term of my service was two years. One applied to serve through a process overseen by local Church leaders. The application involved medical exams, language aptitude tests, and a requirement of “worthiness,” which was determined through an inventory of one’s personal devotion and obedience (past and present) to the teachings of the Church.

Following this process, I was ordained to be a representative of Jesus Christ and promised, in sacred ways, that to the degree I applied myself I would be the beneficiary of spiritual guidance that would allow me to do work important to Him—a sobering and energizing charge.

Once the application was submitted and accepted at the Church’s headquarters, each missionary is sent a letter containing a “call” to serve in a specific geographic area. I was called to the Northwestern States Mission, which, at that time, consisted of Oregon and parts of Idaho, Washington, and northern California. Missionaries are supervised by a mission president, who is responsible for between one hundred to 250 missionaries. Each mission is divided into smaller units typically referenced as districts (four to ten missionaries) and zones made up of three to five districts, or fifteen to thirty missionaries. These are led by missionaries who are assigned by the mission president. Missionaries usually work in pairs of two, though sometimes it can be three depending on various circumstances. During their service, missionaries are moved periodically to different areas within the geographically defined area of the mission. They are not paid but live on about a four-hundred-dollar-a-month stipend (in today’s dollars) provided by the missionary’s family or local congregation. The primary function of missionaries is to find people who are looking for spiritual enrichment and truth, to teach them of Christ and the doctrines of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and to help assimilate them into the local church units through a process that starts with acceptance of

Missionaries are closely supervised and asked to comply with strict rules. In my mission, we woke by 6 a.m. six days a week. In the early hours of the day, we were expected to spend time in a personal devotional, which included our private prayers, scripture reading, and study. We then studied jointly with the companion we worked and lived with. It was expected that we would leave our dwelling by 9:30 a.m. and work productively until 9:30 p.m. Before bed we were taught to plan the next day in highly organized ways. Nowadays the timing may be different depending on the mission, but the structure and strict rules are the same. Our day off was called preparation day. This was our day to shop, clean our apartment and clothes, and other similar tasks, but could also involve recreation. Except for dating—we were required to give up dating during our service. Reading my experiences, it will become evident that initially, I did not have the maturity to do all this without doubt or complaint. Few do. Any population of nineteen- to twenty-four-year-olds will produce a certain amount of noncompliance, imperfection, and nonsense. However, like most everyone who has the experience, over the course of the two years, I grew and learned to operate more like a serious adult in enumerable ways. The experienced separated me from the comforts of home. Despite having served several months in the military, I got homesick. Leaving home for two

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years seemed like an eternity; I had to settle in rather than endure the wait. I experienced work in more intense ways and learned to find satisfaction in a cause bigger than just my comfort. Serving as a missionary, I learned to lead and follow others, and was given serious responsibility. I saw people struggle in intimate ways. I learned to plan, organize, and to take responsibility for commitments.

“

You are called to serve in the Northwestern States Mission . . .

”

Those who serve their country in the military or in other ways learn many of the same practical lessons, but perhaps what makes the missionary experience unique is the spiritual development. I certainly had this for myself. With two years of regular study, prayer, and working with people who were earnestly seeking to find religious truth, my sense of commitment grew and the feeling of confidence in spiritual feelings expanded. I also had many experiences that, to me, were profound evidence that what I was doing was important and that my religious feelings were real. I saw quiet miracles happen and had moments when I felt especially strong spiritual stirrings. In this history, I will allude to some of them but have chosen not to go into a lot of detail because they were intensely personal. I have written or will write them, but they will form a separate history. Lastly, I want to emphasize that missionary service was not just a somber two-year spiritual retreat. It was fun. I made lifelong friends, and we laughed a lot, played pranks on each other, and had other assorted adventures. Most within the rules, but a few that stretched them a bit. When I finished my mission in May 1972, I reentered a world where economics, sociality, and the honors of men thrust themselves between me and the constant nurture of spirituality. However, those feelings are inside me and they reemerge when I summon them earnestly.

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My Mission

Following my return from artillery school at Fort Sill, I enrolled in school for winter quarter and began filling out my papers for a mission. Dave Fotheringham, who had been a week or two ahead of me at Fort Campbell and Fort Sill, was one of the few from my class in school who also went on a mission. He went the same day I did to Bishop Eldon Schmutz to get his interview, and we received our mission calls from Church headquarters on the same day as well. Like every other missionary, I went through the ritual of waiting for the call to come, then meeting the mailman at the bottom of the street. Frank Petty, Cedar City’s postmaster, called to tell me my call had arrived. I picked it up and then, seated in my parents’ bedroom, opened the envelope. “You are called to serve in the Northwestern States Mission . . .” Immediately, I remembered that was where my Grandfather Okerlund had been called. (At the time he served, the mission extended north into Vancouver, British Columbia, which is where my son Chase later served his mission.) I was somewhat relieved that I wasn’t going to learn a language. I hadn’t done well on the language aptitude test and remembered the experience I had in seventh-grade Spanish. I called Dave Fotheringham. Almost unbelievably, he had been called to the same mission, entering the mission home on the same day. We had graduated from high school together, joined the National Guard together, and gone to basic training/Advanced Individual Training (AIT) at the same place. Now, not only had we applied for our missions the same day, but we had been called to the same mission.

Preparing for a Mission

Shortly after receiving my call, my mother arranged for me to begin meeting with Ardella Ford. She lived on Main Street in Cedar City, near 300 South on the east side of the street. She had been a missionary late in her life, and when she came home, she began to contribute to the work by training new missionaries. She was like a preMissionary Training Center (MTC).

REAP AND SOW: A MISSION TO OREGON

1 Salt Lake City Airport, leaving for Oregon, May 1970. 2 Leavitt family saying goodbye to Mike at the airport. From left: Mike, Dane, Mark, Eric, David. 3 Portland, Oregon, with David Fotheringham.

4 Dixie Leavitt with Mike at the Salt Lake City Airport. 5 Missionary Training Center. Mike entering the mission training home, May 1970.

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In many ways, Ardella Ford taught me the gospel of Jesus Christ. Because I had grown up attending church and other forms of instruction, I knew bits and pieces of the gospel and had a broad cultural understanding of the Church, but I did not have a clear picture of the doctrinal foundation. As we reviewed the discussions, a framework used in those days to teach others in an organized way, I began to grasp how all the pieces fit together. The prospect of missionary service made me an eager learner, and Ardella Ford was a willing and able teacher. Historically, departing missionaries are invited to speak in church before they leave. The only thing that I remember from my farewell is standing in front of the congregation; I have no memory of what I said or who else spoke, but it was probably like any one of a thousand missionary departure talks I have heard in my life. I do remember packing my suitcases with my mother and finishing just before I was to leave. I was sitting in my room, thinking, “Oh, I have twenty minutes before I leave. That’s lots of time.” Looking back, I was not prepared spiritually or emotionally.

sobbing as he told his dad he had made a mistake and wanted to come home. We all understood his feelings, as we were all feeling the same set of complex emotions. But he was persuaded to stay and went on to complete his mission, later becoming a successful businessman. While at the mission home in Salt Lake City, I was given a ministerial certificate signed by Joseph Fielding Smith, then the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. It was small, designed to be carried in a suit pocket and in a plastic cover. Reading the words appointing me as a minister of the gospel of Jesus Christ brought a realization I am not sure had fully settled in up to that point.

“

I encountered an Elder Orton who had completed his mission and was headed home. Thirty years later, I would run against Elder Orton for my third term as governor.

As we hit the on-ramp of I-15, I felt like I would never see Cedar City again.

Mission Home in Salt Lake City

Mother and Aunt Faun dropped me off in front of the mission home in Salt Lake. It was an old apartment building located on the block where the Conference Center of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is now. I was surprised how many of the gathering new missionaries from Utah I knew. I knew several from athletic competitions or music camps. There was an instant brotherhood among all of us—lots of common feelings, fears and excitement. On the second day, I walked past a pay phone next to my room. I heard a member of my group

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”

During those four days, several notable general authorities of the Church spoke to the missionaries. These included Spencer W. Kimball and Harold B. Lee, both future presidents of the Church. On Wednesday, President Lee presided over a meeting of all the new missionaries on the top floor of the Salt Lake Temple. I do not know the actual number of new missionaries there were, but three hundred would be a good estimate. To symbolize purity and unity, all of us were dressed in white clothing. President Lee spoke candidly about sacred things and the importance of the work we were being called upon to do. We were part of a worldwide missionary force that at that time was about nine thousand. (Today there are nearly 75,000 serving throughout the world.) Sitting in the temple that day, I felt like part of an army being deployed on a sacred mission. Four days after entering the mission training home, we left. Compared with the preparation given to missionaries today, we were not well trained (missionaries now receive between three to

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twelve weeks of instruction). I was allowed to stay with my family that night, and we reported to the airport Thursday morning. My thoughts were a mix of energy, excitement, and apprehension. At that moment, two years seemed like an endless journey. When we landed in Portland, Oregon, President Grant Stucki and his two assistants, Elders Bach and Buxton, were there to meet us.1 President Stucki was a dentist from Chicago and had a young family. He was called to be a mission president at forty-one years old and had been serving as mission president for a year when I arrived. We went to the mission office, where President Stucki interviewed us. While I waited in the office, I encountered an Elder Bill Orton, who had completed his mission and was headed home. Twenty years later, Bill would become a member of Congress, and thirty years from our mission office meeting, he would be my opponent as I sought a third term as governor. The first night in Oregon we had dinner at the mission home. It was a large home that had previously been a Catholic nunnery. It had a white colonnade porch that sat on white pillars and sat on about a half-acre in a residential neighborhood four blocks from the mission office, which was in the basement of the Portland stake center. At dinner we were each given an envelope containing the name of our companion and area assignment. As we opened them, the mission office staff applauded and told us what a “fired-up” elder our companion was and what wonderful areas we’d been assigned to. My first area was Jerome, Idaho, with Elder John Terry. We were in Zone 9 but not part of any district. Elder Terry and I were known as the Magic Valley Floaters: Magic Valley, because that’s the regional name of that part of Idaho, and floaters because we were on our own with no district supervision. We were, in essence, a twoperson district. The string of connections Dave Fotheringham and I had continued, because he was sent to

Burley, Idaho, just a few miles south of Jerome. We flew together from Portland to Twin Falls, and there we met our companions for the first time.

Jerome, Idaho

I called my parents to tell them of my first assignment. They found the fact that I was going to be serving just a few miles north of the Utah border mildly amusing. Dad said that I reminded him of the cat that we took out to a stack yard in the valley hoping to get rid of it; it nearly beat us home. My first companion, Elder Terry, was a slowtalking South Carolinian. He was tall and thin, a little older than I was. I was the first new missionary he had trained, and he was feeling the pressure of the assignment. We left the airport and drove directly to the house of his favorite member, who lived in the fields south of Jerome. I don’t remember the family’s name, but the wife took good care of the elders. When we arrived, she was bottling pickles, and within ten seconds of our arrival she handed me a giant pickle on a fork with a command: “You’ll enjoy this.”

“

I missed home. I missed having control of my life.

”

I don’t enjoy pickles. However, I was concerned that if I didn’t eat the pickle, I would offend her. So, my first afternoon as a missionary, I literally gagged down a pickle about the size of a cucumber. We then drove to our little house, which sat in the backyard of a home of a member of the Church

1. When a young man becomes a missionary, he takes on the title of elder and goes by “elder” and his last name; likewise, when a young woman becomes a missionary, she takes on the title of “sister,” going by “sister” and her last name.

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1 Mike in his first area, Jerome, Idaho. 2 Mike with Elder Greenwood, his missionary trainer. 3 Elder Chuck Stewart in front of their house in Santa Clara, Oregon, fourteen months into Mike’s mission. 4 Mike in Ontario, Oregon, about seven months into the mission.

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5 House in Jerome, Idaho. 6 Mike in southern Idaho, fascinated by their self-moving sprinklers. Sent photo home to Dixie to see the new technology.

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in that area. We accessed the little house from a utility alley in the middle of the block. It was free-standing, and consisted of a bedroom, which I used; a living room/bedroom combination; a kitchen; and a small bathroom. I’d guess it was four-hundredsquare feet, but proved to be quite comfortable For the next two or three weeks, I was completely occupied with passing the competency tests for teaching, which consisted of memorizing six, hourlong discussions and the twenty-seven missionary scriptures. Once a missionary had passed off those to his zone or district leader, he was granted co-equal status with his companion. That meant you could drive, plan, and take the lead on alternating weeks. I was able to achieve co-equal status in about three weeks, which seemed average. The adjustment to missionary life was not entirely smooth for me. For example, sharing every activity with a companion twenty-four hours a day seemed odd. I anguished over the fact that Elder Terry didn’t want to buy milk when we went shopping. Finally in an interview with Elder Kevin Ramsey, my zone leader, he suggested I just buy my own milk. That hadn’t occurred to me, and I was grateful for the advice. I missed home; I missed having control of my life. I missed being Mike Leavitt, not Elder Leavitt. Every day when we went to the post office, I hoped there would be mail for me, and it was a letdown when I had to leave empty-handed. One evening, we drove past a park where some young adults about my age were playing with a Frisbee. They were in cut-offs and running barefoot, playing and hanging all over each other. I thought to myself, “How did this happen? Two weeks ago, I was dragging Main Street in Cedar City with my girlfriend sitting next to me and a Coke in my hand. Suddenly, I’m a minister of the gospel, working twelve hours a day.” I have vivid memory of pulling up to a stop sign in Jerome and thinking to myself, “I’ve been here a month. I have twenty-three more to go. I’ll never make it.” I suspect it was a short time later that Elder Terry noted that my seatbelt was unbuckled; I had made a conscious decision not to fasten it on the

theory that if we had an accident, I might be hurt badly enough to go home. Things really weren’t that bad, but I was in the process of making—up to that point—the most difficult transition of my life. I was learning all kinds of new skills, like dealing with hostile people. An angry farmer told us to get off his property because we weren’t Christians, but when we told him we were believers in Jesus Christ, he still ran us off. Another time, we were called names by passing carloads of guys our age who made assumptions about our relationship. Elder Terry had to restrain me from leaping out of the car and confronting them. Both were good lessons in learning to endure persecution and act in meekness. In time, things improved. I began to find a rhythm in our work and to feel like I was contributing and making a difference. I began to find pleasure in the work and make friends with other missionaries. Slowly my mind began to turn from home to the privilege and excitement of what I was doing. Elder Terry and I had moderate success together. Most importantly, I formed good habits, like effective studying, good time management, and keeping the rules. Then came a surprise. Six weeks after arriving in Jerome, Elder Terry was transferred to become a zone leader’s companion, a position he had hoped for. That wasn’t a surprise; the surprise was that I got a letter the same day announcing that I would be training a new missionary—an experience that usually came six to nine months into a mission. Not only was the assignment unusual given my short tenure but we were still “floaters,” and had no district leader to guide us.

A New Missionary: Elder Arrington

When transfer day came, Elder Arrington from Denton, Texas, became my companion. We were quite a pair; I’d been out six weeks and he had been out less than one, and we were alone in Jerome, Idaho, tasked to do the Lord’s work. And somehow, we did. We figured it out as we went, asking questions, praying a lot, and using our instincts. The first time Elder Arrington was to teach a discussion on the Word of Wisdom (the Church’s health code) he was extremely nervous because

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he would have to inquire after the investigator’s personal habits, and ask her to give up tea, coffee, tobacco, and alcohol. He asked the question, and she responded that she used all of them. His surprise and alarm could not be hidden. “Oh, do you really?” he asked. I jumped in to smooth things over. In some ways, doing missionary work in Idaho was simply odd. About forty percent of the population were members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints already, and if they were not members, they had a strong opinion about the Church. Our most productive work came when we were teaching people who had been referred by other members. However, because that did not happen often, we had to resort to quite unproductive activities, like going door to door. Going door to door is different in Jerome, Idaho, than in Mexico City or Miami. Most of the people in Jerome were members, and the ones that weren’t had seen missionaries a hundred times. Just to stay busy, we did it anyway. One day, I concluded that going door-to-door with two people was not only ineffective, it was also inefficient to have both of us standing on the same

Mike, about seven months into his mission, in Ontario, Oregon.

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doorstep. It’s important to know that missionaries are supposed to work in pairs, and there are few circumstances where a missionary does not have a companion (usually only when traveling). I concluded to interpret the two-by-two rule differently and concluded as long as we could see each other, it was close enough. My adaption allowed us to work both sides of the street at the same time. After a few days, our efforts and innovation paid off. I knocked on the door of a delightful woman who was in her early twenties. She was a member of the Church, but her husband, Bert Scott, wasn’t. Standing on her porch, she and I talked. She said, “I have a feeling my husband might listen to you. Let me ask him if he’d let you come over.” We called her the next day, and Bert had agreed. An appointment was made. Congregations in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are called wards. Geographically contiguous wards are grouped into an administrative unit called a stake. When I was serving a mission, each stake had a person designated to oversee missionary work within that area, called

REAP AND SOW: A MISSION TO OREGON

stake mission presidents. Full-time missionaries like us were responsible to coordinate closely with each of the stake mission presidents in our area. It turns out that the young woman with whom I had a conversation with on the porch that day was the daughter of the stake mission president in that area. Her father had been uncomfortable with raising the sensitive subject to his daughter or son-inlaw. Consequently, when the father learned we had met his daughter and son-in-law independently and that Bert had agreed to meet with us, it was a moment of real celebration. Years later, I am more understanding of the feelings of the parents. Bert was a terrific person but did not fit their mold. Like all parents, they worried for their daughter, so they considered the circumstances to be a miracle in their lives—one they had prayerfully sought. We taught Bert, and he chose to join the Church. He did it on his own terms—and that was clearly important to him. Later, he became a local church leader. It was my first taste of seeing lives changed in positive ways.

Important Lessons in Jerome

I learned a great lesson from that experience. I came to realize even though working door to door was inefficient, if I just kept trying, moving forward in the best way I could, good things could happen. What occurred brought leveraged value for the parents, Bert Scott and his wife, their children, and possibly their children’s children. Had we been sitting at our apartment that day because we did not have people to talk with, it clearly would not have occurred. I related it to a lesson I learned playing football. When things get hard, keep your feet moving. I learned other important lessons in Jerome, Idaho, many that came when my shortcomings were revealed. One afternoon, some well-versed missionaries from another church tied me in knots with their arguments. I was completely unprepared and humiliated. For many mornings after that, I studied and prepared a response so it would never happen again. I still have my missionary Bible with the notes of my findings. Having my beliefs questioned intensely forced me to study and to spiritually reconcile myself with doctrines I had given little thought to.

The grapevine in our mission was a powerful force. Our leader, President Stucki, like others who do that job throughout the world, appointed assistants to help him with various tasks. These assistants are experienced missionaries who have demonstrated their capability, and, with all the responsibility given to them, their trustworthiness. Thus, serving as the president’s assistant gave missionaries lots of stature. One time, we heard that the mission president’s assistants would be in our area and would be making unannounced visits to missionary apartments to check on compliance to the rules. The practice was known as “bombing” the elders. Knowing that they would likely be in the area, we were ready. The apartment was flawlessly clean, we were up and on schedule. Missionaries were to memorize and practice a specific scripture each day, and we had scriptures all prepared. We were ready. Our intelligence was good—that day there was a loud knock on the door and the assistants entered. For two new missionaries, this was like having the chair of the Joint Chiefs dropping by the barracks; my heart was racing. They questioned us, looked at our plan for the day, inspected the apartment, listened to our daily scripture study, and pronounced us nearly perfect. Then my new missionary companion, Elder Arrington, couldn’t resist bragging, “We heard you were coming.” In our naïve way, we tried to find ways of keeping the rules while expediting the work. On the last day of the month, we were out of miles, but we had a teaching appointment about twenty miles away. (When missionaries are given a car to drive, they have a certain number of miles each month that they need to stay under.) We drove to the back roads of the county, turned the car around and backed our way to the house. Driving in reverse rolled enough miles off the car that we were able to drive home. Another important lesson I learned was to rely on guidance from prayer. Elder Arrington and I were simply inexperienced. We were alone without any supervision or help. We had begun teaching a woman who seemed

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very sincere but had a lot of questions—many that I did not know the answer to. Before going to her home, I prayed for help, basically admitting my worry to God that I did not know the answers to the questions and that I needed help. During the discussion, the woman asked me a direct question and I did not know the answer. It was clear it was important to her. When someone asks a question and you do not immediately know the answer too it is rather normal to start talking, hoping something will come to you. So that’s what I did, and the answer came. I was not faking it, I just felt the thoughts form in my mind and they felt right to me. Once concluded, I rushed back to the apartment to research the answer, and the answer that had come to my mind was the right one. The experience gave me confidence. I did not feel empowered to make things up, but I did feel more confident that if I prayed for help it would come. I also learned over time the importance of attributing the help to God and not my own cleverness.

Ontario, Oregon

After about four months in Jerome, I was transferred. The normal pattern in the mission was to have a missionary become a district leader’s companion in his second area, but because I had been training a new missionary, I guess President Stucki figured I didn’t need that experience and sent me to Ontario, Oregon. Ontario was a town on the Oregon/Idaho border that reminded me a lot of Cedar City in its size and makeup. It had a couple of congregations or wards, and there a small college. President Stucki told me he was sending me there because he thought the institute had more potential than it was yielding.

Outside Mike’s little house on a midblock alley, Jerome, Idaho. May 1970.

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President Stucki also told me that I was going to have a companion that needed a positive experience. Elder Jeff Davies was from Fillmore, Utah. He had been on the verge of leaving his mission. While I am certain, based on my own transition into the mission field, that it was far more complex than this, the reason I was told was that Elder Davies refused to wear dress shoes—he wanted to wear cowboy boots. It came to showdown, but on the way

REAP AND SOW: A MISSION TO OREGON

to the airport, they compromised that Elder Davies could wear them in off-hours, which he did. I liked Elder Davies. We got along well despite our different personalities and backgrounds. We had success together, and I feel confident it set a course that allowed him to finish his mission. He continues to be a good friend today. In Ontario, I worked with another one of my favorite companions, Elder Craig Mitchell. He was a barber in Ogden before his mission and gave me a haircut every week. (He was later an usher at my wedding, and we also have remained friends.) While we were missionaries, we lived in the basement of a member couple’s house. The home was on the outskirts of town, surrounded by onion patches and corn. I don’t remember the couple’s last name, but the husband’s name was Frank. He was in his eighties and could not hear. He picked me up at the bus depot because in Ontario we didn’t have a car. As we drove toward his house, I started making conversation. He turned his head to point his good ear toward me and in doing so, turned the wheel toward the curb. We were headed for the curb when I think he read the fear in my eyes and corrected the car. He would go out in the morning to start the car and race the engine for many minutes while it warmed up. I finally figured out it was because he couldn’t hear the engine unless it was racing. Ontario had some great members who became my friends. The Mathewsons were people who had lived in Bunkerville and knew my grandparents. We spent Thanksgiving with them that year, and I ended up seeing them several times after my mission. Hall of Fame baseball player Harmon Killebrew and his family lived just through the field from our apartment. He was playing for Minnesota at that time, and he and his wife were active in the Church. On one occasion we went to his home, hoping to watch the World Series. He was working in the yard and said he’d had enough baseball that year. In Ontario, we met a Catholic priest named David, who had been assigned to the hospital in the area. He was a character. We got to know him well and would occasionally have lunch with him at the hospital. He liked us because we visited the patients who were members of the Church.

One day he told us about a list that the ministers’ group in the area assembled of new move-ins to help each other find potential members. David suggested we get a copy of it from the Baptist minister who led the effort. We tried to get the new move-in list David told us about, but the minister would not return our calls. It was evident he didn’t want us to have the list. One day we went by his home, which was next to the Baptist church, hoping we could at least make him tell us no directly. We knocked on the door. No answer. We began to walk away. I felt impressed to go back and knock again. As we did, I had the thought that I should look in his mailbox. To my surprise, I found several copies of that month’s list. I felt fine about taking one. As we walked down the sidewalk from the minister’s house, I scanned the list. One listing nearly jumped off the page: “The Johnson family; fourteen children; looking for a church.” It took a couple of days to find them at home but when we did, it was exciting. We taught them about the Church and eleven of them became members. It is ironic that it happened because of our friendship with a Catholic priest and a hijacked list from a hostile Baptist minister. I learned another valuable lesson on faith in Ontario. A woman who was a member of the Church had a son that went on a mission to France just after I arrived. A few months later, she reported to me that he hadn’t yet been asked to dinner by a member. Some weeks later I was asked to arrange a lunch to feed all the missionaries in that part of Oregon after a conference. I called her to request that she prepare part of the meal. In passing, I joked that if she did this, somebody in France would take care of her son. A few weeks after that conversation, she expressed in a rather emotional way how she had accepted my promise in faith. She had a letter from her son that reported his first dinner appointment— on the very day that she had fed the missionaries. The lesson to me was that she had taken my promise at face value even though I had said it jokingly.

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1 4

2 5

1 Mike and Elder Mike McManus behind the elders’ apartment in Ontario, Oregon. 2 Elder Craig Mitchell, Mike, and Elder Drake Self at the mission home in Portland, Oregon. Elder Mitchell and Mike served together in Ontario, Oregon about five months into Mike’s mission. 3 Mike on the Oregon Coast, June 1971.

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4 Mike and his companion Elder Alan Berdick, in Hillsboro, Oregon. April 1971. 5 From left: Elder John Greenwood, Mike, Elder David Fotheringham, unknown. First month in Mike’s mission. 6 Elder Johnson and Mike in Hillsboro, Oregon. May 1971.

REAP AND SOW: A MISSION TO OREGON

I was sobered by it. It seems the Lord rewarded her faith and fulfilled the promise. Ontario was among my favorite areas as a missionary. We were successful, the members liked us, and we had fun combinations of elders. Our apartment, however, was not particularly good. The bathroom was made memorable by the fact that the shower was a pipe that pointed down from the ceiling and you drew a curtain around yourself while standing over a floor drain. Not pretty, but it worked. We did not have a car in Ontario. We used bicycles or walked everywhere. Occasionally, we would borrow a car or persuade a friendly member to give us a ride.

Portland, Oregon

After several months in Ontario, I was transferred to Portland to be Elder Earl Gage’s companion. He was a new zone leader after having served in the mission office as mission secretary. Gage was from Houston, Texas, and a great person. Gentle and fun, dedicated but down-to-earth. He was a convert to the Church. As the zone leader, Elder Gage was responsible to work with different elders every day. In the mornings we joined the elders and worked in their area, then in the evenings we worked in ours. We were in Portland but had responsibility for the area which extended to the coast, including Lake Oswego, Beaverton, and Hillsboro. Periodically we worked in Tillamook, Oregon, and Astoria, Oregon. In our area, we had the Portland State Institute. It was a fruitful area; those we taught were different than others in previous areas. They were generally students or young professionals who were not only pursuing education, but they were becoming adults, and were in the process of establishing their own values and beliefs.

Hillsboro, Oregon

After a few months with Elder Gage, I was transferred to Hillsboro, Oregon to serve with Alan Berbert, an elder from California. Berbert and I had a great relationship. He was a surfer from California who had attended BYU and was a quiet and steady elder. We lived in the upstairs of a member lady’s

house out in the country. Hillsboro is very different now from when I lived there. It is now a large suburb of Portland; Nike is headquartered there. The two months or so I was in Hillsboro were my least productive months. Some of that can be attributed to the fact that when Alan Berbert left, I was teamed with an elder from Scottsdale, Arizona, who for various reasons was simply biding his time to go home. He was actually rather steady as a worker, but his heart just wasn’t in it. He was far more senior in the mission than I and we spent a lot time just going through the motions.

Coos Bay

In June of 1971, I had been on my mission thirteen months. At a mission event, President Stucki pulled me aside to say that he was assigning me to become a district leader in Coos Bay, Oregon. While I was pleased to be assuming a leadership role for the first time, I was rather unenthused with the idea of going to Coos Bay. It was widely considered a hard place where President Stucki sent problem elders. President Stucki was aware of the reputation and took care to assure me it was not a long-term assignment and that it was not a reflection of his admiration; he just needed me to go there. Coos Bay turned out to be not just a successful period of my mission but one of the most memorable and enjoyable. It was remote. We saw a zone leader once a month because the only practical way to get there was by commercial airline from Ashland. The district covered about 150 miles of the Oregon coastline. It was beautiful. The district consisted of me and three other elders. It was a collection of people to whom I would likely never have naturally gravitated, but whom I learned to love. (Just as an example, I was the only one of the four that had ever been on a date.) My companion was Elder Adair from Hawaii, who at the time looked very young. He spoke Hawaiian-pidgin English, which was the language of his native culture in Hawaii. The other elders were Alan Scholes from Tremonton, Utah, and Rick Jones from Detroit. Alan became a computer programmer after his

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mission, while Rick was an aspiring concert pianist. On Saturdays, Elder Jones opened his piano books and practiced at the kitchen table as if it were the keyboard of a grand piano. Coos Bay was an area where missionary work had not been successful for years. But we worked hard and were greatly blessed. Our little unlikely group reversed all the trends, and within three months we were the top district in the mission.

Larry and I became good friends. One night I asked him, “Larry, why have you chosen not to join the Church?” He said, “Because the missionaries are always trying to push a baptismal date on me.”

Missionaries are occasionally prone to practical joking. Elder Jones and I enjoyed one of our best with Elder Adair. One month, the mission magazine, The Motivator, had an error in it. A decimal was out of place and it looked as if an elder named Craig Chugg had been associated with thousands of people joining the Church. As we sat around reading the magazine, Adair, who had only been out a couple of months said, “Wow, look at this Elder Chugg. He is credited with bringing more than a thousand people into the Church.”

A few minutes later, I said, half-jokingly, “Larry, you ought to just choose one yourself sometime and surprise everybody.”

Jones and I picked up on the situation with brilliant harmony. “Oh, yes. Elder Chugg is the most amazing elder. He baptizes entire congregations . . .” This went on for nearly a month. We continued to build the lore of Elder Chugg: he had memorized entire books of scripture, he could hold an audience spellbound. Adair bought it all.

Larry then simply said, “I have decided to be baptized next Saturday.” Tears flowed and a warm spirit filled the room. This was a moment she and others had prayed would occur for many years.

Before the next magazine came out, Elder Adair got transferred. What are the odds that in a mission of 185 missionaries, Elder Adair would be transferred to serve with Elder Chugg? It has to rank as one of the all-time amazing follow-ons to a practical joke. The rest of us could hardly contain ourselves, but we did. Elder Adair went to his next area with extremely high expectations. One of my favorite people who was baptized during my time in Coos Bay was Larry Zitzelberger. He lived in a small coastal town called Gold Beach. He was a logger. His wife was a member of the Church, and Larry had been taught by missionaries several times over nine years, always opting not to actually join the Church. Interestingly however, he was an active participant in the branch of the Church. He was also great to

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the missionaries, allowing us to stay at his house when we traveled to the remote parts of the district. I have wonderful memories of pancakes he would make on the mornings we stayed at their home.

Larry responded, “That’s a good idea. How about next Saturday?” I will never forget what happened next. Larry and I walked out onto a screen porch where his wife was working on getting their children to bed. “Sister Zitzelsberger,” I said, “Larry has an announcement to make.”

Why then, and not years before? I feel certain he has asked himself that question. But it is yet another indication that important decisions like that happen in their own time. Larry was active in the branch, serving in roles that were appropriate for his status as a nonmember. He was widely loved by the other members. However, the time had to be right when he felt it was a deliberate decision by him. It should be no other way. The following Saturday at a widely attended service, Larry Zitzelsberger was baptized.

Eugene, Oregon

By the time I’d been in Coos Bay for three months, I had come to enjoy the place and the people. But then I was transferred to be the district leader of Eugene, Oregon. Eugene was where I lived for nearly six months, and by the end it began to feel like home to me. My first companion was Jack Paris of Houston,

REAP AND SOW: A MISSION TO OREGON

1 Mike (twenty-one years old), in the mission home during the time that he was President Stucki’s assistant. 2 Sister Sharon Stucki and Mike in Portland at the mission home, April 1972.

3 Mission staff gathered for dinner at the mission home with the Stuckis. Mike as assistant to the president, living in the mission home with the Stuckis, February 1972. 4 Sherry Stucki and Mike, 1972. 5 Mike in Coos Bay, around June 1971.

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Texas. Elder Paris had only been serving for a couple of months; he was delightfully fun, with a thick accent and quick sense of humor. He had stringy blond hair that hung straight with no part. Our area was in the Santa Clara ward. We lived in a very small house that sat in the middle of a field of horses, which meant we had to open and close the gate each time we left. The apartment was a frame building with no furnace or insulation. It had a small sitting area with two bunkbeds, and the shower was metal with a small water heater.

“

One thing missionary work teaches is that the Adversary will provide obstacles, always.

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The area had become rather fruitful during the previous months with some wonderful converts, and I have stayed close to several people from Eugene over many years. One of the prominent families in the Santa Clara area was the Don Ainge family. The Ainge family had five sons, no girls, so I related well to them. The oldest son was named Doug Ainge. He had been a star basketball player at the high school and was playing at a community college, with every expectation he would transfer to a university his junior year. The second son, David, was in high school and also an athlete. The middle son was in junior high. He was a scrappy kid named Danny. Yes, that Danny. He went on to be an All-American at BYU in basketball, later playing professional baseball, and then professional basketball with the Celtics. It is accurate to say that I beat Danny Ainge one-on-one in basketball while I was on my mission. However, he was only about twelve.

Zone Four

One night President Stucki called me to be the leader of zone 4, which took in the corridor between

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Baker, Oregon, down to Napa, Idaho. My friend Nick Snyder from Eugene volunteered to drive me from Eugene to Baker because he had business there. We had one of those memorable talks on the way that bond people for life, and we have been friends since. In fact, he and Jean drove to Cedar City from Oregon to attend my wedding reception. Serving as zone leader in zone 4 of the Oregon Mission was important leadership training for me. The arrangement was unusual: I had two companions that I worked with in an area in Baker, Oregon. That’s where my belongings were kept, but on Monday morning they would take me to the bus station on Baker’s Main Street and I would travel to LeGrand, Oregon, where the missionaries there would pick me up. We would work for a day, I’d sleep on their couch, and the next morning ride to Ontario, Oregon, and so on until Friday when I arrived in Napa, the bottom of the zone. Friday night I’d ride a Greyhound back to Baker, my companions would pick me up, I’d spend the weekend with them and head out again the next week. In essence, I had no missionary companion. After a relatively short time in zone 4, we had a tri-zone conference with Elder Harold B. Lee. During my interview with President Stucki, he told me I was being transferred into the mission office to be one of his assistants. Life as the mission president’s assistant was wonderful. We lived in the mission home with the Stucki family and the other mission staff. The family quarters were on the second floor; the mission assistants lived on the top floor in a converted room in the attic. The mission employed a cook, but the missionaries were responsible to clean up. Like everything else in our mission, we turned it into a record-setting exercise figuring out ways to shave seconds off our work. The mission was divided into the north and south with one assistant supervising four zones and the other supervising five. My first companion was a great friend of mine: Alan Archibald from Tremonton. We had been in the same zone several times and had great chemistry. There had existed

REAP AND SOW: A MISSION TO OREGON

1 4

1 Mike and Elder Alan Archibald behind the elders’ apartment in Ontario, Oregon 2 Top left: Mike, Dane, Mark. Bottom left: David, Eric. All the brothers picking Mike up from his mission. 3 Mike (twenty-one years old), with Elder Dave Fotheringham, President Grant Stucki, and Alan Archibald after a mission conference in southern Idaho. Archibald had recently concluded his mission and came to visit. April 1972.

From left: Mike, David Fotheringham, President Grant Stucki, Alan Archibald, unknown. 4 Mike (twenty-one years old), heading home from Oregon, with family packing the car. 5 Within a month of returning from Oregon. Dixie and Anne gave Mike their old car, an Oldsmobile Toronado.

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between us a quiet aspiration to end up as companions in the office. Each month we traveled the mission with President Stucki for zone conferences. We gave talks and taught the elders and sisters. We chose a theme with President Stucki and organized the conference around that theme. We traveled extensively without President Stucki. We had unlimited miles available on our car, and since the mission covered all of Oregon, half of Idaho, and parts of California and Washington, there was plenty of territory to cover. Our primary task was to supervise the zone leaders and to be available to them as a resource. We did evaluations on them periodically and helped them solve problems. We sat in counsel with President Stucki on many matters, including transfers and companionship problems. It was an executive experience. My second companion as assistant was Dave Fotheringham. You would think that applying the same day, getting calls the same day to the same mission, going to the same first area would seem remarkable, but add being final companions and you have an unbelievable string of events. He actually left two or three weeks before I did, so my final companion was Elder Bruce Britton, who was a person with a big personality.

The Stucki Family

My relationship with the Stucki family was an important part of this experience. We lived in the same house, traveled together, ate our meals together. They made us part of their family. They had four children, the oldest being a girl, Sharee. She was a beautiful young woman who had just graduated from high school. Grant was the oldest son, probably fifteen years old or so. The Stuckis also had a set of twins they called Randy and Candy, who were nine or ten, I’m guessing.

Sister Stucki had a strong personality—a biggerthan-life personality. She was also inclusive and loving toward the elders Sister Stucki and I formed a strong relationship. Sister Stucki always asked me to take her to the grocery store, and we stayed up late talking about a variety of subjects. She liked me, and I liked her.

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On the last day of my mission, my parents came to pick me up in Portland. It was such a strange time. Seeing my brothers and parents for the first time in two years, trying to relate to them and at the same time trying to manage the relationships I had with the Stuckis felt awkward. The closeness I had at the time with the Stuckis was hard for my parents to put into perspective, and it hurt their feelings. I’m afraid I wasn’t sensitive enough to it. To conclude my time as a missionary, we had a testimony meeting in the mission home where I shared my experiences, and then I went with my parents to the hotel to spend a little time with them. If leaving the mission field and seeing my family for the first time in two years wasn’t enough to make the time memorable, my parents took care of that with an announcement on the way home. My mother was going to have a baby, who would become my youngest brother, Matthew. President Stucki and his family finished their mission within a month of my departure. They planned to move to California, where he would start a dental practice. A general understanding developed that I would spend time with them, specifically Sharee, their daughter. Sharee was attractive and fun, and clearly found the idea to her liking as well. After I had been formally released, and at the suggestion of Sister Stucki, we spent a little time together and discussed plans to meet in California when they returned. Sharee and I wrote and telephoned each other after I returned home. I spent time in California and the relationship budded quickly into a short romance. However, a whole series of realities set in and the relationship faded about as quickly as it began, ending in mid-July of that year, just in time for me to meet Jackie. Missionary service is a great blessing in the lives of those doing service. Spending two years focused on spiritual things changes a person, and I’ve observed how it produced the same transformative outcome for my children as it did for me. I left a boy on the verge of manhood; I returned a man on the verge of adult life.

11 Meeting and Marrying Jackie 1972 to 1973 • Life After Mission; Dating Jackie; Jackie's Family; Marriage; Garbage Business Once I was released from my mission, the momentum of my life shifted into hyper speed. My plan was to attend Brigham Young University (BYU) in the fall and get my general education requirements out of the way; every other life choice I would make as I went. I had law school in the back of my mind, and, following advice from my dad, I decided to get my insurance license. I hadn’t intended to make it my life’s work; it just seemed like a good thing to do while I was in school. Dad arranged for me to spend several days working with insurance companies to form relationships and gain an understanding of what various people did. I spent a couple of days at the Travelers Insurance Company in Salt Lake City. Most of the time, I was with a young, personal lines underwriter named Ted Barrett. Another man, Jim Blake, was a career Travelers employee and at the time was the branch manager. He suggested that I attend a Travelers Agent School at their home office in Hartford. It was six weeks of concentrated exposure in a classroom setting. I applied, hoping to attend in the spring of the following year. I visited other companies, including USF&G in Salt Lake City, which was one of Dixie Leavitt Agency’s (DLA) best relationships. At

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USF&G, I got to know some of the finest people I’ve met in business. I did the same thing at other insurance company offices. It was a great way to learn and to develop relationships. Looking back, people were remarkable in the way they mentored me. It was evident to me that they were doing so out of respect for my father and the relationship they had with him.

“

Excuse me, I think I’ve met you before.

”

Years later, the relationships I formed during that first summer had deepened and expanded. It helped me understand the value of mentoring others early in their career and development—it pays big dividends later.

Dixie Leavitt Agency

My work at DLA was essentially on-the-job training. Our business model required that we contact potential clients and persuade them to allow our firm to make a proposal when their insurance came up for renewal. We gathered information about the business, filled out applications for various insurance companies, and waited for their underwriters to give us their quotes. We then presented the best quote to the client and hoped to get the business either on the basis of a lower price or a demonstration that we knew more about how to adequately cover their exposures. My practice was to make cold calls to businesses, seeking an expiration date on their current policies. I’d try to figure what I could, read as much as I could about that kind of business, and then attempt to put together a better policy. My filing system was a box of 3 x 5 cards. Each card noted a business and was grouped by expiration date, or what we called “x-dates.” After I called on an account, I kept a record of x-dates so I could call with a proposal when the policy ran out. My goal was to have a full box of expiration x-dates. Ken Middleton, who worked at DLA, was helpful to me, as was Sandra Maxwell, who had worked in the agency for a long time.

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While I wasn’t making a lot of money in the insurance business, I found other ways to generate cash. I bought a mobile home that had been damaged, repaired it, and sold it at a profit of about $1,200. I saved that money and a year later used it to buy an engagement ring.

The First Time I Saw Jackie

On July 9, 1972, I attended church at the summer student ward, which was held at the institute building. I had just returned home the previous month from missionary service in Oregon. My mother was in the stake Relief Society presidency and spoke in the ward that day. As I walked in, I noticed an attractive woman wearing an orange dress seated next to the east wall of the chapel. I looked over at her several times during the meeting.

When the meeting concluded, I made inquiries of my mother and Ann Hansen, who was the stake Relief Society president, as to whether they knew anything about the woman in the orange dress. Through Ann’s sources, I was able to establish two things: that the woman’s name was Jackie Smith, and that she was a beauty queen of some sort. As I was standing in the west lobby of the institute building, I could see that Jackie was leaving, and I wanted to get acquainted with her. Frankly, she seemed a little beyond my reach, but I figured nothing ventured, nothing gained. She was starting toward the door, so I said, “Excuse me, I think I’ve met you before.” It was a lousy line but sufficient to halt her exit and begin a conversation. We talked for a few minutes. I learned that she had just finished college at Utah State and was in Cedar City for the summer, performing in the Utah Shakespeare Festival as a dancer and acting in small parts. She had attended Southern Utah State College for a year before graduating from Utah State University, and therefore had lots of friends in Cedar City. I told her that the next night my brothers and I were having a steak fry at our Navajo Lake cabin, and asked her if she would like to go with me. She agreed, we exchanged information, and I went home to tell my brothers they had to get dates so they could cover me.

MEETING AND MARRYING JACKIE

1 Jackie, one year old 2 Christie (eleven years old), Dixie Lou (nine years old), Kathie (seven years old), Jackie (nine years old), 1957

3 Christie (sixteen years old), Dixie Lou (fourteen years old), Kathie (thirteen years old), Jackie (twelve years old), 1962 4 Jackie in a dance recital

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The night at the cabin was a success. My brothers got dates and all went well. I don’t remember much beyond that except that I was obviously interested in more. During the next couple of days, I learned that Jackie was musically talented and had been first runner-up in the Miss Utah pageant. Much of this information came from Scott Boyter, a guy from Cedar City who was in his mid to late twenties. He told me he had made a serious run at Jackie, but that she had made it clear she was going to the University of Utah in the fall and that she wasn’t interested in any romantic relationships. The following Wednesday, the student ward had an activity planned, again at Navajo Lake at a campground. Jackie was there. Kelly Hansen was with me, so I told Jackie and her friends that we were going over to the other side of the lake for something and asked if she wanted to go. She and her friends agreed. But for about a week after that, I didn’t ask her out. I was discouraged by Scott Boyter’s report and had concluded there probably wasn’t much promise, so I figured I would pay attention to the Boyter discussion. The whole beauty queen thing was also somewhat intimidating to me, and I found it hard to believe that she was interested anyway. The ward again had an activity, this time a swimming party. Jackie was not there, but a guy named John Clarke swam over to me and explained that he was the leader of Jackie’s family home evening group. He was wondering why I hadn’t asked her out again. I told him about the Scott Boyter conversation. He told me that was inconsistent with his conversations with Jackie, and he had it on good authority that Jackie was hoping I’d ask her out again. In fact, he pointed out, she was over at her apartment right then, and that if I had any sense I’d go over there that night. I swam a lap of the pool so as to not seem too conspicuous, exited the pool, and headed for Jackie’s apartment, which was in a basement right across from the old auditorium on Third West, known as Mrs. Rice’s basement.

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Our relationship began from there to pick up a little momentum. During that time, I attended a performance at the Utah Shakespeare Festival with Kelly Hansen. Kelly leaned over during her onstage entrance and said, “Leavitt, she’s beautiful.” After about four dates I was still feeling rather insecure about the relationship. One day we were walking from the auditorium to her apartment, and we got to the street. While we waited for a car, I offered her my hand, and we walked across the street. It was the first time we held hands.

“

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Leavitt, she’s beautiful.

After five or six dates, I planned an evening alone at our cabin. We built a fire and talked for a couple of hours. It was the kind of deep, searching conversation that opens people’s souls. I talked mostly about my mission and the passion I’d felt. I told her experience after experience as we sat in front of the fire. She was a good listener that night. Then we walked to the deck in front of the cabin. It was pitch-black and the sky was crystal clear. It felt like the right moment, and with very few words, we kissed. It was a remarkably romantic place, time, and moment. I remember we drove back to Cedar City and parked in back of Rice’s apartment. Neither of us wanted the night to end. That night introduced a new dynamic into our relationship: pretty serious romance. We continued to date and spend nearly all our social time together. Jackie had been accepted into a master’s degree program at the University of Utah, and I was planning to get a bachelor’s degree at BYU. It looked like we’d just have to conduct a relationship between the U and BYU.

Second Counselor

One afternoon, Tom Williams came to our house. He sat in the living room and talked with my parents, who then invited me in for the discussion. He worked sheep with his father, but also had a PhD in economics from Utah State, and he taught at SUSC.

MEETING AND MARRYING JACKIE

1 Lewis Smith, WWII Army 2 Newton Grade School, seventh- and eighth-grade students, 1932. Top row , from left: Pearl Jenkins, Seymour Jenkins. Third row : Nolan Griffin, Duane Griffin, Russell Barker, Owen Larsen, unknown. Second Row : Lear Jorgensen, Earl Hancey, Mervin

Goodsell, Keith Larsen, Cyril Christensen, Grant Tubbs, unknown. Front row : Earl Wengren, Leatha Peterson, Cleo Christensen, Mr. Amos Griffin, Arlean Griffin, Beth Garner, Ortel Christensen.

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1 SUSC cheerleaders, 1970. In the tree, from left: Jackie Smith, Patrice Holt, Carol Nelson, Paula Thompson, On the ground, from left: Penny Bauer, Creta Rasmussen, Jolene Robins

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2 1971 SUU Homecoming Queen 3 Newton, home of the Smith family 4 Jackie as Polly in The Boyfriend

MEETING AND MARRYING JACKIE

It turns out he was actually there to meet me. He had been called to be the bishop of a college branch.1 The church had recently initiated a pattern of leadership in college/university branches and wards where students could be called to serve as counselors to the bishop. Tom was interested in asking me to serve as one of his counselors. A couple of weeks later, I was called by President Gail Duncan to be Tom Williams’s second counselor. It came as a surprise, and caused me to reflect on whether going to BYU was the right decision. Ultimately, I made the decision to stay in Cedar City. Initially the first counselor was Larry Brough, but when he left to enter the Air Force, Doug Grimshaw was called as second counselor and I was made first counselor. Clarence Randall, one of the Randall brothers who owned the 7-Up bottling/ distributing company (the same Randalls from whom my friends, five years earlier, had attempted to steal soda), was the executive secretary. Serving in the branch presidency as a college student profoundly shaped my post-mission life by focusing my efforts on good things. I felt I was held to a much higher standard than most students, and I was placed in situations that required me to use the spiritual tools that I had used in the mission field. We organized the branch from scratch each fall, requiring us to listen closely to the Spirit. Tom Williams was a good example in every way; he was a great mentor and friend, always treating his counselors as equals but constantly teaching us. During the first year I was in the presidency, I was dating Jackie. We would stay up so late on Saturday nights that when presidency meetings would start at 6 a.m., I struggled to stay awake. So I volunteered to do anything that would get me on my feet. About the time of my calling to the bishopric, Jackie made the decision to defer a master’s degree until spring. It’s hard to know if the decision for either of us to stay was clearly about the other, but our developing relationship was definitely a factor.

Missing Jackie

When the summer session of school and the Shakespeare festival were over, Jackie went home to be with her family. As our time together was winding down, Jackie and I had invested some energy in the new relationship, but were not yet at the point where I could admit the anxiety I was feeling about her returning home to Newton. I found myself missing her, so we talked by telephone most days. Luckily, I had the chance to see her in person when our family home evening group planned a gathering in Salt Lake City, at Temple Square. I was genuinely excited to see Jackie, and I remember her playfully hiding behind a pillar at the tabernacle when we saw each other. I was able to arrange for the girls to stay at my Aunt Faun’s home and the group spent a fair amount of time there. Later that month, I arranged to drive to Cache Valley to see Jackie. It felt conspicuous and a bit of an overreach to invite myself to make the 339mile trip from Cedar City to Newton to see her, so I invented a reason to be there. To validate my cover story, I dropped by Tremonton, a small town in neighboring Box Elder County, to see Alan Archibald, a missionary friend, and then quickly set out on the real purpose of my trip. Alan assured me Newton was just on the other side of the mountains to the east, and he suggested a shortcut that would save me some time. However, he warned it would involve traveling a short distance on a dirt road. Well, I wandered for more than an hour on progressively smaller and smaller dirt roads far better suited for a four-wheel drive truck than the Oldsmobile I had borrowed from my parents. Finally, I crossed the ridge of the mountain and caught an elevated glimpse of Cache Valley as I descended. At the bottom of the mountain range, I turned onto a paved road, and drove in the direction of a small town I could see as I crossed the summit. As I approached the town, I was greeted by a sign that said, “Entering Newton, Utah, Population 320.” I was entering Jackie’s world.

1. In areas where there are not enough members to form a ward, leaders form what is called a branch. Colleges often have branches or wards specifically for young single adult members of the Church.

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Newton is a classic farm community, eight miles directly west of Smithfield and fifteen miles northwest of Logan. In 1972, the town had a small mercantile store, a church, and an elementary school, all of which surrounded a park. The balance of the town was laid out in square blocks. Almost all the homes had corrals, stack yards for hay, and other markers of its agricultural heritage. A couple of blocks west of the center of town, two homes sat in close proximity to each other, separated only by a double garage. The green-colored frame house on the corner was older than the newer, red-brick home next door. A clerk at the general store had directed me to the red house in response to my request for directions. Then, he added with a grin, “You’re not the first man to stop here trying to find out where the Smith girls live.”

Lewis and Cleo Smith

Yes, the red brick house belonged to the Smith family. Lewis Calder Smith and Cleo Christensen Smith, Jackie’s parents, lived there as they raised their four daughters. Jackie was the youngest.

Both Lewis and Cleo had deep Cache Valley roots. In fact, they had been high school sweethearts at North Cache High School. Lewis was a year ahead of Cleo in school. Lewis’s father, also named Lewis Calder Smith, and his mother Veda, were both teachers. Their son, Lewis, was the oldest of three children and the only boy, born May 25, 1918. The family, including younger sisters Mary and Donna, were raised in the family home in Smithfield. Jackie’s father, Lewis, was a gifted athlete. Following high school, he won a place as a sprinter on the BYU track team. At the time that World War II started in Europe, Lewis had transferred back to Cache Valley, where he joined the Utah National Guard, worked at a grocery store, and attended classes at Utah State University. Following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and the United States

“

entry into the war in December 1941, Lewis was soon drawn into the active-duty armed forces. He was trained as a fighter pilot, flying the U.S. Army Air Corps’ P-40 fighter plane by his early twenties. Cleo, born March 7, 1919, was the only daughter of Alphonso Christensen and Norma Olive Benson Christensen. The Christensens were the farming family who occupied the green house next to the house where Jackie’s family lived. Alphonso’s parents—Jackie’s great-grandparents—had lived there before them. When Lewis entered the military, Cleo was enrolled at Utah State University, where she pursued her love of dance and education by qualifying for a teaching certificate in physical education. She taught school while Lewis was away at military training and service. The couple made plans to marry upon Lewis’s graduation from flight school in Arizona, but the day was cut short by Lewis’s commanding officer. The officer refused to give the new pilot a weekend pass, relenting only to offer a two-hour pass. The young couple were married on February 8, 1943, and had no honeymoon. Lewis returned to the base a married man and Cleo returned to Newton. The couple could only correspond by letter, up to a point weeks later when they were able to finally spend two weeks together in San Francisco as Lewis awaited deployment to New Guinea in the southwest Pacific. Lewis’s time at war was dramatic and full of dangers. He flew 154 missions over a year and a half in combat in New Guinea. His aircraft was riddled by enemy fire numerous times, including one mission when his plane took heavy fire, and the bullets and shrapnel injured his arm and leg and knocked out his instrument panel. He had shot down one Japanese plane himself during the dogfight, and squadron mates formed up alongside him afterward to help guide him safely back to the air base. Lewis was awarded the Purple Heart for that mission and two other medals for his wartime service. Upon

You’re not the first man to stop here trying to find out where the Smith girls live.

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MEETING AND MARRYING JACKIE

returning back to the states, he trained new pilots in Texas and Louisiana. Like so many war brides, Cleo toughed out nearly four years of worry and waiting as the war unfolded. Then, finally, she joined her second lieutenant home for his two assignments back in the United States. Once the war and his service ended, Lewis and Cleo bought some of the Christensen farmland and built the red brick home next to the Christensen residence. In rapid succession their four daughters were born. Christie was first in 1946; Dixie second in 1948; Kathie third in 1949; and finally, Jackie in 1950. Cleo set aside her teaching career to be at home until Jackie started second grade. She became a school guidance counselor in the 1960s—the first woman to be hired for that position in the local school system. As a counselor, she served children at North Cache Junior High and Sky View High School in Smithfield until the end of her career. People still comment to Jackie and me as to the remarkable influence she had on their lives. Lewis, too, became prominent in the community. He served as chairman of the Farmers Grain Cooperative in Ogden and chairman of the Utah Fish and Game Board. The Smith household was a busy and, by necessity, an orderly place. Until Jackie had her fifth birthday, all the girls shared the same bedroom. Then, an upstairs room was remodeled and the two oldest sisters roomed there. However, everyone in the house shared the same bathroom—clearly a situation that fostered good citizenship. The girls were naturally talented musically and Cleo assured they got training and performance experience aplenty. Dance lessons, piano lessons, even ukulele lessons were part of every daughter’s weekly schedule. Practice was an expected discipline. Cleo organized the girls into a performance team. “The Smith Sisters” performed at church functions, family parties, weddings, and meetings all over Cache Valley. Each girl began to develop unique parts of the act. Dixie played the marimba. Jackie became a ventriloquist with her sidekick dummies Oscar and Roger. Dedicated dad Lewis loaded the marimba and other equipment into

the back of his truck, all the girls sat in the cab, and they took their act on the road to northern Utah communities. School work came before nearly everything else in the Smith family. There was no television except on Saturday night. The result was near perfect academic records through high school and college. Then there was farm work. Lewis Smith grew wheat and alfalfa, as well as raised beef cattle, and he engaged his daughters in getting the work done. Beginning at age eight, all four of the Smith girls were expected to pull on rubber boots and clothes they could get muddy to move the sprinkler pipe— morning and evening during the summer.

A Talented, Accomplished Farm Girl

Moving sprinkler pipe built more than a good work ethic—it generated physical strength. Jackie laughingly tells the story of challenging boys in her seventh-grade class to an arm-wrestling contest and prevailing. Lewis’s natural sprinter’s speed also carried over to Jackie, who offered the same humbling experience to the boys in footraces. As Jackie advanced in school, her athleticism shifted from races and arm wrestling to drill teams and cheerleading. From junior high school on through NCAA Division I Utah State University, and at Dixie College, she was a cheerleader, song leader, and drill team member, in addition to membership in the Chi Omega sorority, along with the Air Force ROTC’s Angel Flight association. She also participated in theater productions. I have observed an interesting dichotomy in Jackie’s personality. She is by nature modest— reluctant to call attention to herself. Yet, that modesty seems to have been counterbalanced by an intuitive desire to test herself. Throughout her adolescence and early adult years she continually entered contests for scholarships and other competitions that would be the source of great anxiety for many people. She won designations such as Utah Girl of the Year and attendant to Utah Junior Miss. She was chosen homecoming queen at two different colleges, which qualified her as a contestant at the Miss Utah pageant twice. With ventriloquism

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1 Okerlund Grandparents with Aunt Bertha at our wedding in Logan 2 Mike and Jackie with Mike’s brothers 3 Mike and Jackie with their wedding party outside of Christie and Gene’s home in Logan, Utah

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4 Mike and Jackie outside the Logan Temple after their wedding. From left: Melvin and Phyllis Okerlund, Mike and Jackie, Erma and Vincen Leavitt 5 Mike and Jackie outside Logan Temple with Jackie’s parents

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as her talent and dummy Roger at her side, Jackie won the hearts of judges and audiences every time. She finished as first attendant in one of the Miss Utah pageants.

might pursue an accounting minor, but intermediate accounting was the remedy for that notion. I concluded that I wanted to understand what my accountant was explaining to me and that was about it.

Were Jackie writing this history it is doubtful she would mention the leading roles she played in musical theater during college and afterward at various playhouses throughout Utah, or having high grades at every graduation she attended.

My favorite business class was business law taught by Bob Moore. The concepts spoke clearly to me and I enjoyed the cases he used to illustrate the principles. Because of that class, I feel confident that I would have enjoyed and done well at law school.

So, in the summer of 1972 it was a talented and well-accomplished woman I met at church. But it was the down-to-earth farm girl from Newton that attracted me; the academic excellence, the evident musical talent, and the beauty queen stuff was a little intimidating at first. However, Jackie was so unassuming and fun to be with that we just kept moving forward. The trip to visit her in Newton was a real turning point. Seeing her parents, where she lived, and the fields where she moved sprinkler pipe set me at ease.

The economics classes that I took were primarily taught by Tom Williams and Harold Hiskey—both great teachers and wonderful friends. I enjoyed the application of economics more than the theoretical concepts, but still chose a minor in economics.

As that providential summer ended and fall approached, Jackie had been accepted at the University of Utah in a master’s degree program. I had planned to attend BYU. Meeting each other changed things for both of us. We decided to stay at Southern Utah University for a time to see what might come of this relationship. Jackie pursued music classes and worked at the library, and I enrolled in the business program at SUU.

A Business Apprenticeship

Thinking back on my college career, it clearly resembled a business apprenticeship more than a traditional bachelor’s degree. While I was taking the business classes required for my major, I was building a business that required the application of the things I was learning. What I was learning from most was my struggle to start a business. When I left my accounting class, I went to my office to balance my books, I created my own marketing plans, I wrote business letters. It was a wonderful way to learn.

The accounting classes I took from Gary Giles and Ben Bean served as a great foundation for business generally. There was a point that I thought I

The fact that I got directly involved in business so quickly after my mission, plus my church calling, made it quite awkward for me to date like any other student, and had the effect of making my time as a college student highly unorthodox. I simply missed the campus experience. I sometimes regret that, but I know it worked out well for me. I accelerated in my progress as a result, but occasionally wonder what life would have been like had I taken the other road. I have clear memory of the day I made the decision to set aside a more traditional college experience and focus on the future. One day I was at the Parks Office Building where DLA was located. KSUB radio was on the ground floor of that building. I had a conversation with Ernie Riddlebach, who was the announcer for the college’s sports program. He remembered me as a high school athlete and asked why I wasn’t going out for the football team—he felt strongly that I could play for the team. Playing college football appealed to me. Ernie suggested the perfect position for me would be tight end and called Coach Tom Kingsford to arrange a meeting. On the first day of practice, I went to the field to talk to Kingsford. As I watched practice, I had mixed feelings. I spent a few hours seriously considering the decision but ultimately concluded it was time to move on with my life and get serious about other things. It was the right decision.

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1 Jackie and her bridesmaids. Back row, from left: Kathie, Dixie Lou, Barbara Bell, Carolee Castagno, Jennilyn Robison, Gina Nuesmeyer. Front row: Lissa Hansen, Christie, Jackie, Kristen Piercey

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2 Mike and Jackie cutting the wedding cake made by Jackie’s sister Kathie. 3 Mikes family 4 Jaydene Godfrey sitting at a table while Jackie signs the wedding guest book.

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A Proposal

While I was going to school, working full-time, and serving in the branch presidency and National Guard, Jackie was taking classes, working at the library, and acting in the play 1776. It was hard for us to find time to see each other, so our visits generally occurred late at night.

Jackie had moved into a basement apartment on 300 West. Many nights I’d get to her apartment in time to watch the eleven o’clock news, and then we’d fall asleep on the sofa. I would finally wake up two or three hours later, usually with the television blaring snow because the channel had signed off. I would drive home during the wee hours of the morning. Sometime early in the school year, I felt the momentum of our relationship moving forward rapidly, and I worried that I had dated so few people that I wasn’t in a position to evaluate things. So, I told Jackie that I needed to date some other people. It understandably hurt her feelings. I asked another person out, who was, unfortunately, a good friend of Jackie’s. I didn’t know that, and it turned out to be a crisis of sorts between us. Later, I thought I had asked Jackie to a concert, only to find out she had already accepted a date with the student body president. The hurt of having her date someone else indicated to me that it was a good idea to get serious about the relationship. I did some groveling and our relationship proceeded. I decided to surprise her by wallpapering her room (which was actually a little closet just off the kitchen in the apartment) with some cheery paper that my mother had left over from the kitchen in our home. I got some help from my brother Dane and we succeeded in getting it done while she was away. She was very surprised, and that pleased me. At Christmastime, I drove to Logan to visit Jackie and her family. We spent a couple of days in Cache Valley, then drove to Duchesne to see Roger and Carolee Cowan—Carolee was a great friend of Jackie’s from Dixie College. We spent a day and

a night with them and then drove to Loa to meet Grandma and Grandpa Okerlund. The concentrated time together stimulated my appetite for more and when we arrived in Cedar City, we both suffered some separation anxiety. I think it was at that point that we both seriously contemplated marriage. We talked about engagement over the next few weeks, so I made my way to Logan and chose an engagement ring at S.E. Needham Jewelers. They mailed the ring to me. I remember the day it came—my mother wasn’t there, and I just wanted to show it to somebody, so I went to Kelly Hansen’s and showed it to his mother. Later that week, the state legislature was holding a ball at the Capitol. Dad had invited me to attend with Jackie, and I decided that would be the perfect setting for my proposal. I called Jackie’s father the day before the ball with the intention of asking for his permission to marry Jackie. We had a conversation that I can only describe as awkward and roughly handled. There was nothing smooth about my approach. He was understanding and nice, but I didn’t know him well and wasn’t sure how to go about it. We started out with some small talk about pheasant hunting and then I told him I wanted to marry Jackie. Thankfully, he gave his permission, and I told him about my plans to ask her at the legislative ball. I invited them to join us as a surprise.

“

I’ve never been this serious in my life.

”

Jackie and I arrived at the State Capitol and danced for a while. It was crowded, so I suggested to Jackie that we walk upstairs. We went to the Senate Lounge right behind the chamber. I knew the place well because of the weeks I spent at the Capitol with my dad in the state legislature. We were alone, sitting in the northwest corner of the room. “Do you love me?” I asked her. She answered that she did.

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“Enough to spend eternity with me?” I said. “Oh, get serious,” she said. “I’ve never been this serious in my life,” I said, as I pulled the ring out of my pocket. Warren Pugh, who was serving as president of the state senate and was a good friend of my dad, walked into the room about that time, interrupting my proposal. I told him about our engagement, and he congratulated us. We went downstairs and announced our engagement to my parents, and then Jackie's parents arrived, having been told in advance of my plan. Neither Jackie nor I could have known at that point the significance that building would have in our lives.

Hartford

I had begun to enjoy my work in the insurance business. The more I learned, the stronger my appetite was to understand the business more deeply. So, when a Travelers Insurance Agents School slot opened up to me in the spring of 1973, I jumped at the chance. It was an intensive, six-week course in Hartford, Connecticut, held at the home office of Travelers Insurance Company. We lived in dorms, had homework every night, and attended classes from 8 a.m. until 5 p.m. each day. I was even able to negotiate some college credits for attending so it didn’t hinder my progress toward graduation. The Travelers school was the best and most productive post-secondary education I have ever had. Perhaps the reason was its practical relevance to my interest in learning the subject, but it was also a wonderful foundation for the business. We spent a lot of time working through the policy forms and situations. I formed lasting friendships. Because I was gone, Jackie was required to deal with all the arrangements for the wedding by herself. I was not much help even after the Travelers school ended—I had to start the National Guard Officer Candidate School summer camp almost immediately after.

The Wedding

Initially, Jackie and I set our wedding date for the end of the summer, but as time went on, we moved it up to July 6, 1973, mostly because I wanted to get on with it. We chose to get married in the Logan Temple because of Jackie’s Cache Valley heritage.2 My family gathered the night before at the Baugh Motel in Logan. My brothers, parents, and grandparents from both sides were there. We had to be at the temple around 9 a.m. We arrived, proceeded to the sealing room, and had the special ceremony. Brother Heaton, who I think was a member of the temple presidency, officiated at the wedding. I remember the feeling that existed at the ceremony; it was solemn but buoyantly happy. I remember little of what the officiator offered as advice. After the temple, the wedding party had a luncheon at Sherwood Hills—a resort in Sardine Canyon, south of Logan. Our reception was held at the Needham home on Center Street in Logan. The home is a remarkable mansion built by David Eccles around the turn of the century. We had a big crowd for the reception. My brothers and some of my missionary friends were ushers. I remember only a few details about the reception: the home’s beauty, having our families together, and nearly endless handshaking. It was a much different experience for Jackie. For years Jackie would say to me when we met someone who had attended the reception: “Oh, you remember him— he attended our reception.” I could not remember. We had one big problem at the wedding: several people were late for pictures. This unsettled Jackie. She had a wedding luncheon and a reception to manage—and the “trains” needed to run on time. We spent a fair amount of time discussing the matter during the drive from the Needham home to Sherwood Hills, where we spent the first night of our married life. This was not the conversation I wanted to have on our way to our honeymoon. Having more experience in life, I now know what a serious matter that is, but at the time, I was probably a

2. Many members of the Church choose to get married in temples. We consider temples to be sacred places where one can go to feel closer to God, as well as a place to perform essential ordinances for salvation. One of those sacred ordinances is the sealing ordinance, where a man and a woman can be married and sealed for time and all eternity.

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little less sensitive than I should have been in that regard. Not a good idea. We actually chose not to take much time for a honeymoon. We spent one night at Sherwood Hills Resort and then returned to Logan to hook up a small, rented trailer to haul all of our wedding gifts to Cedar City. On the way, we stayed one night at the Little America Hotel. We certainly could have done something more elaborate, but we wanted to save the money, and we were excited about returning to the apartment in Cedar City we had rented together a few days before the wedding. An open house had been planned in my parents’ home one week after the wedding. Jackie became ill with the flu the day before the Cedar City event but rallied as the day went on and made it through the evening. The reception line was inside my parents’ home and refreshments were served in the yard. My younger brothers were the gift carriers. The big surprise of the night was seeing Nick and Jean Snyder from Eugene, Oregon, who drove all the way to Cedar City to surprise us. Our first apartment was located in the basement of George and Erna Hansen’s house on Kayenta Circle about a block west of my parents. (Erna had been a household helper for my mother over the years and stayed with us as children.) Jackie and I were excited to move in as a couple. In essence, we rushed home from our wedding, not really having a honeymoon, because it seemed like more fun to play house than rent a hotel room someplace. We paid ninety-five dollars a month. The apartment was good in most respects; it was spacious and cool in the summer, with two bedrooms that were fully furnished. We used the utility room for storage, mostly wedding gifts, and the second bedroom was a guest room. The only odd part of the layout was that you had to turn sideways to get between the sink that was in the hall and the furnace. No big deal, right? Living together just seemed fun and novel. It was a great summer.

My First Plunge into Entrepreneurship

During the summer of 1973, I also entered into another venture—the garbage business. Early in the spring, my dad noticed in the newspaper an advertisement by the United States Forest Service

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for a contractor to collect the garbage from several campgrounds within the Dixie National Forest. Dad suggested I investigate it. I got a copy of the request for proposal from the local Forest Service Office. The contract was for a little more than three months. I began developing a business plan, though I didn’t know that’s what it was at the time. I listed the equipment needed— basically just a truck. I drove the route and calculated the mileage. I knew I’d need some workers so I pre-negotiated with my brothers Mark, who was a sophomore in high school, and Dane, who was a junior and had a driver’s license, to pay them each twenty dollars a day. I told my brothers I was the executive and they were the employees. If you’ve ever found a dead deer stuck in a garbage can for a week, you’d know why I was the executive. I found a used Ryder Rent-a-Truck for sale at Rick Warner Truckland and went to the State Bank of Southern Utah to apply for a loan to buy the truck. I somehow convinced the banker to lend me about ten thousand dollars, which was a lot of money for a guy going to college. After the bank agreed, I was ready to bid. My bid was $98.50 a day. I remember being at the bid opening. I was a little nervous, as was the bid officer when he found out I was only twenty-two. I got the contract. With contract in hand and a loan from the bank, I rode a Greyhound Bus to Salt Lake City and bought the truck. We were in business. It was a great experience for all of us. I actually went out on the truck maybe a dozen times, and the rest of the time, my job was to do the books and manage the relationship with the Forest Service. By the end of the summer, I had made a couple thousand dollars. The experience made me a confirmed entrepreneur. We repeated the experience the next summer. During the summer of 1975, as part of a significant environmental movement the country was going though, the Clean Water Act was passed. The Forest Service spent 2.5 million dollars to develop a garbage container system, which ended the need for the service that my brothers and I provided.

12 Together 1973 to 1974 • First Year of Marriage; First Christmas; Student Teaching The national strife and scandal of 1973 made it a very difficult year for many around the globe. The Vietnam War had finally ended in a ceasefire in January, but the world was just beginning the process of coming to terms with what had happened in southeast Asia. Images of war on nightly newscasts were replaced with scenes starring members of the Nixon administration testifying before a Senate committee, charged with investigating the break-in at the Watergate complex. Faith in the leadership of the country ebbed as Nixon scrambled to cover up his role in the scandal. The Yom Kippur War began in October, generating further unrest in the Middle East and discord among the allies of the opposing nations. In addition, an oil crisis would result, throwing the U.S. economy into turmoil. The contrast of the political events of 1973 with the events of my personal life couldn’t be more pronounced, because for me, 1973 was a terrific year. I had Jackie in my life. We were together. After our wedding in July of that year, we were living in our own place. We were a family.

Learning to Live Together

Jackie was the one who found the apartment on Kayenta Circle, where we set up our household two days after our wedding. There’s something special about being together in your

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own place when you’re first married. My brothers thought our apartment was pretty special, too. They viewed it as a clubhouse with a steady supply of food and plenty of space to hang out. Because it was in the basement, the apartment offered welcome relief from the heat. We enjoyed having them at our place. That year was also full of learning experiences for me. Like any new married couple, Jackie and I had some adjustments to make. Frankly, most of them were mine to learn. For example, I found myself rather caught up in my work—a pattern that has not changed. It had not occurred to me that Jackie might be fixing dinner with the expectation I would show up at a fairly regular time. That’s the way it had worked in her family. Her father was up and out of the house before dawn and did daily chores until dark. However, he stopped and joined the family for meals at a fairly regular time. Naturally, Jackie had the expectation I would do the same. One evening, I came home from a string of appointments that had lasted longer than expected—a couple of hours longer. Waiting for me on the table was a place setting and a cold, but nicely prepared, meal. Being home for family meals is an important principle, and while I committed that day to do better, I’m still trying to perfect it.

“

Everything has a place, and everything in its place.

”

Someone recommended the books of Daryl Hoole to Jackie. She was a well-regarded author from Salt Lake City who had written a series of books on how to organize a household. One of the principles in the book that resonated with Jackie was “everything has a place, and everything in its place.” I agreed with the principle but had more difficulty applying it than Jackie. Over a period of considerable negotiation, we compromised. I agreed to abide by the everythingin-its-place principle, and she agreed that when one removes one’s socks at night, tossing them in the direction of the hamper satisfied the “place” requirement, so long as on the way to the shower the next morning, they were tipped into the basket.

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Daryl’s books had many rules Jackie believed in, and over time I was converted, though I remained an imperfect disciple. I remember thinking if I ever met this Daryl Hoole, I had some things to share with her. Likewise, I had feelings of condolence to offer to her husband. Little did I know that in the future the Hooles would become dear friends.

Busy People

During the balance of the summer after our wedding, Jackie and I had an assortment of jobs. Jackie taught dance for the city’s recreation department. I continued working at the insurance business and managing my garbage-hauling business. In the fall, school started and our patterns changed. Jackie had a handful of classes to finish for her elementary education teaching certificate, and my schedule was loaded with business classes. In addition to my work at the insurance office, I had my church job as a counselor in the branch presidency and National Guard duty one or more weekends a month. We were busy people. Jackie and I approached school in different ways. During her college career, she received straight A’s in all but one of her classes. (Incidentally, there may be no forgiveness from Jackie in this life or the next for the offending professor.) I, on the other hand, found most of my classes interesting and worked to ensure I did well enough not to be embarrassed. I am a confirmed multitasker, so the fusion of work, school, church, and the military produced an environment in which I thrived. We began to develop friendships with other newly married couples. Some of the friendships we developed during that period have lasted our entire lives. My Uncle Vinny Leavitt in Bunkerville, Nevada, had told me about a young banker named Dan Eastman who had moved to Cedar City to open a new bank. Vin thought Jackie and I would get along well with Dan and his wife Claudette. One afternoon, I was driving along Cedar City’s Main Street and noticed a fellow sitting in the office of the soon-toopen bank. I stopped, entered the bank, and asked if he was Dan. We talked for a while and planned

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a time for dinner with our wives. It was the beginning of a great friendship that has lasted for more than thirty years. There were many others. Roger and Carolee Cowan, Mitch and Gaylene Seaman, Larry and Christine Woodbury, Larry and Joy Brough to name just a few.

Christmas with the Smith Family

As our first holiday season as a married couple approached, we had to decide where we would spend Thanksgiving and Christmas. It made sense for many reasons to go to Logan for Christmas. Jackie hadn’t been home since our wedding, and communication practices were different then. Long distance was extremely expensive—calls from Cedar City to Newton cost one dollar a minute. That would be the equivalent of more than two dollars a minute in today’s money. Consequently, Jackie called home only once or twice a month. It was a planned expense.

Jackie’s three sisters were married and starting families. Dixie’s husband Morris was attending dental school in southern California. Christie and her husband Gene lived in Logan. Gene ran a family jewelry business and was accumulating apartments. Kathie had married Joe Warren and they lived in St. George at the time. Our Christmas in Cache Valley was really the first time Jackie and I had spent time together as a couple with her sisters and their husbands. It was also the first time I was able to observe how Jackie and her family interacted as a group. There is something about going home which causes us to become children of our parents again, rather than the independent adults we have become. Watching Cleo and Lewis as the parents of four adoring daughters provided me with a glimpse of the remarkable home my wife came from.

Lewis and Cleo

Jackie has great parents. Getting to know Cleo for thirty-five years has caused me to believe there may not be a more charitable, generous, and caring woman on the planet. Watching Cleo, it was easy to

understand how each girl was instilled with a compulsion for achievement and the discipline to get it. Theirs was a home where school reigned supreme. Nothing came before homework. Television was only for weekends, and no daughter went without lessons for every conceivable performing talent. One thing each of the Smith girls has in common is a native instinct to care for people. If it isn’t genetic, it could well have come from conditioning. All of them have watched as Cleo constantly took food to the sick, depressed, and outcast. Now, each of them does the same. It is just one of Cleo Smith’s many legacies of goodness. Jackie’s father, Lewis Smith, the gifted farm-boy athlete who deployed as a P-40 pilot at age twenty-three, flew his wartime missions in a fighter plane with the name “Miss Cleo” emblazoned across the side. He had returned home from war to pursue the only thing he had ever wanted to do—farm. Lew was always kind to me, but rather reserved. He was quiet by nature and had the kind of confidence and swagger common to fighter pilots. He didn’t seem to need a lot of reinforcement from others. However, watching him interact with his daughters over the years revealed the strong love each had for him. Perhaps it was all those mornings he got them out of bed to help him change sprinklers; or the endless weekends hauling them to and from performances; or the pet names he had for each of them. Whatever the combination, in the Smith home, Lew was The Man—and he was indeed adored. One incident gave me a great insight into Lew and how he navigated life as the only male in a household of five females. I don’t remember exactly what the situation was, but we were both receiving instructions from a couple of the girls as they intensely went about whatever it was they were doing. Lew looked at me, winked and said quietly, “Mike, sometimes you just have to humor ’em.”

Student Teaching

After Christmas, Jackie accepted a student teaching assignment at East Elementary School working with Mrs. Payne, a fourth-grade teacher. The unique part of the assignment was Mrs. Payne

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1 4

1 Lewis and Cleo Smith 2 Mike and Jackie in Anne and Dixie’s home kitchen 3 Jackie and Anne

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4 Mike and Jackie with Mike’s cousins, Rod and Cindy Leavitt 5 Baby Christmas gifts anticipating Mike S.’s arrival. Jackie was expecting.

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had scheduled hip replacement surgery for the second week of school and would be on leave for the next three months. Jackie would be handling the class completely on her own.

When Jackie awoke, she knew something was wrong. A glance at her watch told the story. She was already late. For the always reliable Smith girl, this was an emergency.

The people at the college’s education department obviously recommended Jackie as a student ready to teach. She already had her degree with a certificate in secondary education and a stint of student teaching experience at the middle school level. It was not much of a gamble for the school, but still seemed like a big lift to Jackie.

A blur of phone calls, hair brushing, and nylons followed. She dashed out the door as I lay under a blanket with my doctor-prescribed ice pack. For the next ten minutes, all I could hear was the revving of our hand-me-down Buick Riviera and the spinning of tires on snow. Jackie appeared again at the door. “The snowplow has made it impossible to get out. You have to help me,” she said.

Jackie’s first day of student teaching was memorable for both of us. Consistent with her nature, Jackie was ready down to the last detail. At the time, I was incapacitated with epididymitis, a strange and painful ailment. It is the only time in my life I have been confined to my bed for multiple days. I didn’t feel ill but had conspicuous swelling that made movement impossible and dangerous.

“

Mike, sometimes you just have to humor ’em.

”

I repeated the doctor’s warning on the possible consequences of such aid on my part. We began working on alternatives, and two hours later finally succeeded. Fortunately, Jackie was not alone in her tardiness that day at the school and everyone perfectly understood, laughing it off as a shared experience. Jackie was a great teacher and the kids loved her. So did Mr. Stratton the principal. At the end of the school year, when an opening was created by the retirement of a second-grade teacher, the position was offered to Jackie.

The night before her first day, Jackie worked until the wee hours of the morning, polishing her portfolio to make a big first impression with the class and Mrs. Payne. When she went to bed, a massive snowstorm dropped fifteen to eighteen inches of snow on Cedar City. The storm was so intense that the electricity was interrupted because of line breakages, affecting our alarm clock.

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13 Military Service 1973 to 1976 • Officer Candidate School; National Guard; Basketball League; First Assignments In 1969, when I enlisted at the National Guard Armory on First East in Cedar City, I committed myself to five-and-a-half years of military service. As a guardsman, I had three options: remain enlisted, become a noncommissioned officer, or become a commissioned officer.1

I decided to become a commissioned officer, although I didn’t want to make a career of the military. One can become a commissioned officer by attending Reserve Officers’ Training Corps, Officer Candidate School, or attending a service academy, such as West Point.

1. An enlisted soldier is essentially a worker who carries out a function. A noncommissioned officer, generally referred to as a “sergeant,” oversees operational matters. A commissioned officer (lieutenant, captain, major, colonel, or general) oversees the operation of military units, strategy, and tactics. Usually, a noncommissioned officer is appointed by an internal promotion by commissioned officers—an apprentice-like arrangement. Commissioned officers must go to school for training, and ultimately receive a commission from the president or Congress.

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M I L I TA R Y S E R V I C E

During National Guard summer camp in 1972, I made the decision to attend Officer Candidate School (OCS). I could complete my training in one of two ways: three months of active duty at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, or one or two weekends a month for eighteen months, plus a two-week summer camp, at Camp Williams near Salt Lake City. I chose Camp Williams, reasoning this route would allow me to continue school and work. The program started in January 1974. Two others from my unit were selected for OCS at the same time I was. Kevin Bulloch, with whom I went to basic training, and Craig Updegraff. Sharing the experience with the two of them provided critical. We typically drove from Cedar City to Camp Williams (just south of Salt Lake City) twice a month, leaving after work on Friday night and returning Sunday evening. It was a grind made more palatable by the comradery and friendship.

Officer Candidate School

OCS was run by the Utah Military Academy staff. A full colonel named Donald Anderson was the commandant. He had a staff of officers and NCOs (noncommissioned officers), including a group of tactical officers who were our immediate supervisors, appointed to make officers out of us.

We spent our weekends in classes and exercises, where we learned advanced soldiering skills and leadership. The rest of the time was just unwavering harassment. While we were away from the barracks, the tactical officers dumped our clothes and ransacked our beds, equipment, and drawers. They employed their imagination to make a wreck of our things. They put our boots in the latrine, smeared shoe polish on the waxed floor, flooded the barracks with water—no effort was spared. This happened day after day, the theory being that it tested our organizational and leadership skills. Nonsense. The tactical officers were juvenile delinquents masquerading as army officers. There was one place that was off-limits from the tactical officers: a small utility room referred to as the Magic Room. We could store things there any way we liked, without having to worry about orderliness. Everyone needs a Magic Room.

Graduating from Officer Candidate School, 1975 Camp Williams, Utah

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The members of the training staff learned early that I wasn’t a fan of the method, so, of course, they started focusing their attention on me. For example, one night, I was awakened at 2 a.m. by a runner telling me to appear in fifteen minutes in my dress greens at the office. I dressed, put on all my medals, and ran the long way (which was also required, given that the sidewalk between the barracks and office was off-limits) to the office. I met a group of tactical officers who told me I was “skating,” and that if I expected to get through the academy, I should work harder. By skating, they were implying that I was getting by with the least amount of effort possible. Probably not entirely untrue.

“

OCS is designed to test a candidate’s physical and mental capabilities. During our second summer camp, we had an exercise that was supposed to last thirty-six hours. We were placed in teams and given objectives and tasks to accomplish, taking turns in various leadership roles. We were given one ration and a canteen of water. Part of the exercise was to make the water last for the full thirty-six hours.

”

Candidate, knock ’em out.

Despite these discomforts, I made new friends. Mark Millburn is an example. He was a soldier my age from Salt Lake City who had recently married and worked in real estate. We spent hours talking, comparing ideas and aspirations. We became great friends, a friendship that has lasted a lifetime. To this day, whenever we see each other, our greeting is, “Candidate, knock ’em out,” which was the phrase tactical officers used to order push-ups. Or we imitate the command voice of Colonel Anderson. One day, during our training, we marched several miles to an area west of Camp Williams known as the Chicken Pen. The training staff provided us with live chickens that we had to kill, dress, cook, and eat as part of our survival training. Grandpa Leavitt’s lesson in slaughtering a chicken came in very handy. Part of our training included night maneuvers. One night, we had just set up our perimeters and lay down for sleep when we were attacked with simulated artillery fire from the tactical officers. I figured the whole thing was going to blow over, so I decided to defend my part of the hill from the warmth of my sleeping bag. Once the smoke had cleared, I got up to join the rest of my platoon. About thirty seconds after I got up, a training officer named Ryan Hixson came cowboying up the hill in a Jeep and ran over my bedroll. Had I not moved seconds earlier, he would have run over me. Not only would I have been injured, but I would have

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been required to explain what I was doing in my sleeping bag. I’m not sure “defending my part of the hill” would have been the answer they were looking for. It was a close call, in more ways than one.

However, the temperature was 103 degrees and we were packing heavy gear, like M60 machine guns and large box radio equipment, plus full field packs. The stupidity of these guys jeopardizing our unit by keeping water from us in that situation should have been the subject of a military inquiry. By midafternoon, out of twenty-three soldiers, thirteen had been transported to field hospitals with heat exhaustion. Guys were dropping like flies. Millburn and I always took great pride in the fact that we weren’t among them and that all the Special Forces super troops (Green Berets), who saw themselves as the elite, were in the group that got packed out.

National Guard Basketball League

During the middle months of training, I was not in particularly good standing with the leadership of the academy. But a stint as a player on the unit’s National Guard Basketball League team changed all that. The first game was held during a weekend of our training. Our opponents were regarded as the perennial champions. In the second half of the game, I hit a hot streak and landed every shot I took. I hadn’t played much since high school, so my performance had to be considered some kind of miracle. We won the game; I was the high scorer. From that point on, the pressure from the leadership seemed to diminish. In fact, they actually flew a small airplane to Cedar City to pick me up to play another game that was held midweek. I don’t think I was ever as good as that first game.

M I L I TA R Y S E R V I C E

On another game day, I left my helmet liner—a critical component of my uniform—in Cedar City. That would have been a capital offense under normal circumstances. I told the supply sergeant/ coach, “We have a problem. I forgot to bring my helmet liner. You and I both know if I show up without one, I’ll get demerits and won’t be able to play the game. Can you help me?” A few minutes later, a new helmet liner showed up at my bunk.

Chain of Command

I learned the meaning of chain-of-command the hard way. Our unit was assigned to organize the first-ever National Guard Day at Camp Williams. We concluded to think big, and we did. I suspect I was the one who suggested we invite the president of the United States. It seemed like a good idea at the time, at least until the Pentagon contacted the adjutant general’s office to ask where the invitation had come from. The adjutant general’s office then contacted the Utah Military Academy staff with the question, “What’s this?” Colonel Anderson was not happy. They seemed to appreciate our ingenuity but not our approach. Ultimately, the event went off on a scaled-down basis anyways due to weather. There were unique experiences related to our training. We flew to Washington, D.C., in a military transport prop plane. Flight time for a commercial jet was about four hours, but in a cargo plane, it was closer to seven hours. However, we visited the Pentagon and other military locations. I graduated from OCS in June as part of the Governor’s Day celebration. It was a very happy day for me; I was ready to be done. I had made good friends and learned a lot about myself, but overall, my time at OCS was a miserable experience. Years later, while serving as governor, I spoke at a Governor’s Day celebration, with all the troops and families assembled. My speech was elegantly short, about two minutes, because I knew the troops had been in formation for a couple of hours by the time I took the podium. My short speech won their hearts.

Several members of my class went on to work full-time for the Guard. Years later, I pulled together a reunion of the class. It was nice to be commander-in-chief. Somehow, I think that fact may have improved their collective memories of my performance as an officer candidate.

First Assignments

My first assignment in the Guard was to the Cedar City unit, under Gary Miller, though I still needed to attend branch qualification school before I could be much help to the unit as an officer. Branch qualification required attendance at a three-month school at Fort Sill, Oklahoma. The thought of leaving my work, school, and church assignments just didn’t sit well with me, so I signed up for a correspondence course that allowed three years for completion. It wasn’t lost on me that I would be eligible to exit the Guard one month before my time for branch qualification was up. After about a year of service with the Cedar City unit, I was transferred to serve as the executive officer of the Beaver supply unit. I worked under Captain Breinholt.

A tragic accident occurred during my assignment. One of the guys was a private pilot, and one day he was assigned to travel to Richfield to conduct some training. Originally, I was supposed to go with him, but something came up, and I did not go. On Sunday morning, I drove to the armory. The trucks of two of the men who had gone to Richfield were still parked in front of the armory. There was an unusual amount of activity for that time of the morning, and I learned it was because the plane had not returned from Richfield. We organized a search. The young wives and families of the missing were there. Finally, in the afternoon, the crash site was found, just east of Beaver. All on board had been killed.2 I ordered body bags from the mortuary and was present when the families were told. It was an awful moment, made personal for me by how close I had

2. “4 Guardsmen Killed in Beaver Crash.” Beaver County News, J. Willard Marriott Library, University of Utah, De. 12, 1975, https://newspapers.lib.utah.edu/ark:/87278/s6ps0b6g/22230989

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come to going with them. I harbored a little guilt, wondering if they would have done things differently had I been there. Some believed they may have spent time looking for deer on the way home and had simply run out of fuel. Because of Dad’s campaign for governor, I was excused from summer camp, which coincided with the state convention. To make it up, I went to Redeye Gunner School at Fort Bliss, Texas. At the school we had to learn to identify aircraft by their shadows and then launch heat-seeking missiles. My National Guard career concluded in an odd way. The Vietnam war had ended, and the military was actively seeking ways to reduce its ranks. I received a form asking where I wanted to spend my annual training. At the bottom of the form, there was a small check box with the line: “Discharge as soon as possible.” I filled out the balance of the form but checked the box. About a month later, I received an honorable discharge in the mail. I had been released about nine months early.

Looking back, I am appreciative of my military experience. Any lack of enthusiasm in this recollection of my time in the military was likely the result of its inconvenience. I was stretched, trying to go to college, build a business, be a husband and father, and serve in the Church. In addition, I got my start in politics during this time. But when one combines the periods I spent on active duty for training and the monthly drills, it was a significant piece of service. I am proud to have worn the uniform of the United States Army. I came to understand military culture, received extraordinary training, and formed good friendships.

Shaking Governor Rampton’s hand after being commissioned second lieutenant at Camp Williams, Utah. July, 1975.

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14 Launching a Career in Insurance 1974 to 1976 • Michael O. Leavitt Agency; Chartered Property Casualty Underwriter; Art Firley In 1953, my father, Dixie Leavitt, was a fourth-grade teacher. During his summer break, Dad accepted summer employment with Benjamin Franklin Life Insurance. He was challenged by his recruiter, Bud Walker, with a proposition: Bud told Dad he would spend time to help get him started, with one condition: if my father made more money during the three months of summer vacation than he would have made in a year teaching school, he would agree to quit teaching and go into the insurance business. My father had intended to become a school principal; our family was even planning to move to Sacramento in the fall, where he had been accepted into a graduate program. My father enjoyed the insurance work and, in fact, made more that summer than he would have earned in a year as a teacher. So, true to his word, he made a career change, setting up an office in the basement of our home on 700 West. At first, my father found a niche market selling life insurance to miners who worked in the iron mine west of Cedar City. The mine employed more than a thousand people in our town and was the foundation of the local economy.

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Just as he was building a sustainable clientele, U.S. Steel announced the closure of the mine. With that, he lost most of his clients as they cancelled their policies to save money. It was a devastating setback. Vowing to eliminate that risk of an economic setback happening in the future, Dad decided to expand his offering as a life insurance agent to include property and casualty insurance, covering homes, cars, and businesses. Soon the property and casualty business overwhelmed his life insurance business, and within a year of expanding his offerings, Dad moved out of the office in our basement to a small office on Main Street. He named the business Dixie Leavitt Agency, and later, he formed other agencies in Nevada and Arizona. The history of the small enterprise he started in 1954 is the subject told in other histories. However, at this writing, the business is approaching seventy years in operation, has more than two thousand employees, and operates in nearly thirty states. It is a great story on its own, but I will focus on my involvement in its early stages.

A Change in My Plan

When I returned from my missionary service in 1972, I planned to enroll at BYU and suspected I would go to law school. Three things changed that path: First, I was called to serve as a counselor in the branch presidency of a student branch at SUU. Second, that summer I met Jackie and we both felt a desire to allow our relationship to mature. Finally, I began to enjoy the insurance business and saw the potential opportunity it was for me. At the time I entered the business, my father was forty-four years old. He had built Dixie Leavitt Agency in Cedar City into the most successful agency south of Provo, and, in addition, created agencies in Las Vegas, St. George, Hurricane, Salt Lake City, Provo, and Phoenix. In each of the agencies other than Dixie Leavitt Agency, he had a partner who owned 40 percent of that agency; Dad owned 60 percent. He was the only common tie among them, and his partners were aware of one another, but weren’t connected in any other way.

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Dixie Leavitt Agency had its office on the second floor of the Parks Office building, which was at 115 North Main Street in Cedar City. My father, Ken Middleton, Sandra Maxwell, and typically one or two other customer service people staffed the agency. It was a small operation. Dad’s relationship with Ken Middleton is important to understand. At that time, Dad had told Ken that he likely would not sell Ken part of Dixie Leavitt Agency—Ken was strictly an employee. Though that later changed, it was part of the terrain I had to navigate. I needed Ken as a teacher and wanted him as an ally; Dad depended heavily on Ken to keep things going in Cedar City as he built other agencies and served in the Legislature. I think Dad wanted to ensure that Ken did not see my entry into the business as threatening, so he proposed I establish my own agency. I went through the process of organizing a new corporation and meeting other requirements. We named the new entity Michael O. Leavitt Agency. The allowed me to operate alongside Dixie Leavitt Agency but not have intermingled ownership. Having my own agency had another effect: it allowed me to learn how an agency operated. I had this tiny little business, but I had to do everything. I had to build the files, do the books, collect the money, do the banking, pay the bills, and negotiate agreements with insurance companies. What a great experience that was, especially in combination with studying business at college. I learned how to write business letters in my business communications class in the morning, then went to my office in the afternoon and applied it. I was taking Accounting 121 and using my new knowledge of debits and credits to do my own books.

Michael O. Leavitt Agency

Our business was acting as an intermediary between insurance companies selling insurance and those who needed to buy it. We were paid a commission by the insurance company, or occasionally, a fee by the insured for our services. To make this new little agency viable, I was assigned a large account, Lalif Wood Construction.

LAUNCHING A CAREER IN INSURANCE

Lalif Wood Construction built highways and was led by Mr. Wood, a salty man from Nevada, probably in his sixties when I worked with him. Sandra Maxwell watched and helped on the account. It provided a financial foundation for Michael O. Leavitt Agency and taught me the business at the same time. I conducted business from a one-room office next to Dixie Leavitt Agency. I was near enough to easily ask questions and also help out when they had needs, but far enough to feel like I was on my own. Every new account I wrote was a learning experience. I mastered the routine personal lines accounts (automobile and home insurance) quickly and found that my real interest was in dealing with more sophisticated commercial accounts, like contractors, restaurants, retail stores, and truckers. My understanding of the exposures these businesses faced grew and my ability to identify risk expanded. I spent hours studying the policy contracts, as I worked to understand their limits and obligations. Given that I was young, didn’t have a college degree, and had been in the insurance business for a short time, I was not the most credible person that had darkened the door of most of the accounts; I could feel the credibility gap my age and inexperience presented, not just with potential clients but also insurance companies. I quickly came to understand that as an agent or broker, you have to sell yourself and the account twice—once to the client and once to the insurance company. I learned instinctively that there were certain things I had to do that mattered—for example, I needed to be dressed in a suit. I worked to learn the manners and methods of the business world.

Chartered Property Casualty Underwriter

Though I was still in college, I began to explore professional designations. I noticed that many respected people in the business were Chartered Property Casualty Underwriters (CPCU). I was determined to become one quickly, even though it is normally a three- to five-year process. The process involved passing an exam on each of the following subjects: accounting, macro and

microeconomics, business law, policy forms, and current industry issues. A candidate studied a topic for six months or a year and then took a four-hour written exam to demonstrate mastery. In looking at the subjects, I found that they overlapped the subjects I was studying to get my business degree, though the exams required mastery of those subjects from an angle that was particular to the insurance industry. However, once again, being able to apply the academics to my work was appealing and helpful to me. I resolved to study for all of the exams at the same time rather than stagger them over the three- to five-year period. My reasoning was based on the synergy with my university studies. Also, I’m generally impatient; I have an inclination to multitask; and I’m a confirmed 90 percenter. What I lack in quality I make up in quantity. I signed up for a prep course, comparable to the Kaplan courses for preparation for the bar exam or CPA exam. I admired the system; it was so efficient and felt so relevant to what I was doing every day, in contrast to many of my college classes, which often felt redundant and irrelevant. I took all five exams at once in 1975 and passed four of them. I waited to retake the fifth exam until late 1977 so I could run my dad’s campaign for governor in 1976. I received my designation in Detroit a few months after passing the last exam. The designation gave me confidence and credibility within the industry; it was also a great educational experience. For a few years I occasionally contracted to teach the review courses at various places around the country. I found it served to keep me up to date with the latest developments within the industry.1

Seeing the Opportunities Around You

My connections with Dave Fotheringham did not end when our missions ended; Dave had also pursued the insurance business, joining Massachusetts Mutual Life Insurance Company. Dave and I kept in close contact, and over the course of time I became acquainted with his general agent, Lee Lalli. Lee and I began to do some

1. The efficiency and relevance of the CPCU process really resonated with me because of its emphasis on competency rather than the time spent in a classroom. Years later, when I became involved in education policy, I became an advocate for competency-based education.

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business together. I was interested in understanding financial products better and knew some of the clients I was developing had needs in those areas. Periodically, I would take Lee to meet with people I had selected, and we would work together on the case. It was profitable for both of us and I learned a substantial amount from Lee. Layne Wilcox was another agent in Lee’s office. Layne asked if I would be willing to work jointly with him on property and casualty accounts—in particular, a business named Huntsman Container Corporation. Huntsman had an office just down the hall from Mass Mutual in the Kennecott Building. Layne had been handling their health and life business and felt he could get us a shot at the property and casualty account.

“

Look at this risk. It has these characteristics of businesses your company likes to do business with. If you are willing to do the following, we can get the business.

”

The entrepreneur and CEO of Huntsman Container was Jon Huntsman, who, along with his brother Blaine, had developed a method of creating egg cartons out of Styrofoam. They had expanded their business by persuading McDonald’s to change its hamburger packaging from paper to Styrofoam. It was by far the most sophisticated account I had ever worked on. I was learning as I went, as it was my first time dealing with international exposures, and Huntsman Container had complex issues involving how it transported its petrochemicals

and finished products. We had competition on the account from national brokers, and yet somehow, we prevailed at each turn.2 The Huntsman businesses went through two mergers. We survived the first as the broker of record, but not the second. The account was rolled into a larger risk management operation with a Fortune 500 parent company. However, the entire experience was an interesting beginning and a terrific professional experience for me, fueling my confidence and appetite for bigger and more challenging markets. In retrospect, my work with Lee Lalli led me to an unexpected opportunity. I view that as an important lesson: big opportunities often come indirectly. Vision is not just seeing the future, it is seeing opportunities that surround you. Another example of unexpected opportunity came as I worked to improve how we approached an inefficient part of our business. When I started my business, I followed a rather traditional business model. As independent agents and brokers, we had relationships with many insurance companies. When we found a prospective client, we filled out applications the various insurance companies provided, mailed them in and sat back to see the terms each would offer. I soon found several things about that process clumsy and inefficient. The whole quoting process seemed slow and wasteful for everyone, and the pricing structure was mysterious and inconsistent. For example, three companies would have a wide range of differences in their charges for the same coverage. I concluded I would learn how insurance companies determined their rate structure and rather than send them applications and wait, I would do the work for them, figure the price it would take to get the business, and then shop it around until I found an an insurance company willing to accept the risk for that price. I reasoned that it would put me in a better competitive position and I could

2. I met Jon Huntsman, but mostly dealt with his financial people, one of whom was named Ronald Rasband. He was the CFO of Huntsman Chemical Company. Forty years later I would work with him again, this time in his capacity as a member of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

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control the flow of my business better. Instead of saying to a company underwriter, “Give me a quote on these ten accounts, and if you’re lucky, you might get one of them,” my approach was, “Look at this risk. It has these characteristics of businesses your company likes to do business with. If you are willing to do the following, we can get the business.” I began studying the companies’ rating systems. I found that underwriters would teach me if I asked, and that it wasn’t rocket science. Most companies used identical systems of rating, and then applied their own pricing judgments. The process began to work for me. My uncle Dave Okerlund was working at Okerlund-Leavitt Agency in Richfield. At some point, I helped Dave with an account or two and it worked for him as well. As time progressed, I began working with several of the other agencies in which Dad had an ownership interest. I quickly began to see a business model emerging. More and more of my time was spent helping agencies not only place accounts but, because of the knowledge I had developed in my CPCU studies, help them in properly constructing the accounts. This was the first time the interests of Michael O. Leavitt Agency began to align with those of the other Leavitt agencies.

Art Firley and Casualty Indemnity Exchange

As I was beginning to learn to do business this way, I got a call from Art Firley, the underwriting manager of Casualty Indemnity Exchange (CIE) in Denver, asking if I would be interested in working with him on small commercial lines accounts. CIE was a reciprocal company, which meant it was owned by its policyholders.

Art was a German who had immigrated to the United States after World War II. He had served in both the German and U.S. armies and had been a prisoner of war. His knowledge of the insurance industry was self-taught, but he had earned his CPCU. He and his wife Joan decided to stick with CIE through the regulatory process, surmising that if they could see it through, they could capture control of a company charter that was licensed in twenty states and had an eighty-year history. With the help of a lawyer, Art found a way to resolve the company’s issues and it gained a new lease on life financially. The downside of CIE was that it had less than one million dollars in assets. However, the company arranged a reinsurance treaty with a respected international company, Swiss Re, a German outfit that trusted him.3 I was intrigued by the unique way in which Art proposed that we work. Art was willing to teach me how to price the accounts, but more importantly, give me authority to do so on my own. And, if a client accepted our proposal, I was given the authority to issue the policies, meaning I personally typed and assembled the contracts of insurance using standard forms we were provided. For issuing the policies, he was willing to pay us 30 percent commission rather than the 15 to 20 percent commission we normally received.

I remembered Art from a meeting a few years earlier when CIE had contacted Dixie Leavitt Agency with the idea of writing property casualty business.

This added a new wrinkle to the wholesale business I was doing with other Leavitt Agencies. This deal meant that I could work with our affiliated agencies, pay them the 15 percent commission they were normally getting from an insurance company, and I would do very well on the remaining commission. I was, in essence, becoming a wholesaler or general agency. It was a remarkable opportunity in my mind, despite the risks of the company’s size.

At the time of Art’s call, his company was just coming out of regulatory supervision. CIE had gotten in trouble writing medical malpractice business. The entire management team was gone except for Art.

For the next year I continued to write accounts I developed and help other agencies on the side. I decided to hire somebody to help me rate and issue the policies. There was no one in Cedar City that had experience with insurance rate making, so I

3. Reinsurance is a contract where one insurance company assumes part of the risk from another.

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had to train someone. I hired Willard Jones, a family friend who had been in the automobile business for many years in Cedar City. Between the two of us, we began to figure it out. I also hired Tom Cardon to help develop my agency’s personal lines (auto and home insurance for an individual or family) book of business. Tom’s presence allowed me to concentrate on developing the wholesale operation and larger accounts. Michael O. Leavitt Agency was one of only a handful of agencies with which CIE did business, so the relationship was close and direct. We knew CIE’s limitations and CIE knew why we looked past its flaws. Over time, Art was able to earn underwriting profits, and the company’s reserves began to grow. Most of CIE’s profit was earned by doing business with Leavitt-related agencies. Art Firley ultimately moved the company to Jefferson City, Missouri, in an effort to come under the direction of the Missouri insurance commissioner. At the time of the move to Missouri, Art invited me to serve on CIE’s board of directors. I was in my late twenties by this time, and it was a good experience for me. Plus, it was flattering. Once each quarter I flew to Jefferson City for a board meeting. Art and his wife Joan became our friends and mentors. He was brilliant, independent, generous, and a lover of fine things. Jackie and I traveled with them a couple of times. Ultimately, Art developed cancer, and sold the company to his employees, who were not able to sustain its success. His wife, Joan, continued to be a great friend after Art’s death.

Other Great Mentors

Art may have been one of the most important mentors of my early business career, but I had many other great mentors in my early professional career. The most influential mentor in my life has clearly been my father. I started in business having observed his example of hard work, and I also leaned on the benefit of his good reputation. It was

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my father who pointed out the garbage business opportunity (that I have written about in chapter eleven) and coached me through it. The opportunity he gave me with Michael O. Leavitt Agency was a brilliant way to manage the cross pressures of my inexperience and my need for independence. He let me learn through doing. When I showed interest in working with him in developing the agency group, he let me try things—some that worked and some that didn’t. And, as I will write later, my political career was launched because of opportunities related to his run for governor. There were others who helped me learn the business. Sandra Maxwell was my father’s assistant, bookkeeper, and truthfully, everything else. One of those “everything else” duties was helping and teaching me. Sandra and I had a wonderful friendship, and we worked together for many years. I have never met anyone who could get more done than Sandra Maxwell. My uncle Bert Leavitt always took a special interest in me, and he may have been the best salesman I have ever known. He owned 40 percent of the Leavitt Insurance Agency in Las Vegas. Early in my dad’s career, my dad was writing much of his new business in Nevada, so he decided he needed to do one of two things: move to Nevada and get someone to manage his business in Utah, or stay in Utah and get someone to manage his business in Nevada. He invited Bert, who was selling office machines in northern California, to join him and manage the business in Nevada. Within a short period of time, Bert had learned the business and was building on what Dad had developed. He became an officer of the Professional Insurance Agents—a trade association in Washington, D.C. Later, he became the association’s national president. He was president during the early part of my career. He appointed me to various committees within the association, which allowed me to make important contacts within the industry. Regrettably, Bert died at the age of fifty-six to cancer, his second bout with the disease. He and his wife Joyce were wonderful to Jackie and me. His sons, my cousins Terry, Rod, and Wade still work in the agency.

LAUNCHING A CAREER IN INSURANCE

Many insurance company people also mentored me. I discovered the magic of asking people to help me learn; people like to be helpful. Three I remember especially well were Don Hansen and Gary Nelson of USF&G, and Don Hutson of Maryland Casualty Company. Don Hansen was the casualty manager of USF&G for many years, and Gary Nelson was his property insurance counterpart. On many occasions they let me sit across from them at their desks and ask questions. If I had an important account, they would talk me through the complexities. Most of all, they encouraged me and showed me respect.

After my success with Art Firley and CIE in developing a wholesale operation, I began approaching other, larger insurers about a similar arrangement. Most declined, but as I will detail later, Don saw something in me and my idea and was willing to take the risk. Furthermore, Don could see I was inexperienced but trusted me anyway. He later became president and CEO of Maryland Casualty in Baltimore and continued to view me and our group as a special project. Our wholesale idea worked, and his optimism paid off, but I have never forgotten his confidence during the apprenticeship part of my career.

Don Hutson had a significant influence on me during my early business career. He was regional vice president of Maryland Casualty in Sacramento.

Boyhood friend and work colleague Tom Cardon.

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15 A New House and a New Son 1976 • Pink Brick Home; Birth of Mike S. During the 1970s, the United States was in the grip of an economic crisis. The aftermath of the Vietnam War, combined with wage and price controls and the oil crisis of 1973, seemed to spell only disaster for the economy. Inflation hit record highs. Unemployment kept rising. Arthur Okun, a professor of economics at Yale University, who served as chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors during the Johnson administration, put into words the painful economic phenomenon that occurs when the rates of inflation and unemployment rise in tandem: the discomfort index. The discomfort index, or misery index, as it is known today, is the sum of the rate of inflation and the rate of unemployment during a given year. In 1974, inflation entered double digits—11 percent—and unemployment was at 5.6 percent. I remember feeling the effects of the economic crisis. Thankfully I always had a job, but the cost of filling up my gas tank kept rising. Our grocery bill increased. Homes were rapidly escalating in price. It was as though inflation knew no bounds. Thankfully, we were still able to buy our first home during this time.

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Mike S. Leavitt

A NEW HOUSE AND A NEW SON

Pink Brick Home on Sunset Drive

After Jackie finished her student teaching assignment during the spring of 1974, she began looking for a teaching job in the Iron County School District. There were only two openings—one in Parowan and the other at East Elementary in Cedar City. Jackie was the first choice for both jobs, and decided to accept the East Elementary position. In the fall, with both of us working, and no stabilization in sight in terms of real estate prices, we decided it was time to buy a house. We felt we needed to get into the game before it left us behind. On Sunday evenings we drove around Cedar City, looking for homes in the range we could afford. We found a pink brick home on Sunset Drive with three bedrooms and a small family room. The asking price was $26,500, and the owner would carry the contract.

“

When my father would deliver a calf, he tied a rope to its leg and just pulled it out.

”

Jackie and I had some money saved for a down payment. We made an offer, nervously waited for a couple of days, and then celebrated when it was accepted. We committed ourselves to live on what I was earning and applied all of Jackie’s $8,275 annual salary to the contract. We proceeded to do what we have done with each of our homes: own, remodel, and (when we were ready) sell it. The backyard needed work. A contractor client of mine, Darrel Yates, owed me money, so we traded for the use of a small Bobcat backhoe. I’d never used one but felt sure I could learn. The attempt turned into a comedy of errors. I succeeded in tearing up the backyard, but ultimately had to have somebody come in and help me finish the job. We tore out the lawn, pulled down a fence, adjusted the property line back to its original spot, hauled in new topsoil. We turned it into a reasonably nice yard, though I never did master the backhoe.

We got some unexpected help furnishing the house as well. Jackie went to Northeast Furniture to shop for a washer and dryer, and while there, she registered for a drawing. One evening a few weeks later, I was at home when Garth Jones, the manager of the store, called to tell us we’d won second prize, which was $750 worth of merchandise. We ultimately decided on a bedroom set and some front room furniture that cost considerably more than the prize money. I’m guessing they made money on the deal, but we still felt lucky.

“We’re Going to Have a Baby!”

A few months after moving in, I decided to paint our house. I was more successful at painting than landscaping; I could handle sandpaper and a paintbrush better than a backhoe. One day, I was standing on a ladder that was leaning against the north side of the house when Jackie returned from an appointment with Dr. Broadbent. She drew a deep breath and said, “Well, we’re going to have a baby!” It was one of those moments one never forgets. I got off the ladder, and we embraced. The responsibility of raising a human being fell upon us both. Jackie had committed to Mr. Stratton, the principal of East Elementary, that she would teach for at least two years. Knowing she would deliver the baby in February, cutting that time short, meant she had to have a difficult conversation with him. Thankfully, he was fine about it, and they agreed she would continue to teach as long as she was able to. She had morning sickness but struggled through it, never missing a day of teaching. Things grew more difficult during the last months of the pregnancy. A few weeks before the baby was due, we went to a dance organized by the National Guard in Beaver. Jackie removed her shoes to dance, and when it was time to go home, she could not get her shoes back on, her feet had swollen so badly. She walked to the car barefoot.

Michael Smith Leavitt

Jackie quit teaching on the thirteenth of February. Michael Smith Leavitt was born on Friday, the twentieth of February.

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Every birth is memorable. The first, however, holds a particularly prominent place in my mind. Jackie’s labor began on Thursday afternoon, so we packed her suitcase on Thursday evening and waited—we had been told if we checked into the hospital before midnight, we would be billed for the entire day. The labor proceeded through the night. The labor pains increased in frequency and severity. Midnight passed, and we decided it was time to go to the hospital. We drove, although it was only a couple of blocks from our home. We had actually practiced this before, worried that if there was an emergency we needed to know exactly where to go. The pains had become intense enough that our drive to the hospital felt like an emergency—like the baby would come at any moment. When the nurse told Jackie she was dilated to a two on a scale of ten, I thought she would cry.

Through the night, then all morning and most of the afternoon, the labor continued. My job was to deliver to Jackie whatever she wanted. She couldn’t drink water but was able to have ice chips. In between spoonfuls of ice chips, we practiced the panting action we had learned as a pain management tool.

“

Who is this little person, and what will he become?

The endurance was made worse by the fact that another couple came in long after we had and by late morning had finished delivery. About that time Jackie said to me, “I just want to go home for a while.”

Dixie, Mike S. (ten months old), and Jackie, celebrating Christmas in Cedar City.

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”

A NEW HOUSE AND A NEW SON

About noon Jackie was finally wheeled into the delivery room. Dr. L.V. Broadbent was there just at the moment we needed him. He had been our family’s doctor for many years. He was the consummate small-town doctor, trusted, kind, and confident. I remember him making house calls to our place many times. Things seemed intense until the doctor administered the epidural block. Once the relief of the medicine began to take effect, Jackie seemed to actually enjoy the experience. In her semi-medicated state, Jackie said, “When my father would deliver a calf, he tied a rope to its leg and just pulled it out.” Dr. Broadbent was having trouble getting Mike through the birth canal. There were several tense minutes as he struggled, using forceps to pull him through. To break the tension, Dr. Broadbent said, “Where’s that rope?” Who could forget the remarkable moment when a baby emerges from the womb? Writing this, the emotion comes back to me, and I choke back tears that flowed freely that day. The moment spoke of mystery; we had no idea of gender. As I saw our child covered with blood (a boy), stretching his arms, taking his first breaths, I thought, “Who is this little person, and what will he become?” It was a moment of great spiritual consequence to me. Mike’s birth confirmed to me, as it did with the births of all of our children, that the spark of life is holy and comes only from God. Once Jackie was safely in her room and the baby had been delivered to the nursery, I stood in the hall and called our parents. “It is a little Leavitt boy,” I said to each of them through more tears. After three days of morning, afternoon, and evening trips to the hospital, I rolled Jackie out in a wheelchair to our car. We drove the short distance home, feeling the weight of this new responsibility. He was so tiny, so fragile, so dependent on us for everything. A few days after returning home, Mike developed a condition called projectile vomiting. After Jackie

had nursed him, he would violently hurl—it would literally travel a few feet. It is frightening under any condition, but experiencing it as new parents was doubly troublesome. The doctor prescribed some medication and things began to settle into a pattern.

New Expectations and Responsibilities

Life became suddenly full of new expectations and responsibilities. The anxiety of that new responsibility was notable. A couple of weeks into our parenthood, I went to Salt Lake on business for a few days. It was the first time I had left Jackie and the baby alone. Coming home to Cedar City, I delayed my departure for the airport, hoping to squeeze in one more meeting before flying back. I literally made the plane by seconds. I was relieved because I sensed Jackie was feeling overwhelmed. When I arrived home, Jackie was sitting in the front room holding the baby. As I walked in the door, she looked at me and began to cry. “I’m so glad you’re home,” she said. “I just need you to take care of the baby for a while.” The combination of postpartum blues and the constant worry of new expectations had finally

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boiled over. Jackie recovered quickly, but it was an important experience for me. I have often worried about how close I was to missing that plane. I felt more keenly the responsibility of sharing the weight. I have vivid memories of those first few months. Jackie nursed the baby at night, but when Mike couldn’t sleep, I often stayed up to try to settle him. One night, he wouldn’t settle and was up nearly all night. As long as I walked the floor or sat in the rocking chair, things were OK, but the minute I stopped, he cried. Finally, he fell asleep. I crept out of his room and tiptoed into our room to lie down. A few minutes later, Jackie said, “Mike, do you have the baby in here?” I was lying on the bed, patting my chest in my sleep.

“

I’m so glad you’re home, I just need you to take care of the baby for a while.

”

I enjoyed bathing and dressing him; I marveled at how small and perfect his arms were as I dressed him in a tiny T-shirt. I had some experience taking care of babies because of all the younger brothers I’d attended to, but not a lot of experience with infants. Jackie spent hours holding and rocking Mikey. He was not natively affectionate, but she taught him how to accept love and give it with those hours of attention. As the first grandchild in the family, Mike got a lot of attention from my brothers. Eric, who would have been thirteen or so, would occasionally babysit. One night we came home after an evening out and Eric reported Mikey had six bottles. He said, “When I put him to bed, he’d cry, so I gave him a bottle. When it was done, he cried again, so I gave him another. He just kept drinking them.” The predictable happened. We went in to check on him and found him asleep on a bed that was wet from one end to the other.

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Mike loved toys that made noise. He had a xylophone with a wooden mallet that played a full octave. He would bang on it for hours. He also had a small Fisher-Price radio toy we would wind up and play. The song was, “My name is Michael.” Mikey would wind it up, put it next to his ear, and rock back and forth. He enjoyed playing patty cake, and liked the toss-it-in-the-oven-for-baby-and-me part of the rhyme most of all. Like most babies, Mikey got rather attached to objects of his environment. He had a blanket he insisted on having and liked to hold a particular corner of the blanket. He loved his pacifier, but referred to it as his “ha-tat-a.” Mike learned to crawl at about eight or nine months of age. He made such an art of it, we worried for a time he would just skip walking. He used all fours—his knees never touched the ground, because he didn’t like the feel of carpet—and he moved as fast as any person could walk. He just zipped around the house. We had a small wooden stool in the kitchen which Mikey discovered before he could walk. He turned it over, stood up while holding the legs and pushed it around the house. He could run behind it—fast. In fact, using the stool, he literally did learn to run before he walked.

16 Dixie Leavitt for Governor 1976 • Dixie's Run for Governor; Finding Support; Republican State Convention; The Primary Nearly a month after his appointment to the presidency in 1974, Gerald Ford granted a presidential pardon to Richard Nixon for his role in the Watergate scandal. This action played a role in 1976, after President Gerald Ford announced his intention to seek a second term. Ford’s benevolence toward Nixon was controversial, and it paved the way for a challenge from another Republican presidential nominee, California Governor Ronald Reagan. Ford would go on to win the Republican nomination and face Georgia Governor Jimmy Carter in the general election, but Reagan’s emergence in presidential politics energized the far right, which was passionate in its support of him. In Utah, Governor Cal Rampton announced his plans to retire after three terms, and Senator Frank Moss, a Democrat, was up for reelection. Five Republican candidates filed to run against Senator Moss. The frontrunner was Jack Carlson, who had spent time in Washington as the head of the National Realtors Association. The other candidates were Des Barker, a former White House staffer and local PR executive; Byron Rampton, a state senator, friend of my dad and the brother of Governor Cal Rampton; Sherm Lloyd, a former Congressman;

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and the ultimate winner, Orrin Hatch, a relatively unknown lawyer from Salt Lake City. The race for the U.S. House of Representatives Republican nomination in the district included five candidates as well: a colorectal surgeon named Jay Hughes, who had a colorful personality; a young lawyer named Alan Chandler; Barry Nielson; and Dan Marriott. The winner of the nomination would face freshman Congressman Alan Howe. All in all, 1976 was a big year in state and federal politics. The only year like it was 1992, when I ran for governor.

Strong Undercurrent to Run

The Republicans really wanted to win the governor’s race. The party organization had essentially decided that Vern Romney, the attorney general, would be the best candidate. However, it was clear to most of the business community that the attorney general just didn’t have the firepower to win, or, for that matter, govern. There was a strong undercurrent that an alternative had to be found. Karl Snow, a state senator from Provo, was the most talked about. However, there was a steady stream of inquiries from a group of Salt Lake business leaders to Dad, who was serving in the Senate. I had been involved in Dad’s elections for many years. My first political memory was of his campaign for city council. He wasn’t taking the race too seriously, but I was. When Dad and Mom went to an election-night party, I stayed home with a babysitter and listened to the returns on KSUB radio. When the totals were broadcast, I knew he had lost, and I was quite upset. When Dad arrived home, he came to my bedroom to talk with me. I started to cry, but then Dad told me he was relieved by the result. I believed him, and I felt better.

A couple of years later, Dad chaired a committee to get the college in Cedar City four-year independent status. It became clear the job had to be done in the legislature. He says he tried to get other people to run, but ultimately decided to run himself. It was the election of 1962. He ran for a seat in the House against L.C. Miles, a popular middle school principal. I can’t remember if L.C. Miles was an incumbent, but it seems like he was.

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My mother pasted brochures on T-shirts with Elmer’s glue, and we wore them to the county fair—my first memory of campaigning. It was an embarrassing moment for an eleven-year-old Little-League star, but I did it. Dad won, and in 1963 began his service in the Utah House of Representatives. He served for two years in the House, then moved to the Senate. He quickly advanced to leadership and became the Majority Leader, losing by only one vote in the race to become Senate president. His response to the steady stream of inquiries from businessmen who wanted him to run for governor was that he had doubts a candidate from rural Utah could win. But there were other concerns as well: he could see it would be a difficult time for his business if he were to leave. I had been in the business only a short time but could see that the infrastructure of the business was completely inadequate to support his absence. His running would also be a major disruption to a family of six boys, and he would have to give up his Senate seat to run. Another complicating factor was the already late stage of the race and the overwhelming advantage that Romney had. The filing deadline was close, and the state convention followed only a few months after that. The pressure continued to mount, and time was running out. Dad and Karl Snow were talking constantly about whether a candidate could beat Romney and which of them should run. Dad went to

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Salt Lake City for a meeting at the Alta Club with a group of business leaders who were the elite of the Utah business community. The group included people like Joseph Rosenblatt; David Evans, founder of Evans Advertising; Roy Simmons, the chairman of Zions Bank; B.Z. Kaslier of Mountain Fuel Supply; Jim Ellsworth of Surety Life Insurance Company; and many others. At the conclusion of the meeting, they committed to Dad that they would, collectively, raise or donate thirty thousand dollars to get the campaign started if Dad agreed to run. He came home from the meeting deeply troubled. Running really didn’t make a lot of sense, especially when I look at it with the benefit of hindsight. However, there was something that drew all of us to it. I understood the impact the decision would have on me, and I also knew Dad would be looking to me for advice or at least input on the decision. So I drove up Right Hand Canyon one morning and prayed about it. I came away feeling that if he wanted to do it, I should support him. I felt that somehow, things would work out. He decided to do it. We drove to Salt Lake City to file the papers and began organizing an announcement and campaign. Looking back on it, we were so naïve about the process. Dad called Jim Carraco, a guy from Kanab who had worked for years as a staffer at the legislature, and asked him to help. Jim had a small, drive-in restaurant in Kanab but dropped everything to help. The plan was that I would help Dad get organized, and then I would go back and, with Sandra Maxwell, keep the business going. Dad and I drove to Salt Lake and stayed in a little apartment at 1390 South 1100 East in Salt Lake. It was a Dixie Leavitt remodel job; he had created an apartment out of the cellar of one of two houses he had combined. It had a ceiling height of less than six feet, so in some places I had to walk with my head cocked to the side. The Republican party chairman, Richard Richards, was nothing short of angry that Dad was going to file. He figured the best shot was Vern Romney, but now the party would potentially have a primary because Stan Smoot, a young and well-regarded Davis County commissioner, had decided to run

as well. I went to the party headquarters to discuss our announcement with the executive director of the party. He was not particularly helpful and did everything he could to discourage me. We decided to do the announcement in multiple places around the state on the same day, concluding in Cedar City. The announcement was on a Friday in mid-April, I believe on the thirteenth. When we finally got to Cedar City, half the town showed up at the Town and Country Inn, and the event was carried live on KSUB radio. It was an emotional end to the first week. We were in the race but didn’t really have a clue what to do.

Inventing and Inquiring

That weekend, as Dad got ready to return to Salt Lake City by himself to begin organizing, the reality of the situation began to settle on all of us. It was simply impossible for me to let him face that by himself. I knew he didn’t have any experience in campaigning—I didn’t either—but I also knew from the previous week that he was going to be alone in this. All those big business guys talked a good game, but they had a lot to do and couldn’t be counted on. It took us weeks to get them to put up the $30,000 they had pledged. We finally had them all sign a note at the bank: they had to raise the money or pay the debt. The reality was we were on our own. It’s always like that. If you’re running for office, you have to make your own way. Many will encourage you and commit to help you, but only a few will follow through and get down to work. It comes down to you, your family, a handful of close friends, and some devoted staff. As a candidate, you come away feeling extraordinarily grateful to those who do help because they begin to own it and support you in a very meaningful way during a critical time. I asked Dad if he wanted me to come back to Salt Lake with him for another week. He quickly said yes. After church, we struck out for Salt Lake City. When we got to the Point of the Mountain it was night, and the porch lights of millions of homes in the Salt Lake Valley stretched before us as far as we could see. Perhaps it was due to the late hour, but we were both a little overwhelmed. I said, “How

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are we going to reach all those people? They don’t know you, or what you stand for.” That moment defined our experience. The next morning, we got up and started organizing in what seemed like the most logical way we could think of.

We leased a building that used to be a fast-food restaurant on the corner of Fourth South and Fourth East, next door to an Arby’s. It provided us with less-than-perfect office arrangements, but it was highly visible.

By the end of that week, it became evident to us that we were not going to find anyone to manage the campaign that was able to work as hard or as cheaply as me, so I became the campaign manager.

Fundraising for any campaign is hard. Our first effort was to get the $30,000 the original backers had pledged, which took several weeks to get arranged. In the meantime, we held fundraising events and calls. Somehow, we kept the effort moving forward. I don’t remember how much money was necessary to get us through the convention, but I do know that ultimately, we had to put family money into the campaign.

I took leave from work, put school on hold, and started assembling a campaign staff. Most were people I knew: Steve Johnson, a missionary friend; Tim Anderson, who was a law student and son of a friend of Dad’s; Joe Walker, who was the son of a friend of our family and had just come home from a mission; and Alan Archibald, another of my missionary companions. Three people from SUSC—Sharon Daugherty, Lou Weaver, and Sue Memmott—joined the effort. They not only helped with the office and organizational work but also formed a singing group, which became a trademark along the campaign trail. My brother Mark worked nearly full-time on the campaign. Two other people were prominent on the staff: Jenette Embry, who had just graduated from Stanford Law School, and Lori Lambrose, who I believe was another SUSC student.

“

How are we going to reach all those people? They don’t know you, or what you stand for.

”

Like any campaign, we had several things we had to accomplish at once. People like to support a winner, and therefore, part of our effort had to be devoted to creating the clear perception that Dad could win. We had to raise money, and most importantly, prepare for the nominating convention to earn a place on the ballot for the primary election in September. The truth is, we knew very little about how to do any of this, so we just went about inventing and inquiring.

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Preparing for the Republican State Convention

The most intense effort was preparation for the Republican state convention. There were 2,500 delegates to be elected that year. Ideally, a candidate arranges to have supporters in each mass meeting with a plan to elect one of them as a delegate. It takes an enormous amount of organization to accomplish that. Because Dad had waited until just before the filing deadline, there was little time to organize before the mass meetings. However, we quickly made that our focus. I returned to Cedar City and was elected at my mass meeting as a delegate, but not until I had overcome direct challenges by Forrest Hunter, who felt he had an ideological conflict with Dad, and Doug Bonzo, my high school English teacher, who represented the UEA. We made lists of people who were natural supporters and developed a packet of information explaining how to get elected. We also struggled to get basic campaign decisions made. We needed a logo and campaign look, and we needed to identify our strengths and possible weaknesses.

One of our supporters arranged for us to work with Gillham Advertising—the advertising agency that handled First Security Bank. The CEO of the agency, Lon Richardson, assigned a young guy named Greg Jarrard to the account. In addition, I assigned Steve Johnson, who had been studying public relations at BYU, the duty of developing some of the materials.

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Our first effort to develop a logo and look was not a good one, but we only had to do it twice, ending up with a reasonably clean package. When the mass meetings concluded, I think we had succeeded at electing as many delegates as either Vern Romney or Stan Smoot, but nobody had created a definitive advantage. That was a success as far as we were concerned—we just needed to get out of the mass meetings with an even chance. Within a few days of the mass meetings, the state party published a list of the delegates who had been elected and announced the schedule of county conventions. From that point forward, it was a mad scramble for every campaign to contact the delegates and arrange for them to have contact with the candidate. The delegates were, of course, just deluged with material and calls from campaigns. Our strategy depended on Dad getting face time with the maximum number of delegates possible. We created a schedule of breakfasts and lunch meetings with what amounted to telemarketers— before there were telemarketers—calling to personally invite the delegates to an event. We found that delegates were reluctant to go to meetings in the evenings, so we devised a method of sending Dad to a neighborhood. We called them drop-bys. While he was visiting one, we’d arrange another. We found he could do personal visits to a dozen delegates in a night. We also concluded that while Dad was the best one to visit, Mother and I were good surrogates. We developed a team to make calls for my mother and a team to make calls for my visits. When all the cylinders were popping, we could visit thirty delegates a night.

campaign, hauling the material and working as the advance man for the next convention. Our traveling trio of singers was the life of the party; they sang lots of numbers, but every few minutes they would sing the campaign’s theme, “Are You for Dixie?”—a remake of the theme song of the Dixie College performance troupe. Thirty years later, people still remembered the group and its music. It was the most enduring part of the convention circuit. There were lots of relationships built on that trail, like with Mark, who stirred up a little romance with Stan Smoot’s daughter. Campaigns tend to generate fascinating studies in sociology and politics.

The State Convention

Once the county conventions were over, we went into the big push for the state convention where the delegates voted. That year, the convention was held at the Salt Palace Convention Center. A political convention can feel like a three-ring circus (which was particularly true of this convention, due to the number of contested races). Signs covered every square inch of the convention hall and surrounding hallways. Most of them were put up in a land rush the day before when workers from all the campaigns were lined up and released at the same time. Every candidate had armies of workers trying to ensure that the committed delegates stayed committed and the undecided fell their way.

I had a phone installed in my car—a Chrysler Cordoba—which I bought new just before the campaign started. The phone was a real novelty and helped considerably, although it was extremely expensive.

By that time, the race felt as if Dad was creating momentum among the delegates, which was confirmed by a poll we had done by Randy Simmons, who was a graduate student at USU and a school friend of Jackie’s. He and a couple of his friends wanted to become pollsters, and they volunteered to do a poll of the delegates. It was helpful information because it showed that we were making headway and had some momentum going into the convention. Plus, we also knew Dad had a solid block of votes coming from areas outside Salt Lake County.

The county conventions reminded me of an undisciplined circus train, with all the campaigns going from county to county, hauling posters and other material necessary for their presentations. My brother Mark was the wagon master for our

Stan Smoot did not seem to have momentum, and Vern Romney did not leave a strong impression with people. He was not particularly outgoing, nor did he have a commanding presence. I don’t remember any issue on which he distinguished himself.

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Photo courtesy of The Salt Lake Tribune

1 Family campaign photo. From left: Eric (kneeling), Mark, Anne Dixie, Matthew, Mike, Jackie (holding Mike S.). Standing: Dane 2 Dixie Leavitt with Kay Knight, the senate stenographer, 1967

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3 Dixie Leavitt walking down the State Capitol stairs. Campaign photo, 1976. 4 Dixie’s governor candidate photo, 1976

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On the campaign trail one makes lots of friends; even competitors become friends. The Romney campaign included an eighteen-year-old Dave Buhler, who later became a significant force in Utah politics himself. He liked politics and enjoyed coming by our headquarters to chat and take our temperature. We would tease each other during the county conventions. He seemed overly sure of the Romney campaign’s success, and somehow we ended up betting twenty dollars on the outcome of the convention. At the campaign, each candidate had a booth where he or she would meet with delegates to convince a delegate to commit to vote for him or her. Romney’s campaign had built a booth that resembled a towering monument. We had opted for a different feel: Antone Hunter, a member of my parents’ study group and a lifelong friend of the family, brought a truckload of furniture to Salt Lake— including carpet—and built the equivalent of an inviting living room. Throughout the convention, our workers mingled throughout the crowd talking with people. When they found somebody that was solidly committed to Leavitt or another candidate, they would say, “We don’t want to keep bothering you, so could we put this blue dot on your credential? That way our workers will not take your time.” Those without a dot were invited to our living-room booth to talk with Dad. People liked the courtesy, and it allowed us to focus on the undecided. As the day wore on, there were fewer and fewer people without dots, and we could feel our momentum building even more.

The Main Issue to Overcome

There was one highly significant issue in the governor’s race: land-use planning. The environmental movement born in the early 1970s had caused people to advocate for planning. Congress, for example, had five years earlier reversed a hundred years of land management doctrine when it passed a law requiring RS 2477 roads to have federal permission for improvements or alterations. The Utah Legislature passed a bill allocating around $800,000 to the counties to begin land-use planning, and Dad had voted for it.

However, among far-right conservatives, there was an anti-planning movement that ran deep. The land-use planning bill became a symbol for the anti-planning movement, and a man named Austin Belnap was the leader behind it. He organized a voter referendum to reverse the bill. The group began collecting signatures for a petition, using outlandish claims such as that the bill allows the government to decide what color to paint your fence. They were successful in getting it on the ballot. Just before the convention, the land-use planning opponents attacked Dad. The issue began to gain traction, and we knew it had to be dealt with. We decided to address it in his convention speech.

The Vote

As the time for the candidate presentations approached, Dad and I found a small room where we could work on his speech. Both he and I were on edge, and we ended up having a major disagreement while preparing the speech. It was a rather emotional experience for both of us. I don’t remember any of the particulars, but in the end, we were able to pull the speech together. We basically used his stump speech and added some new material directly addressing the land-use planning issue. As Dad spoke, the weeks of work paid off. Leavitt signs seemed to be in the hands of every person on the convention floor, his appearance drew the most vocal show of support given any candidate, and he hit his speech out of the park. All that was left was for delegates to vote. I remember the long wait as they counted the votes. We were all huddled in one area of the auditorium. Bill Hansen, my Aunt Faun’s husband, came running across the room. He had either seen totals or had been told that we had won. We all gathered as Dick Richards, the party chair, read the results. Dad had come first at the convention, and we would face Vern Romney in the primary. It was unthinkable to us at that moment—one of the most exciting moments I have experienced in politics. We hugged, cried, and danced, thrilled with our victory. We went to Chuck-A-Rama for dinner in celebration.

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The next day, I collected twenty dollars from Dave Buhler and promised to contribute it to our campaign in his name—which I took care to do. For many years since Dave and I have joked about that wager and his contribution to Dixie’s campaign.

election, but KSL did it anyway. I have always felt that it hurt us because it demoralized our supporters and gave Republicans, who thought they needed to elect the best-known candidate, a reason to vote for Romney.

Onto the Primary

Then, on the Saturday and Sunday before the Tuesday election, the John Birch Society, an ultra right-wing political organization that was prominent at that time, in combination with a land-use planning crowd, printed thousands of fliers and papered all the parking lots along the Wasatch Front. The flier featured an ugly caricature of Dad and a long list of attacks and lies. It was hurtful to us both politically and personally. Those were hard days.

But when the next day came, reality hit. We had come first in the convention, but now we had to start over and win a primary. It was a heavy lift. Our opponent had greater name identification, we were out of money, and none of us had ever run a statewide campaign before. It was the same problem I had spoken to my dad about at the Point of the Mountain: how are we going to reach all these people? As the campaign got closer and closer to the primary, we were doing everything we knew how to do. Dad did well in all of it; nobody ever outworks my dad. We could feel ourselves gaining traction, but it was happening slowly, though we had no polling or tools to know for sure. We knew that we needed to be on television, but we didn’t have any money. Finally, Dad made the decision that he would put $30,000 into the campaign and we hired some BYU students to produce a thirty-second commercial, which I remember being reasonably good. About a week before the primary election, I was driving down Seventh East next to Liberty Park. I saw a man throwing a Frisbee to his dog. My hands were white from gripping the wheel. When I saw the man relaxed like that, I felt angry. “Doesn’t he understand that there is an election in less than a week?” I had to laugh at myself—most of the world doesn’t care about elections. I was in a tunnel that had affected my perceptions and judgment.

Downturn

Several days before the election, a man named Ray Briscoe, who conducted polls for KSL, walked into our headquarters and told me that KSL was going to broadcast the results of a poll that showed us way down. I asked when the poll was taken, and he said it was a couple of weeks old. I argued that it was unfair to play an old poll that close to the

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Despite those negatives, we could still feel our momentum building. On election night, Ray Briscoe forecast the race as a Romney blowout. It didn’t happen. In fact, as the results came in, we were ahead until very late in the evening. The final count shows that Romney won 53 percent to 47 percent. It was the vote from Salt Lake County that spelled the difference; we won nearly every county except Salt Lake County, but we simply could not make up that loss in the other areas of the state. It was a lesson I did not forget. The next couple of days were spent cleaning up the headquarters. I did some news interviews and anticipated my return to a more normal life.

Learning to Deal with the Media

Learning to deal with the media was an important experience for me. Just after Dad announced his candidacy, we were looking for ways to generate coverage. There was a fourth-grade class from Cedar City visiting the capitol building and Jim Carraco suggested we hold a news conference. I thought that sounded like a good idea. When the media got there, and found out that we didn’t have an announcement, they were somewhere between amused and irritated. Clint Warby, who was a lead reporter with KSL at the time, explained to me that a news conference should be reserved for situations where one has something newsy to say. We got a couple of stories out of it, but they were about how the candidates try to manipulate the media for coverage. It was an important lesson.

D I X I E L E AV I T T F O R G O V E R N O R

We had some other unhappy experiences with the media. A Channel 4 reporter, whose wife worked for Romney, filed reports that were slanted and consistently negative toward us. I complained to the management of the station, but it had little effect, and I further alienated the reporter. Another lesson learned.

Meant to Be

The campaign was an incredibly difficult time for our little family. Commuting back and forth to Salt Lake from Cedar City was not a reasonable option, so Jackie, Mike S., and I moved, along with Dad and Mom, to an apartment on Douglas Street. Living in those confined quarters, with a new baby, under the extreme emotional stress that a campaign creates, was just impossibly difficult. My dad and I had frequent disagreements, usually born of fatigue and frustration, which often boiled over at the apartment. Being the campaign manager and son was difficult. However, it was an important experience. The campaign clearly set my life on a new course. I met people and had experiences during those six months that would open doors for me for years to come. For example, I became friends with Chuck Bailey, a political consultant with the Republican National Committee who lived in Utah. He routinely visited our headquarters to give me advice. I interacted with Chuck for years after that. He introduced me to Eddie Mahe, who was the deputy chairman of the Republican National Committee. He became a key figure in my campaigns. I had a chance to interact directly with the leaders of industry and government, which built my confidence. I enjoyed going to the Alta Club for meetings, where the economic community met to network.1

About two weeks before the general election, Congressman Alan Howe was arrested for soliciting sex from a prostitute (who turned out to be an undercover police officer) in Salt Lake City. He lost the election to Republican Dan Marriott. Marriott’s victory was an event that would directly affect my life. Another election surprise was Orrin Hatch, who pulled off a miraculous victory in both the primary and general elections for the Senate. That race also had bearing on my future in ways which I could not foresee. The Democratic convention produced a primary election between John Preston Creer, a Salt Lake County Commissioner, and Scott Matheson, a corporate lawyer with Union Pacific Railroad. Scott Matheson won the primary election against John Creer, and, after facing Vern Romney in the general election, became the twelfth governor of Utah. What was hard to see at the time was that year’s campaign for governor not only got Scott Matheson elected as Utah’s twelfth governor but also laid a foundation for events leading to the election of Utah’s fourteenth governor—me. The intensity of the experience stayed with me for weeks after the election. Whenever the phone rang in my home in Cedar City, I experienced shellshock of a sort. The campaign turned out to be a great experience but a hard one, and it shaped our family and our futures. I think if I had the experience then that I have now, we could have won that election, but it’s hard to know if winning would have been the best outcome because so many good things happened to our family after that, including the extraordinary success of the business.

1: For years, the club was men-only. When I started attending meetings there, women had to enter through a side door, and they weren’t eligible for membership. That changed ten or fifteen years later when my friend Deedee Corradini became the first female member.

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17 Moving to Salt Lake City 1977 to 1979 • Building Michael O. Leavitt Agency; Taylor's Birth; Dan Marriott Campaign; Moving to Salt Lake City; College Graduation With the appointment of Gerald Ford to the presidency in 1974 following President Nixon’s resignation, the economic turmoil of the early 1970s gradually started to stabilize. President Ford chose a long-term approach to economic recovery rather than a quick-fix program, and as a result, GNP growth surged, and inflation and unemployment rates gradually fell.

When Jimmy Carter was elected president in 1977, he made important moves to improve the U.S. economy, including the deregulation of the airline industry and several other industries. But inflation once again started to climb. In 1978, inflation rose from 6.8 percent to 9 percent within twelve months. In this environment, computer technology somehow managed to thrive. Sales of the Commodore

Jackie holding Taylor (six weeks old) next to Mike holding Mike S. (twenty months old).

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computer, introduced in 1977, reached one billion dollars by 1983.1 The Apple II computer, launched by Steve Jobs and Stephen Wozniak that same year, sold for $1,298 and became an instant bestseller.2

visit each office with us so they could meet the staff. It turned out to be an important development in Leavitt Group’s history, but it didn’t start out very well.

A Growing Business

I flew to Las Vegas, where I met my father, who had driven from Cedar City. The plan was that I would show the Maryland Casualty people our Nevada offices and then drive them in Dad’s car through Utah.

An insurance agency with headquarters in southern Utah also managed to thrive. After the election of 1976, having forfeited his seat in the Utah Legislature to run for governor, my dad poured all his energy into the acquisition of agencies. It was a binge of expansion, which would culminate in a portfolio of nearly fifty agencies by 1983. I felt my business ability and confidence growing as well. I was focused on bigger and more complex accounts, and the wholesale part of Michael O. Leavitt Agency was rapidly expanding with CIE. I could see that the next important step was to expand the number of insurance companies that would grant underwriting authority. CIE was a terrific market for me, but it was small, of suspect financial strength, and didn’t write business in all our states or on all the types of accounts we needed. I knew we needed a major A-rated company to add legitimacy to our wholesale efforts. I began to pursue a list of national insurance companies that had little penetration in the West. My logic was that I could offer them a way to quickly develop a presence in three states, and with little risk. Many turned me down, but in the fall of 1977, I targeted a Baltimore company, Maryland Casualty, that looked like a perfect fit. Maryland Casualty had a major presence in California, but nowhere else in the West. My efforts led to Don Hutson, the western regional vice president. His office was in Sacramento. I presented a business plan that would allow Maryland Casualty to write business in Utah, Arizona, and Nevada without opening offices in those states. We would rate the business, issue policies, and essentially serve as a branch operation. Don was intrigued. I persuaded him to bring his senior team to Nevada, Utah, and Arizona to

I had been studying for my CPCU exams with some flashcards. When we got into the car, I tossed them up on the dashboard, covering the gas gauge. We were in the middle of the Nevada desert when it hit me: I didn’t get gas. At that moment, I felt the gas pedal drift to the floor. It was late June and about 103 degrees. I was twenty miles from the next town, Mesquite. So here we were: the future of Leavitt Group, stranded, in the middle of the desert, because I forgot to get gas. Can you imagine a worse way to make a first impression? I assessed the situation and told them I was embarrassed, but we were simply going to have to solve the problem. I hitched a ride to Bunkerville, where I figured I could get Grandpa Leavitt’s car and return with gas. On the way in, I saw Uncle Dutch, my dad’s uncle. He helped me out, and I was back with gas in less than an hour. The Maryland Casualty guys were great. They took pictures and laughed about it. The experience turned into a bonding moment, which, in the end, probably solidified the relationship. A few months later, I traveled to the Maryland Casualty home office in Baltimore and we struck a deal, which extended authority to me for underwriting insurance risks on their behave and issue policies. It was an extraordinary expression of trust and highly unusual. It was a significant event, but a condition of our deal was that I had to increase the sophistication of our underwriting operation. I had to hire more people with insurance company training and experience, which I knew would be hard to do in Cedar City, but I was resolved to find a way.

1. “Commodore International.” Wikipedia. 25 July 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_International#Post-Commodore_International_Ltd. 2. “Apple II.” Wikipedia. July 13, 2021. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apple_II#cite_note-helmers197704-26

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Cedar Knolls

Jackie and I decided to invest in a bigger house. We had access to a building lot in a subdivision in the southwest part of town called Cedar Knolls, so we decided to build. We went through the process of planning and were getting close to hiring a contractor when we noticed a home just a half block from our lot that was for sale. We decided to buy the home and save the lot for another time.

“

Pin that child down and let’s get some sleep.

”

We were able to sell the Sunset Drive home at a modest profit. In June 1977, we purchased the home at 845 Cedar Knolls. It was bigger and nicer than the home on Sunset. It had three bedrooms, a half basement, a double garage, and an enclosed backyard with a small deck. Mikey enjoyed playing in the backyard, and Jackie loved to have dinner on the deck.

A Second Child

Just a little more than a year after Mike was born, we began to suspect Jackie was pregnant again. The first home-test kits were on the market, and we used one to confirm our suspicions. Jackie didn’t go to the doctor until four months later, however. This time, rather than going to Dr. Broadbent, we started seeing his new associate, Dr. John Emo. John and his wife became friends of ours.

Jackie had committed to be in a production of The Mikado at the college and didn’t let the pregnancy stand in the way. This new baby was a wiggly one. When we went to bed at night, Jackie spent the first hour trying to find a comfortable position. She remembers me saying to her, “Pin that child down and let’s get some sleep.” The afternoon of October 18, 1977, I had an insurance company representative visiting the agency. He was a good tennis player, and we had determined to play late in the afternoon. When

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I came home to change clothes, Jackie said she thought she was starting to have labor pains. She insisted I keep my tennis appointment, but by the time I returned an hour-and-a-half later, she was sure about the labor, and we began our preparations. I took Mike to my parents’ house. Jackie insisted we try to stay home until midnight so we would not incur a full day’s charge at the hospital, but between nine and ten, the pains were intense enough she was willing to abandon that notion. Once at the hospital, I got Jackie settled into the labor room and went to register at the office. Over the public address system, I heard a page for Dr. Broadbent to return to the maternity ward. Knowing Jackie was the only person there when I left, I hurried back. I found both Dr. Emo and Broadbent working with Jackie. Dr. Broadbent said, “Well, it’s a boy.” “How do you know?” I asked. He explained to me that the baby was breech, and they would have to turn him around in the womb. They took an x-ray so they could see the baby’s position and then began pushing and pulling. John Emo was trying to manage the situation but after a few minutes, Dr. Broadbent took over. The situation was extremely tense and painful for Jackie. Finally, he was born—a handsome little boy with lots of hair and a nice round head. We named him Taylor Smith Leavitt. The next day I took Mikey, who was not yet two, to see his mother and new baby brother. I held him up to the window to see his brother in the nursery. Life was instantly different with two children, especially at bedtime. We were grateful to have two bedrooms for the boys. However, it was rare we achieved the goal of having both asleep at the same time; it seemed like one or both were always awake.

Politics Reenter Our Lives

In the fall of 1977, politics entered our lives again. I was attending school and working, and we

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were living at our new home when I got a phone call from Barry Nielson, who was Dan Marriott’s administrative assistant in Washington, D.C. I had met Barry during the campaign season when he ran for Congress in 1976. When Barry was eliminated at the party convention, he joined with Dan Marriott, who had come out of the convention and later won the primary. Dan was elected in the general election following Congressman Alan Howe’s arrest for solicitation of a prostitute, and Barry became administrative assistant for Dan. Barry asked me if I would manage the congressman’s reelection campaign in 1978. Congressman Marriott and Barry had observed me as we worked together on the campaign trail, and when they decided to organize the reelection campaign, they concluded that I could do the job. I was twenty-six at the time. They wanted me to take over as their district office administrator, with the expectation that at some point I would transition to the campaign. This would mean Jackie and I would have to move to Salt Lake City. I knew Dan Marriott, but not well. Mostly, I was flattered. My first appraisal was that a move like that just didn’t make sense. We had been in the Cedar Knolls house for only a few months, I was still taking college classes to finish my degree, and we had two little babies. Another significant fact in my mind was the commitments I had made to Maryland Casuality. I felt an obligation to concentrate on staffing and making that opportunity go smoothly.

“

”

You’ll never come back.

However, there were positive aspects to the Marriott offer that appealed to me, beginning with the challenge. When I ran my dad’s campaign, I had no previous experience. Although we lost, I learned an enormous amount from the campaign. The thought of running another campaign with the benefit of that experience intrigued me. A second positive component was that I had also been spending an increasing amount of time in Salt Lake City working on more sophisticated accounts than I could find in my hometown.

One night I was standing at the kitchen sink, washing dishes as I weighed the pros and cons, when Ken Middleton, the co-owner of Dixie Leavitt Agency, called me on the phone. Ken said, “Mike, I don’t often involve myself in the life decisions of people, but I’ve watched you weigh this opportunity, and I just want to tell you that I’ve always wondered what my life would have been like if I had left Cedar City. You have real potential and I think you should be thinking long term here. It could be a profound opportunity.” My conversation with Ken Middleton that night was a profoundly important conversation in my life. I knew Ken well enough to know that he didn’t often intervene in matters like this, and therefore it was obviously something that he had strong feelings about. It was a turning point in my thinking and my life. Not only did I begin to think differently about the opportunity, I suddenly realized it could be the solution to my need for more experienced technical people to staff my wholesale underwriting operation. Salt Lake City was a regional hub for insurance companies with a pool of qualified candidates. I approached the opportunity as an adventure, where I would move my family and my business to Salt Lake City for a year and a half, finish my degree at the University of Utah, then move back to Cedar City when the election was over. I left open the option of leaving the underwriting operation in Salt Lake City because of my need for trained underwriting people. Looking back, the unlikelihood of returning the business to Cedar City was clear, but somehow the idea that I would be back allowed me the courage to make the leap. My mother didn’t have illusions that I would be back. I remember a tearful conversation with her that reflected both her pride and resignation at my departure. She said, “You’ll never come back.” She was right.

Accepting the Job

I negotiated a congressional office salary of $25,000 a year. In addition, it was understood I would continue to operate my business, which I had

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1 Mike and Jackie in the Cedar City hospital with a newborn, Taylor. 2 Taylor (five months old) and big brother Mike S. (two years old)

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3 Mike, Taylor, and Mike S. going camping at a father-and-sons outing in Salt Lake City

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set up in an office building we owned at 1390 South 1100 East. My insurance work was conducted in addition to the forty hours I was expected to render to the federal government. On January 1, 1978, I began commuting to Salt Lake City under this new arrangement. Our plan was for me to get things organized there, and then Jackie and the boys would move. I often stayed with Dan and Claudette Eastman in North Salt Lake or in an apartment the business owned in our office on 11th East. Leaving Jackie home with two little boys was hard emotionally for me but much more difficult practically for Jackie. I asked my brother Eric, who was about fifteen years old, if he would stay nights with Jackie. I don’t think he did much to help during the nights, but it was good to have another person in the house. It made both Jackie and I feel better. Eric liked it because he was allowed to drive the car back and forth at night and in the morning, even though he didn’t have a driver’s license. As I began looking for a house for our family, I fell in love with the Harvard, Yale, Princeton Avenue areas. I often walked or drove around those neighborhoods in search of “for sale” signs. I told Jackie how impressed I was with those neighborhoods, and that someday I hoped we could live there. I hired John Wightman, a veteran insurance underwriter who had worked for several companies, including Leavitt Insurance Agency in Nevada, to work in my agency in Salt Lake City. Once I completed the Maryland Casualty deal, he became critical to my success as the wholesale business began to grow. I have vivid memories of setting up the office, purchasing furniture, and watching it become an orderly business. Each day I counted the invoiced business and monitored the expenses. I was handling all the accounting myself and came to understand the process and logic with completeness. Once a week, we sent our invoices and checks to Cedar City, where they were entered into the computer by Sandra Maxwell and her little team. Nothing was more exciting to me than receiving the accounting runs for the month. I then

transferred the commission revenues from the trust account, paid the bills and felt the thrill of having made a genuine profit.

Finding a Home in Salt Lake City

I was acquainted with Bill Oswald, a Salt Lake attorney and Dan Marriott’s neighbor and bishop. He represented the Utah Medical Association. We had worked together on a legislative task force dealing with medical malpractice insurance. Bill knew that a couple in his ward, Don and Helen Lloyd, were going on a mission and needed to rent their home. Their eighteen-month mission coincided nicely with our “temporary need.” One day, when Jackie was in Salt Lake City with me, we went to see the house. We drove onto the long, blacktop driveway and saw this white-pillared estate. We quickly backed out of the driveway to avoid appearing as though we were rushing things. But we were beside ourselves with excitement about our good luck. The Lloyds later agreed to rent the house to us for $350 a month.

“

I don’t want to go back to Cedar City. This is where I want to make my life.

”

In the spring of 1978, we rented a truck and hauled our possessions and two small sons to Salt Lake to begin what we thought would be two-year adventure. Our first home was a temporary apartment on 45th South, and in June 1978, we moved into the Lloyds’ home on 13th South. We enjoyed living in the house at 2045 East 1300 South, a historic home on about three-quarters of an acre, situated next to a creek. The property abutted the yard of Spencer W. Kimball, who at the time was president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. One May morning, only weeks after resettling our family in Salt Lake, I was driving on I-80 past

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the Olympus Cove area on my way to the congressional office. It was very early in the morning, and I had the windows down and was enjoying the morning air. I felt invigorated by being there. I could see the downtown area of Salt Lake City and the Utah State Capitol building. I thought to myself, “I don’t want to go back to Cedar City. This is where I want to make my life.” It was a strong feeling deeper than an opinion—it was a spiritual impression.

Making our Home in Salt Lake City

Moving into the Lloyd’s home opened a new world up to our little family. The house didn’t turn out to be quite as grand as it appeared the night we drove into the driveway for a peek, but it was a good arrangement for both the Lloyds and us. We cared for the yard and kept the house maintained. It was like living in a national park, it was so big.

We were part of the Monument Park 2nd Ward. President Kimball’s residence was opposite our backyard, and we used to walk with the children through the neighborhood and see his security men parked in his driveway. We had periodic interactions with President Kimball and Sister Kimball. We began to make friends, like Oscar McConkie Jr. and his wife, Judy, who lived in the ward, as well as Oscar III and Carol. They were part of a group of young couples with whom we socialized. The Lloyd house had a small patio off the master bedroom. In the summers, the house was hot because it had no air conditioning, so we slept on a mattress on that small patio, often joined by both the children before morning. We woke up to the sound of birds in the trees which surrounded us. The Lloyd home was probably eighty years old. It was the original farmhouse for that property before it was subdivided in the early fifties. In the drawer of Donald Lloyd’s desk there was a copy of the trust deed showing Brigham Young as the original owner.

Mike and Taylor

My recollections of Mike and Taylor during this period are nearly always in combination. They each had their own personalities but were navigating life as a package.

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Taylor was the more outgoing of the two. When Jackie would go to the grocery story, Taylor would sit in the grocery cart seat and say to people as they passed, “Hi, hi man.” Once he had their attention, he would smile a big grin and instantly capture their affection. Mikey was a little quieter but acted as the ringleader most of the time. Jackie always kept life full of activities for the boys. They loved to do exercises at the YWCA where Jackie would take them. However, our first attempt at swimming lessons was a disaster. They were afraid of the water. It nearly took therapy a few years later to get them back into the pool. Actually, it wasn’t water they disliked, it was probably the size of the swimming pool, because they loved taking baths together and were constantly looking for ways to get wet. While we were at the Lloyd’s, Taylor discovered that if he could get out the back door unattended, there was a tap just outside the door waiting to be turned on. From the second we heard the screen door slam, we had about five seconds to be outside to catch him before he would sit on the faucet and turn his body around, drenching himself in the process. It delighted him, and he was constantly looking for any lapse in attention to make a break for it. At the Lloyd’s, Mike’s favorite thing to do was pull the pans out of the pan drawer to hear them crash. Then there was a category of things the two of them loved to do together. Pulling the books off the shelves was a big favorite, as was driving down the driveway at top speed on their Big Wheels. It always looked like they were headed for the street, but most often they would turn at the last second onto the lawn at the bottom. Both Mike and Taylor loved to sit on my lap as we mowed the lawn together. We had a nationalpark-sized lawn, so the Lloyds had a riding lawn mower. There was also creek that ran through the property that held great intrigue for both of them, although going there alone resulted in extended periods on the time-out chair. Another joint attraction was Jackie’s shoe closet. Both of them liked to pull out all the shoes and wear the high heels. Living in, and caring for, another person’s home with small children had unique pressures. One Saturday, Jackie and I slept in a little and we let the

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boys play downstairs. We found them in a small bedroom with white carpet, playing with lipstick they had taken from Jackie’s purse. It was smeared all over the carpet. We employed every cleaning method we could find in order to get it out.

“

You saved my brother! Thank you!

”

Actually, the let-them-play-and-clean-up-later strategy became a survival skill as the kids grew up. On Sunday afternoons, we concluded it was worth the time it took to clean up after them just to be able to nap. One night, when we left the boys with a young sitter, Taylor got his head caught between the balustrade of the staircase. The sitter called her father for help, and he was able to get Taylor dislodged. Mike cried, “You saved my brother! Thank you!”

New Technology

I set up my first computer on the kitchen counter at the Lloyd home. I knew intuitively this was the future. It was a Tandy, made by Radio Shack, which had something like 16K internal memory and used giant black floppy disks as external storage. I spent hours trying to teach myself to program with BASIC, a new computer language. This was long before MS-DOS or Windows. It didn’t make a computer programmer out of me, but it taught me many things that later became important building blocks. I loved acquiring new technology. I purchased a small, handheld calculator that was about the size of a deck of cards but nearly twice as thick for $139. It was made by Summit and had the four basic functions. A couple of years later, I saw the same calculator for less than five dollars. This cycle would be repeated many more times during that exciting era.

Full-Time Campaigning

In the spring of 1978, I made the transition from the congressional office to full-time campaign. Every twelve years in Utah there is an election cycle where there are only congressional races. This was such a year, made even more unique by

the fact that the races were for the House, not the Senate. The other congressional district was a sleeper. Gunn McKay was a powerhouse and seemed nearly unbeatable. Because Dan Marriott had been elected unexpectedly and didn’t seem on the surface to be a natural politician, many thought he would be a oneterm congressman, so the race attracted a full slate of ambitious opponents. The Democratic side of the race included a number of people who would later play roles in my life or remain friends: John Paul Kennedy, who was a young lawyer in his thirties, tried to run but was eliminated in the convention. Peter Cooke and Ed Firmage, a well-respected law professor, ended up in a primary. Peter was only a couple of years older than I, and his campaign manager was Randy Horiuchi, a man who became a prominent figure in Utah politics. It was a hardfought primary, but Ed Firmage ultimately won.

Organizing Another Campaign

As the Democratic primary unfolded, I began organizing the campaign for Dan Marriott. I created a fundraising committee complete with all the leading business people of Salt Lake City. It was a big responsibility for a twenty-seven-year-old, but somehow I felt rather natural doing it. The experience I gained in Dad’s campaign, plus my experience selling and organizing, gave me confidence, I guess. I look at twenty-seven-year-olds now and figure that people must have considered me rather brash. I began to build a campaign staff. My first hire was Bill Sadlier, a BYU senior who, when I interviewed him, thought he was applying for a job with the Marriott Corporation. I could tell he was talented and let him off easy. I hired him to be the assistant campaign manager. He was incredibly bright and even more ambitious. Our lives continued to intersect many times over the next few years. He went to Washington on the strength of relationships he formed during the campaign and ended up in President Reagan’s scheduling office. Bill’s wife, Deanne, had a cousin named Ruth Jolley, whom Bill thought would be a good secretary for our Marriott-for-Congress staff. We hired

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her. She was young, able, and bright. She reminded me of my brother Dane, so I introduced them, and they later married.

We held an event at the high school gymnasium, filling the place, followed by a poolside reception at John and Daisy Morgan’s St. George Hilton.

The campaign office was in a vacant title company office on Fourth South, near Seventh East. Because we were the only Republican game in town that year, we had the state party’s full-time attention.

At the gymnasium, a farmer stood and asked Reagan, “So, what do you think about St. George?” Reagan cocked his head and said, “Well, I just can’t wait to tell Nancy about it.” The crowd went crazy. They loved it.

People in Washington thought that Dan Marriott was a high priority as well. We had a constant parade of Republican National Committee people in to help us, and I was even invited to attend the RNC’s campaign college for a week. It exposed me to the best thinking available at the time, contributing not only to my worldview but also my personal network.

Fundraisers

That year, we had Bob Dole, Ronald Reagan, and Gerald Ford in town for fundraisers. I not only organized the events but also spent time with these men. Dole had been Gerald Ford’s running mate the year before and was now positioning himself to run for president. The fundraising event with Gerald Ford was held at the Hotel Utah. I created a plan to have him attend a high-donor reception, give a speech at a lunch, and film a commercial within the forty-five minutes we had been allotted on his schedule. Ford had a reputation for bungling things. We showed him into the Jade Room of the hotel to film the commercial. We had cameras ready to roll and cue cards. He stepped in, looked into the camera, and said, “Hi, I’m Ferry Gord.”

Reagan’s visit occurred after his unsuccessful run against Ford and before his election victory against Carter. The Reagan event was special. We decided to take him to St. George because I thought Reagan would do well there. I met him in Las Vegas, and he insisted on taking a jet from there to St. George. Reagan was pleasant and engaging. He sat toward the back of the plane by choice so he could work on something he was writing. We had a rather hair-raising landing in a high wind—I thought we were going to slide off the end of the runway.

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It was a big success for me; our team had pulled it off.

Campaigning for Dan Marriott

Congress did not recess until mid-October of that year. Consequently, I did all of the campaign appearances on Dan’s behalf. It was a great experience for me but frustrating for Ed Firmage, who believed he would be distinguished by the debates. Many felt that Dan wouldn’t be able to stand up to his opponent’s powerful intellect. However, we had Firmage so well scouted that by the time Marriott publicly debated him, Dan surprised everyone with his ability and completely exceeded expectations. He was declared the winner by the media. By October, we had a substantial lead. It was clear that Firmage was feeling his political career slipping away and began to look for a way to jumpstart the effort. He cut a commercial explaining that he was the grandson of Hugh B. Brown and great-grandson of Brigham Young, probably trying to connect to the Church of Jesus Christ majority in Utah. The minute I saw it I knew it was a major mistake. Regrettably for Ed, he had spent a bunch of his own money on the campaign and spent years digging himself out of debt. We put together a good campaign, solid in every way. Dan Marriott had exceeded people’s expectations as a candidate. We won a resounding victory—Marriot won with 62.3 percent of the vote to Firmage’s 35.3 percent. Dan Marriott’s victory during the 1978 campaign prevented strong candidates from challenging him in the future, and I believe he could have

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1 Marilynn Marriott, Dan Marriott, and Mike 2 Gerald Ford with Mike at a Dan Marriott fundraiser, Hotel Utah, 1978 3 Ronald Reagan, Mike, and Dan Marriott at a St. George fundraiser, 1978

4 Dan Marriott and Mike shaking hands in front of the capitol 5 Mike, Jackie, and Bob Dole at a Marriott fundraiser, 1978

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stayed in Congress as long as he chose to. However, he decided to retire from Congress after eight years when he ran for governor in 1984. Running this campaign was a great experience for me. Not only did I have the opportunity to build on what I had learned during my dad’s race, but because it was the marquee race for the year, it exposed my abilities to many members of the party and community leaders. With the congressman in D.C. attending to his duties during much of the campaign, I had to learn the issues, refine arguments, and deliver them under pressure. I learned to deal with the media, fundraise, organize, and strategize. I don’t know where a twenty-seven-year-old could get better training. Another important contribution the Marriott campaign made to my life is that it created a context for a move to Salt Lake City. It is hard to imagine how I would have done so otherwise. The move was clearly a major moment in my life and set the stage for opportunities to follow. I had negotiated a bonus based on the margin of victory. We won handily and while I can’t remember exactly how much it was, the paycheck contained the most I’d ever had in one lump sum. It was well timed because Jackie and I had come to love the neighborhood we were in and wanted to stay.

College Graduation

Two other matters of significance happened while we were living at the Lloyd’s. First, I took the final CPCU exam and was awarded the designation, an important achievement for me professionally. Second, I finally finished my bachelor’s degree the same year. As the campaign moved into high gear and my business picked up pace, my momentum as a student slackened. Two things got me over the top: first, Jackie found that I needed one more humanities credit to graduate. She went to the University of Utah and enrolled us in a class that required attendance at six plays and post-performance discussions. I went to most of the plays, but Jackie covered the discussions and probably ghostwrote

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most of the papers. It only got us in trouble once when she either neglected to add my social security number to the top of my paper, or she used her number for my paper. Either way, it blew our cover. The second was some gracious counseling by Harold Hiskey at SUSC. I had enough credits to graduate but lacked a statistics class, which was required for my major. I went to see Harold when I was in Cedar City on business. He said, “Mike, we’ve got to get you out of here. I think you’ve had enough exposure to statistics with your insurance background. I’ll waive statistics.” As I left his office with my graduation slip in hand, I turned to him and said, “Dr. Hiskey, the way I have approached college has not exactly made me the valedictorian, but I plan to be one of your most distinguished graduates.” I graduated during the summer of 1978. A few years later, when I was chosen as that year’s most distinguished graduate, that conversation was foremost in my memory.

Purchasing the Laird House

After the Marriott election, I had the time to be more fully devoted to building the business. The move of the business operation to Salt Lake City had been successfully executed during the year, and the size and sophistication of our business continued to grow. On a personal basis, Jackie and I had concluded we would make Salt Lake City our permanent home. It just felt right. We also knew we wanted to live in the general area of the Lloyd’s home, because we liked the people we met in the neighborhood. They were generally professionals, many of whom had grown up in the area. The homes were nice but not ostentatious. You could buy more home in Bountiful or Sandy, but that required a commute. I liked being fifteen minutes from downtown, close to the university, and in a mature neighborhood. At that time, homes in the area never lasted very long on the market. There were several couples in our ward that wanted to buy homes there, and I knew of several people who had charted each home in the ward, forecasting the time when it might go on the market. Most homeowners had been

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contacted by aspiring homebuyers with a request for contact if the home was going to be sold. I had made a friend named Preston Naylor, who worked for Jake Garn. He also worked part time as a realtor. I had told him we were among the many looking for a home in the Harvard-Yale-Princeton area. During the summer of 1979, he called to tell me his mother, who lived at 1872 Laird Avenue, was going to sell her home. He was willing to show it to us before it was put on the market. Although it was several months before we would fulfill our commitment to the Lloyds, we knew this might be our best chance if we wanted to stay in the area. There were other challenges. The asking price for the home was $30,000 to $40,000 beyond our initial budget. It was also in substantial disrepair. Jackie was not enthused about the house at first. The interior felt a bit dreary due to dark, heavy drapes and navy blue shag carpet. She liked the location but didn’t see as much potential in the home as I did. However, as we talked, we concluded we could gradually make of it what we wanted. It had a good floor plan, but the interior needed to be lightened up. On the size of investment necessary, we developed a financial plan, which included renting the basement until we needed the space. The basement had three bedrooms. We calculated that if we had six girls in the basement, each paying a modest rent, our monthly payment would be well within a manageable range. We bought the home and began making repairs over the summer and fall. We moved in a couple of months before the Lloyds came home from their mission but paid rent and kept their home up. We filled the basement with tenants and continued renting it for a couple of years. Having tenants demanded patience but we kept reminding ourselves it was temporary. However, my patience ran out one morning when I discovered that all the hot water was gone and one of the girls had allowed her brother to live in the hall downstairs. We gave them notice, took down the temporary barrier at the bottom of the stairs, and began to use the entire house.

We instantly loved our neighborhood and ward. Laird Park, right at the bottom of the street, was a terrific place for children and the streets around us were full of young families. The first time we went to church, it was fast and testimony meeting. A man named Hank Hoole stood to say how much he and his wife, Daryl, valued being in the ward, saying they had been there for nineteen years. I had two thoughts. “Can you imagine being in one ward that long?” followed by, “This isn’t the Daryl Hoole, who has vicariously been training me to pick up my socks and put everything in its place—is it?” It was. Within a short period of time, Daryl and Hank became some of my favorite people. The neighborhood was full of children. At our ward, the Yalecrest Ward, there were seventeen boys Mike and Taylor’s age, and 150 children in Primary. Once we were settled into our life on Laird, the children became nothing but more active. I recall one night coming home to put the boys in their pajamas before our home teachers—Gary Wright and John Jepson—came. Mike and Taylor just went crazy running around the sofas, jumping from chair to chair, screaming and trying to get away from us. We just couldn’t settle them down. Fortunately, Gary and John both had small families and understood our predicament, but it was pandemonium.

A Series of Fixations

Mike and Taylor went through a series of fixations together. Underoos was one craze. Underoos was children’s underwear decorated with pictures or the costume of various superheroes. The boys insisted on wearing Underoos for much of the day. When they had to wear clothes, they insisted on wearing them underneath, although the clothes would come off at the first possible moment. Slim Goodbody—a character on a PBS television show called Inside Story—was another favorite. Slim wore a bodysuit painted in an anatomically correct way with muscles, internal organs,

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and bones to teach children about physical fitness and staying healthy. One afternoon, the house got very quiet—a sure sign investigation was needed. Jackie found the boys in the bathroom using watercolors to decorate each other’s naked bodies as Slim Goodbody. We went through a huge Star Wars phase. We had costumes, lightsabers, picture books, and every conceivable type of related paraphernalia. There is a scene in the first Star Wars movie where the characters get into a giant trash masher. We had just gotten a new refrigerator, so I turned the cardboard box into a trash masher by putting wadded up newspaper and other items inside. It was a galaxy-sized hit. The different nature of the two boys’ personalities actually provided a sense of counterbalance. When it came time to let the two of them stretch their areas of operation, Taylor was never quite cautious enough and Mike was sometimes too tentative. The two of them created equilibrium. For example, after some coaxing, we let them navigate the trip to Emigration Market by themselves. They were a great team. Taylor had no fears, and Mikey knew how to handle the money.

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Jackie signed up the two of them for some classes designed to nurture their self-esteem. After the first day, Taylor asked the teacher for her telephone number. When Taylor told Mikey he was going to call her, Mikey did everything he could to keep Taylor from what seemed to him like sure embarrassment. As Taylor dialed the phone, Mikey ran into the front room and rolled himself in the drapes to avoid any contact with this outlandish action. One evening, Wayne Cannon, a six-foot-nineinch pediatrician, came to our house on church business. Mikey invited him in. Taylor ran into the room and announced, “Mom, it’s Kareem Abdul-Jabbar!”

18 Managing the Jake Garn Campaign 1979 to 1980 Following the Marriott Campaign of 1978, I was relieved to just be concentrating on building my business. It felt as if I had concluded my adventure as a campaign manager. However, that did not last long. The combination of my dad’s campaign and the Marriott effort had placed me right in the

middle of Republican politics in Utah. I knew the players, and they knew me. In the fall of 1979, I was asked to attend a meeting for the Jake Garn reelection fundraising committee. Six senators had committed to attend a fundraising dinner, but no work had been done to sell tickets, and the event was six weeks away. The meeting evolved into a discussion about whether the event should be cancelled.

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I had been thinking about how poorly most fundraising efforts were organized. They generally consisted of forming a committee, printing tickets, and then asking the committee members to sell the tickets. The problem is, most of the committee members do nothing because they are busy, and when they do make calls, there is a lot of overlap, so a few people get called several times and other prospects aren’t contacted. I told those at the meeting that I had been thinking about a way to make fundraising events far more productive using computer technology. Keep in mind that this was 1979 and computer technology was basic and new, but it was clear to me how it could change human interaction. I laid out my idea, and when the meeting was over, I ended up in charge. The essence of the idea was to recruit a committee of loyalists and ask them to complete a list of specific tasks. In other words, define the commitment. The list included spending an hour making a list, making ten phone calls, and allowing the committee’s personal assistants to spend eight hours on the effort. Using word processing software, we drafted letters to prospective donors, or nominees as we called them, using fields ranking how well our loyalists knew the prospects and how much money they were willing to ask for. We sorted the total list of names and elected one of the committee members as the primary source of contact for each prospect. We then prepared letters to each prospect from Jake, indicating that their mutual friend (the name of the committee member) would be calling them to invite them to an event. A letter from the committee member saying he or she would be calling soon was also included. A third letter from one of the visiting senators cultivated the prospect. The letters were put together by the personal assistant of the committee member. Once this was done, the personal assistant called all the prospects except the ten highest-value prospects—the committee member called those prospects personally.

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We deployed the plan and it worked amazingly well. Within six weeks, we had raised more money than the committee had ever hoped for. This experience created a relationship for me with Jake Garn and his team.

“

I don’t know which one of these guys it will be, but I predict one of them will ultimately be governor.

”

A few months later, Jake asked me to manage his campaign. After the Marriott campaign, I had figured my time in politics was finished, but I was so flattered by Jake’s request, I told him I would. Once again, I found myself balancing two jobs and a young family. Somehow, I made it work.

Managing the Garn Campaign

To kick off the Garn campaign, we planned a supercharged fundraising event using the method I just described. But rather than one major event, we decided to hold multiple fundraising events simultaneously, though the main media event would be organizers calling in to report they had raised a specific amount of money. Because the technology was so primitive, the logistics were cumbersome, but we made it work. With the Internet and today’s technology, it would have been a snap. The event was a smashing success. We raised more than $150,000, which was the largest amount raised during a political fundraiser in Utah up to that point. The only downside was that Jake was detained in Washington for votes and had to attend by phone. But it worked because he called from the Senate cloakroom, and he collared different senators as they walked by to address the crowd.

My team consisted of Layne Wilcox, a friend I had made while working with Mass Mutual; Scott Marsh; Marita Boam; and several others. We set up our offices in a motel that was converted to office suites, called Ambassador Plaza. It was located on about Fifth East and Third South.

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Jake’s administrative assistant was Jeff Bingham, a complex and talented person. Jeff had assembled a good team. It included Skip Glines, who was head of the Utah office, and Joanne Neumann, who later worked with me for eleven years as director of my Washington office. (Actually, I had known Joanne before, as Bob Braithwaite’s cousin.) As Garn’s campaign head, I began to get involved more heavily in party politics. Bob Wright, a prominent Salt Lake City lawyer and former state Republican Party chair, had decided he was willing to run against Scott Matheson, who was an extremely popular governor. The problem was that a guy named Brimhall, who was the executive director of the Public Employees Association, had also decided to run, as well as a realtor from Sandy named Wilburn McDougal. As a condition of running, Bob wanted both of them out of the race. Bill Stevenson was the party chairman. I don’t remember the details of how I ended up getting involved in this, but somehow it became my lot to be the point-person for negotiating their withdrawal. We ended up persuading McDougal to run for national committee chairman and Brimhall for county commission. McDougal won; Brimhall didn’t. Bob Wright went on to run a pretty good campaign against Scott Matheson, giving him a better run than one would have expected. Many memorable and shaping events occurred during that election. I remember Chuck Bailey, a Republican Party operative, who lived in Roy and worked for the RNC, teaching a campaign course. I was on a panel with a couple of other young political types. Bailey said in the course of introducing us, “I don’t know which one of these guys it will be, but I predict one of them will ultimately be governor.” Jake’s opponent that year was Dan Berman, a Salt Lake City attorney who was respected and feared as a brilliant trial lawyer. People didn’t expect Dan to win, but knew he’d make the race colorful. Right out of the gates, Berman began to make an issue of Jake accepting honorariums for speeches. This was a terrible practice that most of the

senators used to supplement their incomes. Berman referred to them as corporate tips and, like the good courtroom advocate he was, just kept pounding and pounding Jake on it. It incensed Jake, and he was itching to defend himself. I knew it was a bad issue for Jake, and I encouraged him to let it pass and move to other subjects. Finally, the first debate came. It was at KSL radio, which was then located on Social Hall Avenue in Salt Lake City. Berman hammered Jake on the honorarium issue. Jake tried to respond with a logical explanation, but logic simply could not stand up to the unseemliness of the practice. After the debate, we walked quietly to the car. Once inside the car, Jake said to me, “Let me say it. You were right.” That was the sum total of the conversation, and he began to handle the issue differently. Our relationship also changed; he seemed to better respect my opinion. During that year, Congress did not adjourn until mid-October. Jake held a significant lead, so we felt it was in our interest for Jake to avoid engagement. Consequently, I debated Berman many times, did lots of press interviews, and conducted most of the activities as though I was the candidate. There are lots of details of the campaign that I can’t remember, but somehow, over forty years later, what seems essential is to acknowledge that this was a powerful training experience for me, and I made many relationships that played important roles in my own opportunities for public service. By the end of the campaign, we were clearly going to win, so we turned many of our efforts toward helping Jim Hansen in his race to unseat Gunn McKay. The election of 1980 was a landmark event. Ronald Reagan was elected president. Jake Garn won, Jim Hansen won, and the Republicans took control of the U.S. Senate for the first time in decades. Jake also became chair of the Banking Committee. It was truly an amazing night. Once again, I negotiated a bonus based on the size of the margin of victory. It was one thousand dollars per point, as I remember it. Despite the money, the aftermath seemed a little empty, as all my Garn friends went on to new adventures as

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1 Victory announcement. Skip Glines, Mike Leavitt, Jake Garn, Jeff Bingham, Lee Conant, and Curt Burnett on election night, 1980

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2 Mike; Lori Snow, press secretary for Jake Garn; and Skip Glines, director of Garn’s Utah office 3 Jake Garn

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staffers for the chair of a committee. I went back to my work, thinking that my political adventures were over.

Running a Marathon

During the summer of the Garn campaign, I started running a little for exercise. While I am certainly not built like a runner, I needed to do something for exercise, so I slowly began to build my endurance. At first, a mile was more than I could do. It wasn’t long before I was able to do much more. Several others in the neighborhood ran, including Richard Davies and Hank Hoole. We began running together every morning. As my conditioning and confidence began to build, I decided to try one of the 5K races that were held nearly every Saturday some place in the Salt Lake Valley. I didn’t want the pressure of running my first race with anybody I knew, so I drove to a Saturday morning event in the west part of the valley. I was surprised to find several hundred people preparing for the race.

“

Each week we had to increase the number of miles we ran. On Saturdays, we would do a long run. My first ten-mile run was from our house on Laird to the Salt Lake airport. In June, I did a twenty-miler in Loa early on the morning of the fourth of July by running from the farmhouse to Mill Meadow Reservoir and back. Richard suffered an injury that deferred his marathon, but Hank and I completed the race that year. My time was slow, just over four hours, but I finished with a sprint at the end. In marathon running there is a phrase, “hitting the wall,” which describes a point when your body just runs out of gas and things get extremely difficult. It happened to me just after the twenty-mile mark. It was interesting to watch how people handled the hardship: some would trudge forward at a snail’s pace, others would walk and then run. Still others would sit down beside the road for a while and then get up and move forward. Many just quit. My method was to walk for a while and then run, until I got within a few blocks and used the little energy I had left to sprint in.

I just don’t want to take last. Surely I can outrun him.

The Deseret News Marathon was one of the great physical accomplishments of my life. It took more effort than any of the sports I played in high school. I had natural abilities in each of those sports, but to prepare for the marathon, I had to develop qualities of conditioning that were not natural or previously familiar.

I was nervous. I kept looking at each runner thinking, “I just don’t want to take last. Surely I can outrun him.” When the gun went off starting the race, I made a rookie mistake. Without knowing it, I had got up in the pack, running at a much faster pace than I was accustomed to. The realization of my speed came as the timer called out times. About halfway back, my conditioning began to catch up. It was a miserable three quarters of a mile to the finish. I didn’t take last, but I wasn’t far from it.

However, I think one marathon was enough for me.

”

At some point during the early spring, Richard, Hank, and I decided we would run the Deseret News Marathon, which is held annually as part of the July 24 celebrations. We had about three months to prepare and followed the training regimen the newspaper and magazines had.

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19 Orrin Hatch’s Reelection Campaign 1981 to 1982 Orrin Hatch was first elected to the Senate when my father ran for governor in 1976. I had watched Orrin’s rocket-like rise in politics, fueled by the right wing and Orrin’s inherent skills. He was viewed as an up-and-comer in Washington, and almost instantly people started to talk about him as a presidential candidate, which he did little to discourage. Orrin’s primary political handler was Mac Haddow, a guy about my age who was smart, brash, and a street fighter by nature. Mac had become a political figure in his own right by being elected to the Utah House of Representatives. He had immediately taken on some sticky issues, including organized labor. To say Mac had become controversial was an understatement. Orrin, in some measure because of Mac, had become a little controversial himself. Only four-and-a-half years into his first term, polls showed that his negative rating was in the high thirties, and less than a majority thought he should be reelected—a dangerous place for an incumbent to be.

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Mac then did something that made it clear to Orrin he had to distance himself. Late in 1981, Orrin called me and asked me to manage his campaign. In the past, I had managed campaigns out of love (my dad’s governor campaign), adventure (the Marriott congressional race), and flattery (Jake Garn’s reelection to the Senate). I accepted this one because it seemed like a place where I could contribute. Orrin Hatch had a close group of supporters with significant stake in his success, all of whom would naturally have been inclined to seize control. As a condition of taking the race, I got a commitment from Orrin that I was the campaign manager and that he would support me when various people sought control. For the most part, he lived by that. Just as I had anticipated, immediately after taking over I was confronted with a series of situations that required me to reverse several arrangements that could have been highly problematic.

Orrin Hatch vs. Ted Wilson

The Democratic Party nationally and locally had recruited Ted Wilson, who, at the time, was the very popular mayor of Salt Lake City. He was a great guy and would be running against an incumbent who wasn’t particularly well-liked. This was a race that the Democrats really thought they could win. I commissioned public opinion research on Senator Hatch. Essentially, what we found was that Utah didn’t really know who Orrin Hatch was; he had burst onto the scene and beaten Frank Moss by basically getting people to vote against Frank Moss. He then headed off to Washington. He had this combative image that was earned by taking on labor unions and other tough issues in confrontational ways, and he had this alter ego, Haddow, who then started using tactics that people weren’t at all sure of. The Democrats knew people in Utah did not know Orrin well and immediately developed a campaign to define him as an outsider, often pointing to his upbringing in Pittsburgh. I decided to run some TV ads we referred to as “hearts and flowers” ads, which were two minutes in length and defined Orrin as a person. We hired Jim Gartner, a young and upcoming producer who had produced an award-winning series of

advertisements (a series known as “Homefront”) for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to create the ads for us. We caught the Democrats off balance, and we were able to balloon Hatch’s polling margin from seven points to nearly twenty by the end of July. The need to define a candidate before the opponents do is an important political lesson.

Bud Scruggs

It was during the Hatch campaign that I first got acquainted with Bud Scruggs. He was an undergraduate student living in a trailer park next door to my brother Dane, and the two had become close friends. Bud had been a missionary in Canada under Wayne Owens, a Utah congressman and staffer for Robert Kennedy and Ted Kennedy. When Bud returned from his mission, Wayne hired him to do fieldwork for Ted Kennedy’s presidential campaign. Working for Kennedy persuaded Bud to decide that he was a Republican. Dane asked me to get acquainted with Bud and to consider hiring him as a low-level operative to rehabilitate him politically.

Fortunately, Orrin’s son also knew Bud, so that when I proposed hiring him, a former Kennedy staffer, Orrin agreed. However, there were many of his Senate staffers who were rather skeptical. I told Orrin I would take personal responsibility for him. Bud quickly began to distinguish himself; his natural gifts were many. We opened a campaign office on Third South and about Third East, right across from a Dutch sandwich place called Van Kolmans, where we ate almost every day.

Sophisticated Turnout Program

As a targeted race, we saw a long parade of notables visiting to help or report. I remember Cokie Roberts and David Broder, a pair of prominent New York Times political reporters, and many others coming to see how the race was shaping up. Part of our strategy was to win the race on the ground with the most sophisticated turnout program ever organized. I’m guessing it was. Cokie Roberts filed a story for NPR on our use of computers during an election.

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1 Mike as campaign manager during the 1982 Hatch campaign 2 Mike and Mark Hurst editing campaign commercials.

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3 Dan Jones, Bud Scruggs, and Mike on election night, 1982

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I hired Alice Shearer to run the turnout program. I also hired Steve Alley and his brother, Lynn, to help. Steve and Lynn were brilliant young guys trying to build a business in the data processing business. They had developed a program enabling the Bank of America to aggregate its branches for financial reporting, and they were trying to make a business out of selling that program to other multibranch banks. Their business was always running close to the edge on cash, so the revenue from our campaign and the notoriety of the campaign was helpful to them. In essence, we created electronic lists of voters on each block. We called the list looking for supporters and then asked supporters if they would volunteer. If they accepted, they became our block captains, and we cultivated them seriously. We sent them a volunteer packet with literature and instructions on where and when to deliver the material to other voters on their block. In order to coordinate the work we were doing with other campaigns, we tried to make this a party-wide effort. It was one of several attempts I made to coordinate multi-campaign efforts on behalf of the Republican party. Each one has been

unsatisfactory, adding to my rather negative impression of political party organizations. In all my campaigns, the party was always a taker, not a giver. However, the data processing was always highlighted in national stories as an example of how computers were being used in the development of campaign organizations.

Fundraising Visits

We had fundraising visits from David Stockman, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget. He was an electric figure at the time. A former congressman in the middle of Reagan’s supply-side economics policy, he had become famous for his efforts to balance the budget and a belief in what he described in an Atlantic Monthly magazine article as “trickle-down economics.

The most prominent visitor was President Reagan, who visited Utah twice during that election season. The first time was a picnic in Hooper, which created a traffic jam on I-15 that went for miles. Two presidential visits in a senate race are highly unusual, but we got them because Utahn Steve Studdert was the head of presidential advance team

Mike, George H. W. Bush, and Orrin Hatch during a campaign appearance for Senator Hatch in 1982.

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and Richard (Dick) Richards (also from Utah) was chairman of the Republican National Committee The second event was the last presidential event before the 1976 election. It was dropped into the schedule without much notice—Studdert called me at 2:30 a.m. and demanded a meeting at 5:30 a.m. with a long list of people. Over time, I have begun to dislike dealing with presidential advance people. They learn early that among the most powerful words in politics are “The White House is calling.” We had to move the Jazz team practice, recruit bands to play, and find Boy Scout troops to distribute twelve thousand tickets within about forty-eight hours. But it happened, a tribute to Studdert’s ability. At the very end of the event, we choreographed for Orrin to hold the president’s hand high above their heads in a show of victory. It was used as the capstone of our last ad.

Campaign Ads

We had been expecting the Wilson campaign to play an add featuring Governor Scott Matheson. Matheson was popular and had a personal dislike for Orrin. The second week of October, they did as we expected, playing a hard-hitting, personal attack on Orrin by Matheson, who said Orrin was from Pittsburgh and was ineffective. On the day the Matheson ad played for the first time, Jake was leaving town for two weeks. We had only one hour. Scruggs and I hired a camera, put Jake Garn in a sweater on the front lawn of his Yale Avenue home, plastered a giant cue card on the side of an RV because we didn’t have a teleprompter, and had him record a message where he calmly said, “October brings autumn leaves and politics. The Democrats say Orrin Hatch isn’t effective for Utah. Not true. I know. I’m there.”

“

”

The White House is calling.

Turns out that the Matheson ad and Garn ad ran head-to-head for nearly three weeks, and it didn’t move the electorate at all, which we considered a great success.

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Independent Expenditure Committees

Independent expenditure committees were essentially born during the election cycle of 1982. This is when a group, not associated with a campaign and often out of state, injects itself into the race—typically to tarnish the reputation of the opponent of the person they support. A group supporting Orrin Hatch entered the race and attacked Ted Wilson in a rather vicious way. Given the Wilson campaign effort to depict Hatch as an outsider, I felt an outside group coming in to attack Wilson would only fuel Wilsons’s message. I held a news conference and asked people to disregard them. “Line your birdcage with them,” was perhaps my most colorful line. This, of course incensed Hatch’s out-of-state supporters, and they used my resistance as an opportunity to go after me with Orrin. This is one of the moments where getting Hatch’s commitment to support me paid off.

Union Votes

It was important to Senator Hatch that we connect with the union voters, who incidentally hated Orrin. He had been a vocal opponent of theirs. However, the national teamsters union liked Orrin and wanted to be heavily involved (the teamsters unions often cultivated relationships with Republican politicians during that period). The national president of the teamsters assigned a man, a colorful veteran of union political wars, to work with us. He would do things like check-in to the Salt Lake Hilton under assumed names. That made me nervous. There were rumors of death threats and other rough play that kept us all alert, though I think most of it was exaggerated.

I knew that running a campaign to get union support was a waste of our time and money, but Orrin insisted on it. Ultimately, we produced a tabloid and had 25,000 copies printed by a Colorado printer; Utah union workers wouldn’t print it. We gave copies to Orrin and a few others and then ditched the rest of them. It was a good decision; inflaming the unions was not the strategy to use in that race. On Labor Day we had Orrin visit the post office. As part of the visit, we took pictures of Senator Hatch with some union people. We had them sign

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disclaimers, and then used some of the footage in our TV ads. (One of the pictures was used in the phony union paper we printed to satisfy Orrin but never really distributed.) The postal unions persuaded and supported some of the workers in bringing an action arguing the union workers appearing in the ad were defamed by being misrepresented as supporting Orrin Hatch. Our lawyers came back and stated that we had disclaimers, and that just because they appeared in the ad as a member of the public, it did not violate their rights or defame them. The case, known as Cox vs. Hatch, stretched on for nearly eight years. In 1988 it was argued in the Utah Supreme Court, who ruled in our favor. It was an important case, one that law schools still use to teach First Amendment issues. I am told it is often cited in defamation cases. The case, in essence, defines if permission is needed to use shots of a crowd for a commercial. I was personally named in the suit.1

Putting Out One More Fire

We had the campaign won going into the last week. We had one last debate with Ted Wilson at the Utah Education Association. Just before Orrin left, we talked about how important it was to be careful. After the debate, Orrin called me on the phone and said he was afraid. “I’ve been a bad boy,” he said. During the debate, he said that the NEA National Education Association (NEA) cared more about benefits and money than it did about the education of children. He also referred to Ted Wilson as a socialist. I knew how inflammatory that would be, and that we needed to get in front of it. Within a couple of hours, we were able to produce and post a letter to teachers because we had a database of the names and addresses of UEA members on our computer. The letter cleverly defined what Orrin “meant,” which was that the NEA was involved in all kinds of liberal issues and that Utah teachers shouldn’t have to pay dues to an organization if they didn’t support its causes. I knew that was a hot-button issue within the organization. The letter started landing in faculty mailboxes the next morning and turned the debate into a discussion about the NEA. Our quick response killed the issue.

We won the race rather handily, by 57 percent, I think. I did a good job managing that race, which built my reputation, network, and confidence. All in all, it was among the most important experiences I had in my thirties.

Journal Entries from this Time

In July 1983, I wrote a series of thoughts about where my life was and where it was headed. I had been keeping a journal during much of 1982 but the discipline of keeping it had been interrupted by the intensity of the campaign season. I have fallen into a start-and-stop pattern with journal writing many times during my life. I wish I had written more, but I’m glad for the times when I did. The entry, dated July 25, 1983, begins by reflecting that the campaign of the previous year had gone well and that I had benefited from it personally in many ways. I will pick up verbatim from here: While politics has had many positive aspects, it has not been without its price. Looking back over the last eight months, it occurs to me that the campaign was so intense, that it virtually destroyed every personal habit I had worked hard to develop. I had been exercising virtually every morning prior to the campaign. That habit went by the wayside in early September. My journal had become an important part of my daily routine for more than six months by that time. During the campaign, it became one of the things that I chose to let go. I don’t think that is the way it would have to be. But I’ve concluded that the environment became so intense I just became too nervous to do those things. Before I would ever do it again, I would work much harder at maintaining that personal balance. The kind of attention I was paying to my family slipped. It started to occupy absolutely top priority in my life. I’m not certain it was good from my perspective, but nevertheless, that was exactly what happened. I am only now getting back to my exercise,

1. Cox v. Hatch, 761 P.2d 556 (1998), https://law.justia.com/cases/utah/supreme-court/1988/19257.html

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journal, and other personal habits that I find desirable. My business was adversely affected by it. For a period of three or four months I virtually had no contact to speak of. Though Justine (my assistant) and B.J. (my colleague at work) would bring things over, I was constantly trying to juggle those interests so that they would not be cut any more, but for the most part, they were. That caused me to go through three or four months of vicious catch-up. That prolonged the impact on my life personally. At the end of every campaign, I find myself an absolute nervous wreck. When the telephone rings, I immediately assume it’s a problem and feel a kind of flinching reaction to it. Whenever the newspaper comes, or the 10 o’clock news comes on, I’m afraid it’s going to be another bombshell. I’m sure that if I have one trait that makes me a good campaign manager, it is that I become so personally invested in the project. I honestly feel when I do a campaign, it reflects on me, that I lose just like the candidate loses if the campaign is not successful. One of the most significant remnants of the campaign experience for me this year was an increased perspective on the relative importance of political life. It has been generally assumed by the public, my family and me that in some point in time I would seek public office. However, after going through this experience, I am not certain any longer. I can’t say I’m thinking I won’t. It is very possible that I will. However, I have a much better understanding of how jealous the political life is. I’m sure that realization has come to me not as a result just of the 1982 campaign, but of all the campaigns I have worked on. If I were to go into public office, it would have to be with an absolute pledge to myself that I could not let it take precedence over my family. I see the kind of sacrifices that Dan Marriott, Jake Garn, and Orrin Hatch have made and I’m not certain I’m willing to make them. The time with my sons is absolutely crucial to their development, and I’m not

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real sure I’m willing to jeopardize that. The journal continues: Part of the political perspective I gained during the campaign was a much closer view of national politics. Because of the nature of the campaign, I got to meet many of the national reporters, political figures from around the country and the top political technicians. What I concluded from the experience was much the same as when I was in Cedar City and found I could succeed in a larger Utah environment. If I wanted to, I could assume a national role. Those people are not any smarter or any different than I am. For the most part they are folks who find themselves by hook or by crook or by good luck in a situation to hold a big title or work in a very important environment. I left the Hatch campaign much less in awe of national anything. National situations are simply a composite of many small local areas. Another part of the entry: If Jackie had her way, and particularly after the Hatch experience, I would probably never be involved in other political campaigns. However, she is quite supportive and understands it’s something I like to do. The boys really weren’t affected much by it. I was on television a lot. They kind of thought everybody’s dad was on TV. They gained very little excitement out of it. U.S. senators to them were just like any other people. The entry concludes with this interesting statement: I may decide to go into politics and this campaign will have become a stepping stone. None of those things do I know today. However, what history will reveal is a matter of real interest to me.

20 A Growing Family 1982 • Anne Marie's Birth; Sydney the Dog; Games with the Children When my son Mike was five and Taylor was four, we were finally looking forward to another baby. We had been trying to get pregnant for nearly two years and were concerned it wasn’t happening as quickly as it had before. We fasted and prayed about it, and then decided to ask Bishop Reid Gardiner to give Jackie a blessing. Within a few months, we were successful. We have always acknowledged Anne Marie’s birth as answer to our prayers. However, we required a miracle at her birth as well.

A Dangerous Birth

The first few days of February 1982, Jackie could tell the baby’s birth was imminent. By the night of February 4, things were advancing quickly. At 9 p.m., I had put the boys down for the night while Jackie was in our bedroom, periodically getting up to walk around when the pains became severe.

About 11:30 p.m., the pains intensified rapidly in frequency and difficulty. I lay down next to Jackie and dozed off. I heard her say in a rather panicked voice, “Mike, Mike.” She told me later she felt spiritually prompted that it was time to get to the hospital.

Anne Marie Leavitt

We arrived at the hospital about 12:30 a.m. I got Jackie in the care of a nurse and walked down to take care of the registration. While standing at the desk, I heard a code

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blue announced over the public-address system. I knew enough about hospitals to know it was a signal of urgency, but I had no way of knowing if it involved Jackie. When I returned to the room where I had left Jackie, she had been taken to another room and was obviously in trauma. Minutes after I left her, she began to have symptoms of severe toxemia—a condition of real danger to a baby and mother. All at once, her body began to tremble uncontrollably, and she had an immediate onset of severe headache. A short time late Dr. John Nelson, our OB/GYN, arrived. By then Jackie’s blood pressure had skyrocketed and it was clear to me both she and the baby were in serious trouble. That was confirmed by the frantic look on Dr. Nelson’s face. All he said to me was, “Mike, this is a very sick girl.” I sat on a chair in the labor room; the world was swirling around me. All I knew how to do was pray, so that’s what I did. The doctors had to get the baby out before they could treat Jackie because the medication for the blood pressure was apparently counterproductive for the baby and birth. I could see the monitors of Jackie’s blood pressure, and I knew they were very high. Finally, Jackie got some anesthesia, and the pain became more manageable, but she was still in grave danger.

“

Mike, this is a very sick girl.

”

Finally, the baby was born. Both Jackie and I were surprised to hear Dr. Nelson say, “It’s a girl.” Those were words we had never heard before in a delivery room and subconsciously didn’t expect this time. What joyous words they were. However, Jackie was still in severe shock. She simply touched Anne Marie’s little hand before the doctors surrounded Jackie’s bed to continue treating her. She had made me promise before the birth that I would hold the baby until an identity bracelet had been put on; she harbored a fear I suppose many

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mothers have about their babies getting mixed up in the nursery and going to other families. I made sure she could see me holding the baby. With the baby delivered, Jackie’s body began to normalize with the help of medication. She was still sick but out of serious danger. I have thought many times about that night and how our prayers were answered, that both Jackie and Anne Marie were protected. We later learned that the previous week a young mother had died in childbirth with blood pressure elevated less than Jackie’s. It was a hard realization. My mother arrived the next morning to help with the children. The little boys could not contain their excitement. The next day, I drove the boys to the hospital so they could look at Anne Marie through the window of the nursery and see their mother for just a few minutes. Driving home from the hospital, my thoughts again focused on how blessed we were and how differently things could have turned out. But we had a little girl in our family and things would never be the same—it would be forever better.

Three Children

With three children under six years of age, our house was in perpetual motion, and a magnet for kids. The boys loved to have my youngest brother Matthew come to our house; he was their big brother figure. He would often stay for a week or so, and then they would stay with him in Cedar City. One of their favorite things to do when he came was a splish-splash party in the backyard. Kevin Wright, Joel Henroid, and Michael Stoker—friends of Michael and Taylor—would join in, as well. Matt’s presence was always special. One day we were driving out of Cedar City. Mikey was very quiet. I asked, “Are you OK, Mikey?” He said, “I love Matt’s face.” Birthday parties were big at our house. The biggest problem, however, was Taylor, who always wanted to invite every person in his class. The parties usually ended up at less than twenty guests, but it was hard to persuade him to keep the guest list to a manageable level.

A G R O W I N G FA M I LY

Taylor had a hard time parting with things. It was as if a pair of old shoes or a box had a personality capable of feeling abandoned. He just couldn’t stand to throw things away. All of our children attended the Small Wonder Preschool when they turned three and then Wasatch Preschool at age five. The first few days, a parent was required to stay there until the child was interested in something, and then tiptoe out into the hall and wait to see if the child howled upon discovering the parent was gone.

Sydney the Eccentric Dog

Like most families, we went through episodes with pets ranging from goldfish, turtles, and a lizard Jackie couldn’t stand to touch. In what resembled a TV sitcom scenario, Jackie took the lizard to school for show and tell. In the midst of the presentation, the lizard escaped into the classroom, sending little girls screaming to get away and boys scrambling to catch it. Jackie was forced to pick it up—a very traumatic parenting moment for her. After weeks of pleading from our children, we decided to try a dog as a pet. I was more sympathetic to their request than Jackie, because I have positive memories of my grandparents’ dog Ginger—a docile cocker spaniel that mostly lay on the porch. We found a family selling such an animal, and the adoption meeting at their home produced a sufficient match. We left with Sydney. Sydney, it turns out, was eccentric, perhaps the most eccentric animal I have personally ever been associated with. Sydney had the dog version of ADHD; he was simply in perpetual motion. He was also smart, which can be a bad combination. For example, to motivate a person to play with him, he waited until the door opened to the house, then ran in to one of the children’s rooms for the explicit purpose of finding a pair of socks. If the drawer was open, he stood on his hind legs to pull out a pair and then ran out the door again, anticipating he would be chased. We allowed Sydney to sleep in the garage. It was warmer, we reasoned, and it would keep him from running away. The problem was, Sydney would get

lonely and begin to howl. He howled loud enough that it woke me up, and I assume the neighbors too. I would walk into our family room, get a garage door opener we kept there, and open the door. There was never anything wrong. We left the light on, he had food and it was warm. Sydney was just bored.

“

And I’ll tell you the rest tomorrow night.

”

Once Sydney had succeeded in stimulating some action, he would stop howling, sometimes for an hour or more. Then the scene would be repeated. I put up with this for quite a while, thinking we were just breaking him in and that giving up now might be a bad example for the children. However, Sydney crossed the line with me when I realized I was lying in bed with the garage door opener in my hand because of the frequency of our nightly interactions. Sydney had conditioned me to be his nighttime playmate—I was getting up with him more frequently than I was the kids. We put an ad in the paper and passed him along to the next unsuspecting family. We actually had to go through a couple of prospects before we got a taker. One family took Sydney to the park for a tryout, and when he all but dragged their four-year-old by his leash, they reached the conclusion he was “a little more dog than they could handle.” They had spoken our thoughts as well.

Games with the Children

When it was bedtime, I would lie down next to them to tell stories. At first, I read them stories, but after a while I began making stories up. I spun big, grand stories that involved them and their friends possessing supernatural powers, which they employed in adventures of the first order. Then, at a critical point, I would say, “And I’ll tell you the rest tomorrow night.” They would complain, but it was a good way to get them to bed the next night. Those were great moments. I love thinking back to when I used to lie with them on their beds, in the dark, envisioning the same scene created by those imaginary tales.

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1 Anne Marie (five months old) 2 Anne Marie (one year old) 3 Anne Marie (four years old)

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4 Family Photo. Anne Marie, Taylor, and Mike S. with parents Mike and Jackie. 5 Lewis Smith and Anne Marie at Christmas, 1985

A G R O W I N G FA M I LY

Our bedroom seemed to be where the children wanted to gather most nights. It was unusual when we didn’t wake up with one, two, sometimes three children in bed with us. We had a mat and blanket under our bed, which any of them were welcome to use, but it was almost always just a staging area for their next quiet move into bed. Once in bed, it didn’t take long for one of them to make posts of me and Jackie in a sleepy rendering of a post-andlintel system—a pair of feet in my face and a head next to Jackie’s face. While my love for my children knows no bounds, they do make lousy bedfellows. In the morning when I needed leverage to get them stirring, I would instigate a game we called Alligator. We all started on the bed. The children would then try to push me into the swamp (off the bed) where the alligators lived. Once there, it was imperative to swim to safety (outside the room). After a suitable struggle, hearts would be pumping, and the day would start. We had another game we called Tent. The kids and I would crawl under the covers on my bed. I held the blankets up, using my hand like a tent pole. We would fix meals with imaginary food, then

eat and chat about whatever would come up. The game would always start when I said, “Let’s make a tent.” Sometimes we would have four of us in our little make-believe tent, eating a gourmet meal of make-believe fare. When it was time to get ready for church, or on other occasions when the children needed their hair washed, I became the “hair doctor.” I would create a special “operating table” by laying a blanket on the counter abutting the sink. One at a time, each child would be plucked from the bathtub and laid down on the towel-draped counter with their head tilted into the sink. I would then cover them with another towel, which kept them both warm and dried them off. Then I would cover their eyes with a washcloth, act like I was giving them a shot to make them sleep, and begin washing their hair. It became one of our favorite rituals. I am always amused when I hear my grandchildren reference the “hair doctor.” It seems those childhood games have carried from one generation to the next.

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21 Growing Responsibilities: Business, Family, and Politics 1982 to 1985 • Beginning of The Leavitt Group; Direct Writers; Utah Recodification While we were living at Don and Helen Lloyd’s home on 13th South, I found a book that detailed the founding and organization of Associated Food stores. Don was the founder of the company, and then CEO for the first thirty years of the organization’s life. Associated Food was formed by a group of small, independent

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grocery retailers who could see that the large chain stores, with their buying power, would likely drive them out of business. To avoid that, they formed a co-op and created a brand: IGA stores. Each of the stores agreed to make the co-op its wholesaler, and the profits were returned to the members in the form of a dividend.

From Left : Dixie Leavitt, Mike Leavitt, Kelly Russell, Dane Leavitt and Mark Kenny at the opening of the Leavitt Group Corporate offices in Cedar City.

G R O W I N G R E S P O N S I B I L I T I E S : B U S I N E S S , FA M I LY , A N D P O L I T I C S

I was intrigued by the Associated Food story because as I read the reason for its founding, I could see similarities in our situation with our agencies.

Beginning of Leavitt Group

Michael O. Leavitt Insurance Agency, like other Leavitt affiliated agencies, was 60 percent owned by a business called Security Enterprises, which was owned collectively by my father and other family members. I owned the other 40 percent of Michael O. Leavitt Insurance Agency. This arrangement was consistent with a small group of other agencies Dad had begun to develop. From the time I moved to Salt Lake City, my work began to shift from the Michael O. Leavitt Agency toward developing our emerging agency group. This evolved after I began building the wholesale operation. In time, I concluded that rather than building my future through Michael O. Leavitt Agency, I would tie my future to the success of our family enterprise. From that point on, I began to focus my efforts on building our family’s interest in the ownership of agencies. At the time, we had a couple dozen agencies in three states, but no one knew us as a single entity. We had made one attempt at branding under the name of Security West Agencies, but that had not taken root. When Dad ran for governor, it became clear to me that we should be building on the Leavitt name, so we changed the name of our agency group from Security West Agencies to Leavitt Group. For example, an agency might be named Bowen-Leavitt Agency, a member of The Leavitt Group. I felt our agencies lacked a sense of ownership within the larger organization, and it was clear that we were inconsistent in the way we were dealing with the agencies within our wholesale operation. The agencies needed to feel better aligned.

I developed a business plan and pitched it to my dad. I proposed that we form Leavitt Group Agency Association (LGAA) as a cooperative. In order to compensate for the value I had built by developing the wholesale operation being used by the various agencies, LGAA would buy the business. LGAA was capitalized by each agency signing a note that that would be paid back with profits from operations. Dad thought it was a good idea. About that time, we leased space on the second floor of a new building located at Eighth South and Third East. Moving to these offices was a big step-up in the world for us.1 I have many memories of that building—I was in that office during the period I managed the campaigns for Jake Garn and Orrin Hatch and when I heard Ronald Reagan had been shot. LGAA also held its first organizational meeting in the conference room of that office building. We elected a board member from each of several regions designated by the bylaws. Shortly before the organization was formed, I hired B.J. Fuchs to oversee a series of agency services that we hoped to provide in addition to underwriting. Over time, B.J. became a prominent figure in LGAA, developing relationships and organizing conferences. At thirty-four, she was slightly older than I, but we were in many ways peers making things up as we went. She had worked at Hill Air Force Base for nine years, then attended Weber State to get her degree. LGAA was her first post-graduation job.

New Company Relationships

My vision of LGAA was of a cooperatively owned enterprise that worked to develop and manage tools that made the individual agencies more profitable. One obvious way to do that was to add new insurance company relationships.

1. The building was the headquarters of CV Credit Union, which was formed for the benefit of immigrants from Germany; many of the customers still spoke German with the tellers. It was a wonderful organization that provided a sense of community for the membership. We shared a party room and boardroom.

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Essentially, Leavitt Group operates like a grocery store, offering different products. Individuals or businesses would come to a Leavitt Group agency seeking certain types of insurance. The agent would offer the customer policies from different companies at different prices and with different coverage and assist the customer in choosing the best policy. Each agency had contracts with insurers that were unique to them. My goal was to develop a series of insurance company agreements that the agencies could share and access through LGAA. Individually, many of the agencies were small; collectively, we were large. Furthermore, I wanted to have enhanced authority with many of the insurers, like we had with CIE and Maryland, because it gave us the advantage of speed and flexibility. LGAA created the underwriting management division to manage the relationships we had with our underwriters, CIE and Maryland Casualty. We concluded to move the underwriting centers closer to the agencies, so we created small underwriting offices in Arizona, Las Vegas, Provo, and Salt Lake. In time, that proved to lack economic viability, so we reconfigured it in Las Vegas under the direction of my cousin, Terry Leavitt. I was able to negotiate a contract with United Pacific Reliance, who had been one of our most important insurance company relationships. It meant we now had three underwriting relationships. Another important step was developing our first contract with Lloyd’s of London. I was intrigued with Lloyd’s but didn’t know a soul there. Somehow, I got acquainted with a fine man, just a little older than I, by the name of Phillip Golding. He worked for a Lloyd’s broker. He agreed to visit us in Utah, and shortly afterward, I traveled to London to be introduced on the floor of Lloyd’s. At that time, Lloyd’s was still the paragon of insurance. For several days we went from cubicle to cubicle meeting people, and then proposed a Lloyd’s underwriting contract. Lloyd’s was an amazing system. When the people at Lloyd’s concluded they trusted you, a contract was written to which different syndicates subscribed. Once the syndicates signed on, we just started doing business in

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accordance with the contract. It spelled out the pricing arrangements. We were to pay claims from premiums, and if claims exceeded premiums, we wired them for money. However, if you burned them, your reputation was ruined, as well as your ability to do business with them. I left feeling the pressure of upholding their trust and resolved that only our best, lowest-risk business would go there. That trip represented playing the big time in the insurance world. It was a real eye-opener for a thirty-year-old professional. Jackie traveled with me. We had made reservations for Phillip Golding at the Little America Hotel when he was in Salt Lake City. It was a nice hotel and people raved about the rooms and the rates. Phillip booked us into the Ritz in London. It turned out to be about five hundred dollars a night with the exchange rate. We stayed one night and then found a B&B just a few blocks away for about fifty dollars a night. We didn’t want to look too unsophisticated, and we didn’t want to embarrass him, so each day we had him drop us off and pick us up at the Ritz, and then we waited for him to leave before we walked to the dive we stayed in. While we were there, we had a high-stakes dinner with a potential lead underwriter for our contract. Phillip told me that it was unusual for such an invitation to be made on a first visit, so we were on our best behavior. At the end of the meal, I offered to buy, and the underwriter scoffed. He said, “Oh, don’t be daft.” I had no idea what the word “daft” meant. When we returned to the B&B, I asked for a dictionary. I was relieved to learn it simply meant, “don’t be silly.”

Direct Writers

Another important LGAA development was the negotiation of agreements with a couple of former competitors allowing our agencies in certain markets to represent famous brands, something most independents could not offer. This was rather controversial in our industry. Allstate is a good example. Until the early 1980s, Allstate was exclusively a direct writer. There was bitter rivalry between the independent agency

G R O W I N G R E S P O N S I B I L I T I E S : B U S I N E S S , FA M I LY , A N D P O L I T I C S

system (Maryland Casualty Company, Travelers) and direct writers like Allstate, State Farm, and Farmers. I had come to admire how well direct writers did business; it was clear to me that the independent agency companies were not as skilled. One day, I read a small piece in a trade publication that Allstate was experimenting with the appointment of independent agencies in the Midwest. It was creating a huge controversy—but I immediately began looking for a way to connect with them. I discovered that the executive vice president was a man Dad had known at Utah State University named Boyd Christensen. I started a campaign to meet with Boyd, which lasted more than a year. Finally, he agreed to meet us and sent a man named John Fowler, who was a real champion. He had been in the Allstate career ranks and then became a manager. Allstate had given him responsibility for the independent agency program, and we were among the very first agencies to contract with them. We repeated this process with Metropolitan (now called Metlife). I read, again in the trade press, that the company was considering following Allstate, so I started a campaign with the home office in Warwick, Rhode Island, to become Met’s first agency in the West. We made a compelling pitch. We covered a large geographic area and had the potential to reduce Met’s marketing costs because we would manage the agency force. With Met, we even negotiated an override commission for LGAA. We were not able to put Met in Allstate agencies, but since Allstate would not appoint agencies where it had Sears store agents, we put Allstate in our rural agencies and Metropolitan in our urban agencies. Our strategy was controversial within the industry. Some of our independent agency companies, like Maryland Casualty and Travelers, viewed our deals with Allstate and Met as disloyalty to the “independent agency system.” Some cancelled their contracts with us. But doing business with Allstate and Met was a risk I was willing to take. They could offer their products (or coverage) at a lower cost, and they were good at what they did. This turned out to be a very important move, as far as LGAA was concerned.

A Larger Office

Back in Salt Lake City, we began to run out of space at the Eighth South office, so I started looking for a building to buy. I found one for sale at 1400 South Main Street. Part of the building’s appeal was that the city had plans to turn the area surrounding the building into a park. The office had limited parking, but we were able to lease some parking spots from the city, which made it workable. I could drive up to the building, park in front, and walk in. Perhaps the best part was that the view from my office was centerfield of Derks Field, where Salt Lake City’s minor league teams played. We were in the building for nearly ten years until the city decided to renovate the park to accommodate a new Triple-A team. The city bought the building from us just after I was elected governor.

Increasing Efficiency with Automation

Another significant emphasis at LGAA was increasing the efficiency of the agencies with computer technology, or automation, as it was called then. I stayed pretty close to the cutting edge of computer technology for a company our size. Computers were brand-new, but I was fascinated by them and could quickly see the potential for them to revolutionize the business. I have previously described my first computer, the 16-bit Tandy. When Compaq put out a portable computer, I bought one, which weighed about twenty-five pounds. I remember hauling it onto an airplane for a business trip.

I encouraged my dad to invest in automation. To this day, Dad doesn’t use a computer, but to his credit, he also saw that automation was the future. In the early 1980s, feeling the need to push ahead with computer technology, we began to build one of the first online systems in the country with financing from our major companies. I think it can be said that Leavitt Group stayed well ahead of the pack when it came to adopting the technology to build a private network to connect our agencies, but it was expensive and slow. We used T1 lines, and our telephone charges were more than $20,000 a month. The learning curve was steep because nobody had experience with computers. Kelly Russell and Sandra Maxwell were the major

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players who made this happen. My role was to sell the concept to companies, agencies, and our staff. It was remarkable that we undertook the project and succeeded.

was a great opportunity to learn and to build relationships. At the end of the two years, we were not done, so the legislature reauthorized the commission for another two years.

However, I think I must concede in retrospect we likely had unrealistic expectations on how long it would take for the insurance world to move toward automation. I wrote in a journal I was keeping at the time a view that within three to four years, one would be required by insurance companies. It ultimately happened, but several years after I thought it would.

The discussions were often contentious because there were significant economic stakes for many of the members of the commission and those who regularly attended the meetings. Some rather pronounced differences of opinion developed between Spencer Kimball and senior members of the commission, and at the conclusion of the first two years, Professor Kimball resigned.

Utah Recodification

The commission concluded to not hire a new executive director and instead relied heavily on Dane and the Utah Insurance Department to staff the effort. As a result, Dane became one of the most knowledgeable people in Utah on the insurance code.

During its 1981 session, the Utah Legislature created the Utah Recodification Commission. It was an ambitious effort to take all the pieces of the Utah Code related to insurance and compile it into one section. Over the years, the law had been amended hundreds of times, creating inconsistencies. Governor Scott Matheson appointed John Piercey (my aunt Jane’s husband) as the chairman, along with nineteen other commissioners. I was appointed as one of the commissioners, a terrific opportunity for a thirty-year-old. The other non-legislative members of the commission were seasoned industry people, mostly CEOs of local companies. Spencer L. Kimball, a professor at the University of Chicago Law School, was appointed as a member of the commission and executive director. He had prominent Utah roots, since his father was Spencer W. Kimball. He was also considered to be among the nation’s leading experts on insurance law, and viewed this effort as a means of creating a model law that could be used as a template for state laws all over the nation. Such a complete recodification had never been undertaken before. Professor Kimball was a delightful and brilliant man whom I enjoyed working with. A bonus in all of this was his hiring of my brother Dane, who was a law student at Brigham Young University, to be his clerk. The commission was authorized for two years. We met regularly for half- or full-day sessions. This required a significant amount of time, but it

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At the conclusion of the four years, the new law was more than six hundred pages long. Debating a six-hundred-page law at a forty-five-day session of the legislature is a tall order, so the commission developed a brilliant strategy: they asked the legislature to pass the entire bill into law, without amendment, in 1985, with a deferred implementation date after the 1986 legislative session. During the ensuing year, any interested parties who had disagreement with the code could prepare legislation to amend it before the new code became effective. The plan worked. The bill was enacted without taking the wrapper off, though a few amendments were offered and defeated. Only a few amendments were made during the next session, and our work became law.

22 Balancing Politics, Work, and Family 1983 to 1985 • Chase's Birth; Dixie and Anne's Mission Call; Election of 1984; Virginia As Halloween 1983 approached, we were living on Laird Avenue. With three small children, our home was always buzzing. Jackie was nearing full-term in her fourth pregnancy, and speculation about the new baby’s gender added to the excitement. October 28, 1983, was a Friday. When Jackie woke up, she told me she was beginning to feel mild contractions. The due date was actually October 23, so the signs were not a surprise. As I left for work, Jackie told me she expected to be at the hospital that night if things progressed as the other deliveries had. I spent the day at work, and Jackie took Anne Marie, who was twenty months old, to Bonneville Elementary for the annual Halloween parade. Our children dressed up in their costumes and paraded around the school. Both Taylor and Mike were in a Superman stage and went costumed as such.

Chase Leavitt

In the early afternoon, Jackie had a previously scheduled doctor’s appointment with John Nelson. After the appointment, Jackie called to tell me she had started to dilate, and

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to plan to register at LDS Hospital around 5 or 6 p.m. She said Dr. Nelson had dinner plans and would meet us at the hospital shortly after. That allowed us to call members of our family and make arrangements.

The Delivery

Jackie was much more relaxed during this birth and delivery, later calling it “painless childbirth.” What a relief after having a hard time with each of the other children. I remember when the doctor arrived, the University of Utah football game was on TV. We were watching the game without sound and quietly visiting. The atmosphere was almost festive.

“

As he said those words, it seemed to make sense— another Leavitt boy.

”

The delivery also went well because of a wonderful neighbor named LaVon Gibb. She was a maternity nurse at LDS Hospital and told Jackie she wanted to ensure this birth went more smoothly than our previous ones. She asked me to call her when we headed to the hospital. I did just that. Soon LaVon, whom Jackie referred to as her guardian angel, was at our side taking charge of every detail. It was like a designer delivery. As Jackie began to bear down, it became evident that Chase was turned backwards. Once that was solved, things went extremely well. When John had only seen Chase’s face, he said, “It’s a boy.” Jackie has said, “As he said those words, it seemed to make sense—another Leavitt boy.” Just a few hours later, we phoned family and friends to tell them the baby’s name would be Chase Smith Leavitt. We had picked out his name before his birth. The only other Chase I knew was Chase Peterson, who at the time was the president of the University of Utah and a good friend of the Leavitt family. Though I have enormous respect for Chase Peterson, Chase Leavitt wasn’t exactly named after him. But Chase Peterson was flattered when we told him we planned to use his name.

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The following Monday was Halloween, and it was the day we brought Chase home from the hospital. My mother was there helping to take care of the other children. When we arrived, we sat down in the family room to introduce Chase to the children. They were so excited they could not hold still. We let each of them take a turn holding Chase. When Anne Marie’s turn was finished, she began to scream, “No! My baby! My baby!” Soon the trick or treaters began ringing our doorbell. I took the children out to do their rounds. Jackie and my mother stayed home, answering the door and watching the baby. It was clear to both of us that with four children, we were into the family business in a big way.

The Election of 1984

When I ran the Orrin Hatch reelection campaign, I met Dick Wirthlin, a former BYU professor turned pollster. Dick was personally close to Reagan and had gained notoriety as Ronald Reagan’s pollster during his gubernatorial and presidential campaigns.

As Dick and I worked together on the Hatch campaign, I told him that I would enjoy being part of President Reagan’s reelection committee. So, during the summer of 1983, Dick Wirthlin called to tell me he had been authorized to put a team together for the president’s reelection campaign. He needed somebody who had campaign management experience and wondered if I would be in a position to spend some time in Washington during 1984. I talked with Jackie about it, and discussed it with Dad and my other business colleagues. Although it created a bunch of complications, we all concluded it was simply too unique an opportunity to pass up. Jackie and I viewed it as an adventure. It obviously seemed like a better adventure for me than Jackie, but she still agreed. However, our ability to move to Washington, D.C., for a time got much more complicated by a single phone call.

A Call to Serve the Lord

Late in the fall of 1983, Dad was in my office in Salt Lake City. My assistant announced that Elder

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L. Tom Perry was on the phone for Dad. I heard only one side of the conversation, but it was clear he was telling Dad that a mission call was imminent. As Dad listened, his eyes filled with tears, and a series of life-changing events for nearly everyone in our family began to unfold. He was only fifty-five and deeply involved in business. The call meant Dad would need to leave the business he had worked a lifetime to build. All of us would be affected, and almost instantly after Elder Perry’s phone call, we began to develop plans for the transitions in our lives. For Mother, it meant leaving the comforts of home, her mother, children, and grandchildren. For me, it meant stepping into the leadership of the business. It changed nearly every one of my brothers’ situations as well, like Dane, who would have to give up the legal practice he was building to join me in managing the Leavitt Group. In hindsight, it was a divine masterstroke of transformation, though at the time it felt complex and full of risks. These risks were heightened by my plans to spend much of the next year in Washington D.C. on the Reagan campaign. The new business responsibilities I was assuming because of Dad’s mission assignment properly caused me to consider withdrawing from the Reagan commitment. However, after lengthy discussion with Dane and other members of the family, we decided to move ahead if I was able to negotiate a relationship with my mentor Dick Wirthlin and the Reagan Campaign that would allow me to travel back and forth as needed. The Reagan people agreed, and I was able to work out a consulting contract that allowed me to stay in Salt Lake City, with occasional trips to Washington, until late spring, when things would begin to ratchet up in activity. They also agreed to cover the extra expenses for me to travel back and forth from Utah so I could keep my business interests going. Though Dad and Mother would not actually receive a mission call until the spring of 1984, we assumed it would happen and were therefore prepared. I began to develop my plans not only to assume more responsibility then but also to go through an awkward few months when I would be away from the business. It was definitely less than

ideal, and in some ways irresponsible, to be away during a period of transition. All I can say is that it felt like the right thing to do. In retrospect, it worked out, perhaps in part because of the blessings that come from people doing missionary service. It was also possible because of many others like Dane, Sandra Maxwell, and Kelly Russell, who picked up the deficit created by my absence.

Unexpected Benefit of Washington, D.C.

The decision to spend time in Washington, D.C., was helpful to us in an unanticipated way. It provided an avenue to help us resolve a school situation for one of our children. Having children start school is a monumental moment for any parent, and a milestone for a child. Jackie has always been perfectly attuned to the developmental progress of our children. Due to Jackie’s educational background and upbringing, she knew when they should be achieving important skills, and worked with our children to learn colors, shapes, letters, numbers, and phonics. I have always felt the educational system has leaned too heavily on a one-size-fits-all model. Children mature at different rates and learn in different ways. Mikey, as the oldest, was our little school pioneer, and our experience with Mikey and school reinforced that belief with me. As Mike prepared to enter first grade, his kindergarten teacher began raising the question of whether he was ready for a full day of school, suggesting he might be better off starting at age seven rather than six. We decided to press on and put him in first grade. Mikey and I spent lots of time together working on schoolwork. To learn basic math concepts, we invented a football game where Mikey gained yardage by solving the problems on flash cards we made. Both of us enjoyed our game. He was struggling to keep up in school and it frustrated him, but he was always willing to try. We would play our math game in the morning because he could concentrate better at that time of day. One morning, I remember waking up and seeing this little boy standing beside my bed. He said, “Want to work on math?” It just melted my heart.

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1 Mike, Henry Kissinger, and Bud Scruggs 2 Dick Wirthlin with charts, 1982 3 Mike S., first grade

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4 Chase, Jackie, and Anne Marie at the Laird home 5 Anne Marie and Chase playing

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At the end of his first-grade year, we decided to let him advance to second grade, thinking he would likely catch up. However, in the fall of 1983, within a couple of weeks after starting school, it was evident he was struggling. The challenge we faced was how to return him to first grade without affecting the way he felt about himself.

season got more intense, I moved the family to Virginia.) We hired a young woman, Tracy Roberts, to help us with the children, because I had to divide my time between two cities. I would fly back and forth, working in Salt Lake City from Thursday through Sunday, and Washington, D.C., from Monday until my flight on Thursday.

We needed to make a hard decision. I simply couldn’t face having him deal with the social hardship of leaving his friends and going back to the first grade, especially when kids can be so unkind.

During the last weekend in June, I went to Cedar City to help my dad finish his preparations for his mission. I planned to drive him and my mother to Provo on Sunday night so they could enter the mission home the next morning. He had been working for months to tie down loose ends, solving problems that only he could address while Mother got the house and personal matters in order.

Realizing we would be moving to Washington for the next school year provided an avenue for recalibration. We elected to enroll the boys in a private school in Salt Lake City called Carden Memorial School—Mike into the first grade and Taylor into kindergarten. The school had a reputation for working with children in a highly disciplined but more individualized setting. Mike could then start second grade in Virginia, returning to Bonneville Elementary for third grade. Our hope was enough time would have elapsed it would seem less conspicuous. It seems possible that these kinds of worries are more prominent for the parents than the children. I remember taking Mike and Taylor to Carden for their first day and feeling tremendous empathic anxiety for Mike as he walked into his class for the first time. When he left, I sat in the car for a few minutes and wept. It was heart-wrenching to see him go through something hard and know the questions it was creating for him. However, having Mike and Taylor enrolled at the same school was a big help to both.

A Move to Virginia

On a Sunday evening in the spring of 1984, I landed at National Airport and drove to Lorton, Virginia, to see a townhouse condo that was listed for sub-rental in the Washington Post. The drive took about twenty-five minutes, which seemed reasonable as a commute to the offices of the Reagan Reelection committee. I didn’t bother to think about the fact that it was a Sunday. Turns out that in normal traffic it was more than an hour each way. It was a lesson I learned the hard way. In April of 1984, I started flying to D.C. to spend a few days there each week. (Once the campaign

For weeks in advance of his departure, Dad had worked nearly day and night. He was approaching a state of exhaustion. There were still lots of things on his desk and in his drawers that he knew would remind him of uncompleted tasks. Dane and I convinced him to put them in a box, and we promised to work on them with him as we all drove north. Finally, we reached the last item; the box was empty. Dane and I had a long list of delegated tasks, but Dad was ready to leave the business and enter missionary service, free of other obligations.

Planning and Polling

The Reagan re-election campaign operation had divided the country into regions. Each region had an operations person in planning and polling. I was the planning and polling coordinator for thirteen northeastern states, which included New York, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, the New England states, Ohio, and as far south as Virginia. In addition to my state-by-state plans, I wrote plans for Catholics, environmentalists, and Italians. The operations guy for the region was Roger Stone, a well-known, hardball politician from New Jersey and New York. He was a campaign consultant with the firm Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly. Our office was on the sixth floor of the National Association of Counties building on C Street near the Capitol. I worked on the floor with the most senior campaign management. While my office surroundings weren’t great, my proximity to the action was terrific.

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The news-gathering operation was through the wall from my office. The campaign had rooms full of teletype machines for receiving and printing news updates. The machines, referred to collectively as “the newswire,” pumped out the equivalent of a constant flow of telegrams containing breaking news. Someone would read everything that came over the newswire, summarize or photocopy it, and hand deliver it to those who had need for the information. We ordered polls for our states and did flash analysis of the results. I was less experienced than the others on the team in the math of polls but much more experienced in their use and interpretation. One of our most important duties was to recommend places for the president to visit when the campaign decided to do an event in a particular state. For example, I would get a call saying the president would be visiting Ohio. What town or region of the state, and what issues did I recommend, based on the polling? I would take the latest information and provide it to the operations person. I think one of the more significant contributions that I made was realizing that the state of Ohio was lagging behind the rest of the nation in feeling the economic recovery. It was clear to me that the “Morning in America” theme that the campaign was using (Reagan’s award-winning TV ad, which focused on low unemployment and a robust economy) was not working in Ohio. I wrote a memo to campaign management. As I remember, Roger Stone put both our names on it, which I appreciated. The result of the memo was a different campaign in Ohio, concentrating on jobs creation. It seemed to work. I noted through the course of the campaign that the president just kept returning to Ohio; it was obviously a swing state. It wasn’t until later that I learned how the campaign arrived at that strategy. Richard Nixon was an important adviser to the campaign, and he recommended a strategy where they should strive to win the South, the West, and one big industrial state. He told them to run in that industrial state like they were running for governor. They adopted the strategy and chose Ohio to be the state of concentration. That explained the repeated trips. One of the jobs that I enjoyed during the ’84 campaign was briefing Richard Nixon on the

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phone when Roger Stone invited me to participate. Nixon was kind to me and obviously conversant with many of the states, right down to the congressional district. He would occasionally ask what we were showing in the Connecticut 5th district, for example. One of our briefings took place on Halloween. He had to leave the phone a couple of times to give candy to trick-or-treaters. I could hear him greeting the kids who came to the door. That created an irresistible picture for me: a former president answering his own door, basket of candy in hand, to greet trick-or-treaters.

“

While you are here, share it. Being here will be routine for you, but a life highlight for those you bring.

”

The presidential debates were a memorable part of the experience. The entire campaign staff was given the assignment of thinking up zingers, but as far as I know, nobody but Reagan came up with the classic lines. As for the debates, the president so completely lost the first debate to Walter Mondale (former vice president to Jimmy Carter and U.S. Senator from Minnesota) that winning the second one was a great victory.

Reagan Coworkers

Dick Wirthlin had invited a number of westerners to serve on his staff. Ray Beckham, a BYU professor, was one of his closest friends and handled one region. Another fellow, Mario Hegewald, was a young BYU grad who had just finished his degree at the Kennedy School of Politics at Harvard. (He was going to work for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency after the campaign.) Mario handled another region. We drove to and from work together because he lived in Woodbridge, which was even further out than Lorton. Anne Marie was captivated by Mario Hegewald’s name. She would often sing, “Mario, Mario, Mario is such a beautiful name. . .”

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Todd Remington, another colleague, was also a BYU graduate. He ended up working in California as a pollster for Wirthlin and later started his own firm. When I ran for governor in 1992, he did a little bit of work for my campaign. Another colleague of mine during that time would reenter my life later in our respective careers. For the last several months of the Reagan Campaign I shared an office with a young analyst who had just finished his PhD in Oxford, England. His name was Gerrit Gong. Because we sat back-toback in a tight little room, we shared many conversations on a variety of subjects. After the campaign, our paths crossed periodically as he pursued his career path and I pursued mine. He was hired by BYU, and later called to be a General Authority of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. In March 2018, he was called as a member of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles. Our paths have crossed again while both serving on the Church’s Communication Committee. We often reference our earlier connections. During my work for the Reagan campaign, I got to visit the White House twice. One was for a reception attended by the entire campaign staff, while the other, more significant visit was an invitation to accompany Dick Wirthlin in a meeting. I remember making a short presentation, but I can’t remember who we met with or which room we met in. Now that the White House is so familiar to me, I have tried to reconstruct the moment but have not been able to. However, the visit served as the basis of an important lesson. Years later, I would return with frequency to the White House as a member of President Bush’s cabinet. As often as possible, I would follow Dick Wirthlin’s example and take a less senior person with me. I knew they would reference the experience as one of their great experiences working in Washington. This opportunity to bless people’s lives was reinforced by White House Chief of Staff Andy Card, who had served several presidents. Andy often said, “While you are here, share it. Being here will be routine for you, but a life highlight for those you bring.”

Our time in D.C. also reunited me with my longtime friend Bud Scruggs. The connections he made working with me on the 1982 Hatch Campaign had opened doors for him to become part of the staff of the Judiciary Committee. Bud and I met frequently at the park between the Capitol and the campaign office for a picnic of vendor hot dogs. It was a good time to savor and share the experiences we were having, and to talk politics. Another positive to having Bud Scruggs there came in the form of a car. I had been renting a car by the week. Scruggs needed to buy a car, so I agreed that if he bought a new one, I’d pay him the weekly rental for the rest of the time I was going to be there and then he could own it. It worked out well—except he bought a car with no radio or air conditioning. Driving back and forth to work in the hot D.C. summers caused me to conclude sometimes frugality can be carried too far.

Fun Memories in Lorton

Our little townhouse in Lorton produced fun memories for the kids. They often recall how the woods behind the house contained fireflies, poison ivy, and several action figures they buried. They still talk about the friendships they formed in that neighborhood. Jackie enjoyed our time there as well, especially the sense of community she developed with the neighbors. The kids had positive academic experiences; both Mike and Taylor felt they were successes. The time recalibration for Mike played out well in Virginia. Having to deal with the traffic going in and out was a defining experience. I concluded that I did not want to live in a city where my life was relegated to twelve-hour days. If I didn’t leave for work by 6 a.m., then I’d get snarled in traffic. But if I left work for home before 7 p.m., sometimes it took me two hours to get there. One of the days I’ll never forget during that period was when Anne Marie got bronchitis and had to spend the night in an oxygen tent in the hospital. It was just plain frightening. Jackie often loaded the children up in a van and took them sightseeing. It was actually a great experience for them.

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One weekend, we took the family to New York City on the train. At Penn station, some rough-looking guys pretended to be getting us a cab and then wanted to charge us forty dollars for the service. The cab driver wouldn’t say anything until we got away from the scene. “You haven’t spent much time in New York City, have you?” he said. We were all piled into his cab, Mike was sitting in the front seat next to him. The driver said, “Be careful because they steal children.”

“

You haven't spent much time in New York City, have you?

”

When we got out of the car, Mike literally held on to my leg with both arms. When we got to the room, he looked out the window onto Manhattan. He said, “Look how nice this view is. Let’s just stay here so we can see everything.” We had two rooms, and early in the morning, Taylor, who was about six, walked to the other room to watch TV with his brother. When we awoke, and found that he was gone, Jackie went crazy, figuring that somebody had stolen her baby. It was an awful two or three minutes until we found him with Mike.

End of the Campaign

On the day Ronald Reagan visited the campaign headquarters to thank the staff, Dan Eastman had stopped by to see me. Both of us got to shake Reagan’s hand. I remember the feeling of electricity when Reagan walked into the office; for some people, the experience is the same when they meet the governor. When I became governor, I tried to keep that moment in mind, hoping I could make the experience special for people. Working in a large organization was a good experience for me, though not being in a leadership position took some adjustment. Also, I learned how much a word of encouragement from the boss meant. I appreciated the few times I felt that Dick looked after me, providing me with experiences and praising my work. He wasn’t particularly good at doing it, and I think feeling the need for his reinforcement helped me learn how much it means to people

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to be recognized for their work. I’m sure I could use constant reminders of that.

Utah Politics

Back in Utah, 1984 was an active year in politics. Norm Bangerter and David Monson were involved in big races. Monson was the party’s candidate to replace Dan Marriott, who was running for governor. Monson was running against Frances Farley, a fairly liberal state senator from Salt Lake. She was probably the only person in the state whom Dave could beat, but going into it, it looked like she might beat him. Scruggs and I volunteered to redo the campaign. We looked at the polling and it was clear that people liked her more than him, and that in order to win, we had to redefine the election to be a referendum on Ronald Reagan. We rented a video camera and a person to operate it, found an editing studio, and cut commercials with Jake and Orrin looking into the camera basically asking, “Why would anybody vote for Ronald Reagan and then send Frances Farley to Congress to vote against him?” It worked like a charm, and Monson won by less than five hundred votes. That year, I also helped extensively on the Bangerter-for-governor race. He was running against a sizable group of candidates—several of whom were my friends. The most awkward situation for me involved Dan Marriott, whose campaign I had run in 1982. The awkwardness came to a head at the Republican Convention. I had not publicly endorsed Norm Bangerter, but I was actively helping him. Marilyn Marriott, Dan’s wife, walked up to me and said with a hurt, angry expression, “I’ve been told you are helping Norm Bangerter. If that is true, it will break my heart. Is it?” I simply froze and then did something I immediately regretted—I didn’t tell her the truth. I hedged my words to get out of the immediate pain the situation was causing me. Later it became evident I was helping Norm, and while admitting it to her at the convention would have broken her heart, it was true. The result was an even deeper wound in our friendship. I learned from that experience the

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need to tell people in advance if I am going to do something they won’t like. If you don’t tell them in advance, at least be willing to face the music when the time comes. It was a situation I didn’t handle well and learned a great lesson from.

“

I’ve been told you are helping Norm Bangerter. If that is true, it will break my heart.

”

My most important contribution to the Bangerter campaign was a strategic issue. I went to a meeting held at a home in Midway, Utah, with Norm’s brain trust. The issue was how they should deploy their money. I told them about the Kingston Trio song, “Desert Pete.” The narrator was about to die of thirst when he came to a pump in the middle of the desert. There was a box with a bottle of water in it and a note saying that he could drink the water if he wanted to, but the better solution was to pour the

water down the hole and prime the pump. “If you do that, you’ll get all the water you can drink, and it’s cold,” the note read. “Just refill the bottle.” I told Norm that I felt like we made a big mistake when my dad ran. We saved our money until the end and ran out of time. If we had spent money at the beginning, we would have defined ourselves and may have caught fire in time to win. I recommended that the campaign define the race early. If they did, I argued it would make it much more difficult for their primary opponent, Dan Marriott, to raise money. Bangerter took the advice. He remembered the conversation as one of the turning points of his campaign. Election night in 1984 was a memorable one for me. I had three elections in the hopper: Reagan, Bangerter, and Monson. I was on the phone with my brother Eric until nearly 5 a.m. in the morning, waiting for results to appear on Utah television. It was a clean sweep.

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23 Repositioning Leavitt Group and the Formation of Public Affairs Advisory Group 1985 to 1987 • Leavitt Group; Public Affairs Advisory Group; Jake Garn, Utah Hospital Association The entirety of 1984 had been a monumental year. During the first three months of the year, with Jackie and the children in Utah, I was traveling regularly to Washington, D.C., for my work with the Reagan Reelection Committee. At the same time, I was preparing to assume

Bob Bernick Jr. (Deseret News), Bud Scruggs, Jake Garn, Mike, 1986

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the CEO role of Leavitt Group, a change brought about by my parents’ departure for a mission in Leeds, England. In May, the family and I had moved to the D.C. area. This created a reversal of pattern for me.

R E P O S I T I O N I N G L E AV I T T G R O U P A N D T H E F O R M AT I O N O F P U B L I C A F FA I R S A D V I S O R Y G R O U P

Rather than living in Salt Lake City and flying to D.C. for short bursts of Reagan work, as I had done for the first three months of the year, I was living in D.C. and returning almost weekly to Salt Lake City, generally leaving Thursday evening and returning to D.C. on Sunday night after marathon work stretches with the Leavitt Group. It was exhausting for me and for Jackie, who, along with our nanny Tracy Roberts, managed the family without much help from me. Jackie and I had concluded to take our children to visit their grandparents in England, one last diversion before I turned my full attention to my duties at the Leavitt Group. While Dane and others had done a good job holding it together, having a part-time leader was not sufficient. We returned to Salt Lake City and prepared for our trip. During that brief period at home, I was confronted by the first real crisis of my business career. It was discovered that Dave Olsen of Olsen-Leavitt in St. George had opened an office next door to our agency. My relationship with Dave had been strained by his perpetual overspending and underperforming. The agency was unprofitable, and I had been demanding changes. Olsen clearly did not like that and opted instead to organize a coup. When I confronted him with the obvious, he informed me that he wanted to buy the agency, and if we were not willing to sell, he said he would proceed with his plan to simply take the clients with him. Of course, he was bound by a contractual covenant not to do so, but he boldly declared I would have to stop him in court. I could not acquiesce to Olsen’s demand; doing so would weaken our business proposition all over the system. Our ability to be majority owners was based on the strength of our contractual covenant not to compete from our partners. The situation quickly turned into an ugly situation. Olsen’s father, who belonged to the Browning Arms family, had inherited money. Dave had persuaded his father to bankroll his acquisition of the agency. Dave then orchestrated a plan, which included offering a bonus to each member of the existing staff to come with him.

I told Olsen the agency was not for sale and fired him. The next morning, Olsen was running all over St. George collecting letters from clients, assigning him as their agent rather than our agency. We were in full crisis mode. All the employees essentially went into hiding, not knowing who was in control of the agency. The only employee who showed up for work was a nineteen-year-old clerk with less than a year of experience. We went to court to get a restraining order. It was granted. I reached out for resources all over the Leavitt Group system and assembled a staff of people who moved into the office and began servicing the business. I asked John Roberts, one of our newer producers, to move from Salt Lake City and take over for Olsen. This opened 1985 in a tumultuous way. I sensed that all our partners in other offices, while sympathetic to our situation, were also interested to see if Olsen succeeded. We had a lot at stake. Within a few months, Olsen had purchased our agency’s St. George competitor, Labrum Insurance Agency. I concluded to use the crisis as an opportunity to turn an unprofitable agency into a profitable one. I did so by agreeing to sell a book of unprofitable commercial accounts to Olsen’s new agency, under a provision of our contract with him that specified the price. We then kept the personal lines and selected commercial accounts. This also allowed me to size the staff and overhead to a point that the agency was earning a nice profit. A big improvement over our previous state. John Roberts was well-equipped to handle the personal lines of insurance, but not well-equipped to handle the commercial part of the business. I was able to persuade Galen Heppler, a former adjuster and agency producer at Olsen-Leavitt, to come back to work to handle the commercial aspect. He hadn’t joined Olsen but was waiting to see what happened when the dust cleared. I was able to accomplish the resizing, and within the year had a profitable, growing agency. The bad decision was to rely on a contract with a dishonest man. I did not want the disruption of a trial and agreed to simply enforce the buy-out provision of our contract, which required Olsen to pay

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for any accounts he took. However, the contract gave him time to pay for the accounts, and my mistake was thinking he would ever pay us. He simply refused to do any of the accounting the agreement required. Within a few years, he was broke, and we never got paid. Olsen ultimately lost what had to be a seven-figure amount of his father’s money, and if that wasn’t a big enough disaster, he left his wife and six children. It was very sad. Over time, we ended up buying—for a fire-sale price—the other agency he had assembled. Over time Dane and I dealt with a steady supply of difficult situations, many of them dealing with dishonesty and bad behavior. It was quite an education for two guys in their thirties building on the solid foundation provided by their father.

Remodeling Leavitt Group

The Olsen situation, as hard as it was, made clear to me how disruptive poorly performing agencies could become. I had been concerned for some time that our growth had been too fast, and worried that we had inadequate systems to manage the demands. Dane and I concluded we needed to swiftly but carefully focus on three strategic goals. The first was to “cull the herd.” We needed to remove ourselves from unpromising agencies so we could concentrate on the best ones and continue to acquire more agencies. The second was to realign our economic relationship with the agencies so that Leavitt Group Enterprises was being compensated for its work in the agencies in a uniform way. Finally, we would capitalize on more on our scale by expanding the number of common services we provided through Leavitt Group Agency Association. During the next couple of years, we made progress on all three objectives.

Within eighteen months we had succeeded at our first objective. We reduced the number of agencies from forty-six to twenty-three. The impact was a doubling of our profit. Some agencies we merged with other agencies, and some we just exited. It was a smart move because it provided expansion capital and freed up resources for management.

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One memorable example of agencies to be culled was Jensen-Leavitt in Burley, Idaho. Blaine Jensen was a farmer who decided he wanted to be in the insurance business. He had been with Farmers Union but knew nothing about insurance. I drove to Burley to inspect the agency, and when I walked into the place, I decided on the spot to close it, but not without a lot of trouble. The place was an absolute mess. There were literally no files; papers were stacked around with no sense of organization.

“

Does your father know what you’re doing?

”

I called Sandra Maxwell in Cedar City and asked her to spend a couple of weeks in Burley. She brought a little team with her and began reconstructing the accounts by literally putting the papers in alphabetized stacks, sorting the stacks into files, and then reconstructing each stack into accounts. In some cases, there would only be an application—in others, a policy. She found checks written without an application. Once we had assembled the files how they would be in a neatly run agency, I sold it to another operation in a way that protected the buyer from errors and omissions. It was an absolute miracle there weren’t serious problems—somehow, we got lucky. Gratefully, there weren’t many agencies in that kind of shape. Rearranging the way Leavitt Group Enterprises got paid revealed that it was going to take some time for the agencies to get used to the fact that I was now in charge—not my dad. Shortly after my father and mother departed for their mission, I visited each agency and presented a new approach in the way we handled our financial relationship with the agencies. It dealt with the amount of money the agencies paid to Leavitt Group for services we provided. I was troubled by how inconsistent we were in our practice and felt it needed to be rationalized. We were, up to that point, being reimbursed more on the basis of ability to pay rather than a more objective measure of services consumed.

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When I met with Peggy Summerfield, an agency principal in Summerfield-Leavitt Agency in Las Vegas, she listened to my presentation and then asked, “Does your father know what you’re doing?” I laughed out loud, and said with a smile, “No Peggy, he doesn’t, and he is in England. I’m sure he will be proud of us. I’m here as your partner asking you to support this change.” She and others did. Despite being only thirty-four years old, my more experienced colleagues accepted my leadership, something I have always appreciated.

Repositioning in Arizona

Armed with capital and improved profitability, we were in a position to make some strategic moves. One of the moves I am most proud of during the time I was CEO was the repositioning we made in Arizona. We had five agencies in Arizona, and there were serious problems with each one. The Arizona market was depressed because the real estate bubble had broken; the nation was in the midst of the savings and loan crisis; and construction had all but stopped in Arizona—and our agency group was loaded with construction accounts. At one point, we had less than half the premium written with the same number of accounts and the same number of employees.

“

There is a limit to the amount you can be paid for what you can accomplish on your own. After that, you are paid for what you can get done through others.

”

I came to three conclusions: First, Leavitt Group was in business with the wrong people. Second, this was a time for investment because the economy would come back, and while we were hurting, other agencies would be also. Third, we needed to diversify our client mix—we were too dependent on construction industry accounts in Arizona.

I formulated a strategy to get us out of two of the agency relationships we were in, and a third, Steve Minard, decided he wanted us to buy him out so he could start another agency on his own. I really liked Steve but knew that losing him provided a means for me to reposition. I sold accounts to him to generate capital for our reinvestment. Over the next several months, I began aggressively buying agencies that I thought better fit our profile. We bought an agency in Tucson and recruited a strong producer named Lloyd Koty to take over the agency. He immediately began looking for other acquisitions. The agency was profitable and growing from the very beginning. I built an agency in Buckeye, Arizona, with Charlene Powers, who was referred to me by Laurie Barrett’s husband, Bob, who worked for an insurance company. It was a strange situation involving an agency that was being sold by the government as part of a savings and loan failure. That agency grew rapidly with a balanced book of business. I found an opportunity in Cottonwood, Arizona, and persuaded Mark Butler to move from Phoenix to become our partner. That agency became viable quickly. We bought a couple of other agencies and folded them into the Phoenix agency, and I changed the management. Within a period of eighteen months, I had completely realigned the business in Arizona, and as the economy bounced back, we began to grow quickly and profitably. During that period, I was spending at least two days a week in Arizona.

Terry Leavitt

During the late eighties, Las Vegas was the business’s fastest-growing area, mostly due to its exploding population growth. I ended up spending a lot of time there. In addition, we had consolidated all the underwriting management divisions under my cousin Terry Leavitt’s control and were operating them out of Las Vegas. Unfortunately, Terry developed cancer. While he was undergoing treatment, I managed the UMDs in his stead. For nearly eighteen months, I followed a route, almost weekly, where I would go to Arizona, then to Nevada. Toward the end of Terry’s life,

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whenever I was in Las Vegas, I visited him at his house in the evening. When he died, he was only forty-six. He had young children, and his inevitable passing was hard to watch. One night, he told me that he wasn’t really worried about dying as much as he was worried about what would happen before death. He once expressed how intimate a touch of his wife’s hand had become and how much his illness had caused him to feel his love for her. It was a tender and difficult time. We had a memorable moment saying our last goodbyes to each other just before he died. We had been close. There was no doubt he was dying, we just didn’t know when, so leaving was hard.

Public Affairs Advisory Group

When I returned home to Utah from Washington after the 1984 election campaign with new business responsibilities, I knew I needed to change how I engaged in politics. I needed to remove myself from the day-to-day management of campaigns and begin to guide others in a way that would leverage my instincts, relationships, and skills but take less time. I decided to implement an important lesson I had learned from a conversation with a general in the National Guard. Five years earlier, while attending Redeye Gunner School at Fort Bliss, Texas, I developed a friendship with a colonel who, as a civilian, worked as a management trainer and consultant for Firestone Corporation. His job was to build better management within the various corporate sectors of Firestone. One night I asked him what he considered the most important lesson a young manager could learn. He said, “There is a limit to the amount you can be paid for what you can accomplish on your own. After that, you are paid for what you can get done through others.”

My responsibilities were simply too large for me to accomplish on my own. It was time for me to learn how to get things done through other people. Bud Scruggs, who had been my deputy on the Hatch campaign, had graduated from BYU law school and was working on the Senate Judiciary Committee staff under Orrin. I knew he wanted to get back to Utah. During a trip to Washington, I approached Bud with the idea of forming an entity that could manage my political interests and give me the ability to focus on my business responsibility.

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I proposed a deal that was similar to the arrangements we had with our insurance agencies. I would keep 60 percent of the stock and he would have 40 percent. We would each be paid a salary commensurate to our ability to spend time and make contributions, and we would split profits on the basis of ownership. Bud accepted. We approached Senator Jake Garn and Senator Orrin Hatch about signing on as our foundation clients. This arrangement guaranteed my continued involvement in their future campaigns, and it also developed independently-owned assets that could serve multiple campaigns—what we had acquired or built up for one candidate we could use for another. It was a good arrangement. We named the organization Public Affairs Advisory Group (PAAG). It was Utah’s first political consulting firm. Over time our little firm had a significant impact on Utah politics. We concluded at the very beginning that this was not how we wanted to spend our careers. We wanted to get Orrin and Jake through their respective campaigns, and then we would reevaluate, with the expectation the business would eventually be dismantled. That is exactly what happened. PAAG moved into the Leavitt Group’s office at 1358 South Main in Salt Lake City. The office was at one end of the building and Leavitt Group was at the other. I could literally walk between them in seconds, providing a perfect way for me to integrate my business and political work. Most of all, it meant Bud would be able to manage the day-to-day activities of PAAG, leaving me free to better focus on my family responsibilities and my insurance business.

Becoming a Real Business

About this time, Leavitt Group developed a way of doing a quarterly economic report by inviting Utah’s elite business community to lunch to listen to an update on consumer confidence. It was a way to get Leavitt Group’s name into the larger business community, and, thanks to the attendance of the news media, into households. At one of our early gatherings, we invited Art Laffer to speak. He was a prominent economist who had been on Reagan’s economic council and

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was considered the father of supply-side economics. He drew a big crowd, and many members of the media were in attendance, just as we had planned. After the meeting, he told me he was thinking of running for the U.S. Senate. When he heard what we were doing at PAAG, he asked if we’d help him raise money.

kept telling me to plan on it. I always resisted, good naturedly, of course.

Bud and I put a proposal together and flew to California, where we showed him and his staff the computerized matching approach we had invented with Jake’s campaign. They hired us to do events in about a dozen cities around the country.

I said, without lightness, “Jake, this is your campaign, and you can and will do what you want, but I need to tell you, it’s the wrong thing to do, and it isn’t consistent with what people know about Jake Garn.”

I remember getting in the cab after the meeting to return to the airport. Bud and I looked at each other and just laughed. Bud couldn’t believe they were going to pay us the amount we had proposed. We were now a regional consulting operation, a real business.

There was a long moment of silence and sustained eye contact. Jake said, “You’re right.”

We did a good job on the Laffer campaign. He finished lower on the list of candidates, but we raised a lot of money, nearly $1 million as I remember. We used a system that involved dispatching a person in a city like New York, San Francisco, or Cleveland where Art had contacts. The contacts would be asked to nominate prospects in the same way we had done with Jake’s fundraisers. The duplications were eliminated and then the list was cultivated with a series of letters. The assigned committee member then called to close the deal.

A Good Relationship with Garn

The 1986 Senate race in Utah was hardly a race. The Democrats nominated Craig Oliver, a union leader and party worker. Just as the race was warming up, Jake’s daughter Sue, who had diabetes, required a kidney transplant. Jake was a match and donated his kidney. It was such a powerful story that political issues were hardly part of it. Important things happened during this race. First, my relationship with Jake deepened into a genuine friendship, which is well-illustrated by one experience. For months he had been pressing to purchase an airplane with his campaign funds. Jake was a former Navy pilot and simply obsessed with aviation and owning a plane. I think a couple of senators he knew had purchased things “for use in the campaign.” Jake was actually shopping and

One day, I was dropping off Jake in front of the campaign office and he said to me, “I found a plane.” In that moment, I could tell the conversation had turned from banter to buying.

I went from campaign manager to counselor and friend that day, and it never changed. It created a level of heightened respect between us. I knew that Jake would always do the right thing; he is a man of absolute integrity. He knew I would give him good counsel even when it was hard and awkward. Jake Garn has had a tremendous impact on my life as a mentor. I acknowledge the value gained from both my close observation of Jake as a leader and the opportunities our relationship provided me. The constructive way he dealt with people and his well-defined set of conservative political principles influenced my philosophy and values. I admire the man. Another important development for me was that I became the persona of the campaign. Jake was simply unable to participate during the early stage of the race because of Washington business and the transplant. It meant I got a lot of TV time and built relationships with opinion makers. It was also a good test drive for Bud to become the campaign manager. He did it extremely well and his relationship with Jake grew. At first, Jake was uncomfortable with Bud, mostly because of Bud’s razor-sharp wit and tendency to use it during high-risk moments. For example, on one occasion, Bud accompanied Jake to a fundraiser with the San Francisco banking community. Jake was chair of the Senate Banking Committee and hence, a serious draw. As they walked into the room, the CEO expressed surprise that Jake didn’t have a large group of aides with him. Bud reportedly said, “This is San Francisco. We figured you had enough AIDS.”

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There was an awkward pause and then everybody in the room burst into chuckles. Only Bud could pull that off. Just something about his manner and delivery allowed him to do that. He is smart and has remarkable timing. I had to broker counseling with Bud and Jake a few times, but we got through it, and they ended with a fine friendship.

Saved From Myself

Another political figure whom I had always admired was Howard Baker of Tennessee. He had impressed me during the Watergate hearings, and when he became Senate minority leader I admired his manner and tone. As potential candidates positioned themselves for the 1988 presidential campaign, he opened an exploratory committee. He came to Salt Lake City to do a fundraising event of some sort, and I drove him around while he was in town and told him that I wanted to help. He asked me to call a man named Tom Rath, who had been the attorney general of New Hampshire and who would be his campaign manager there. He also asked me if I’d met Lamar Alexander, the governor of Tennessee. Baker called Lamar Alexander the smartest political figure in the country. He said that Alexander would be his chairman.

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campaign would have been a disruption of major proportion. It may have been a case of having been saved from myself.

Utah Hospital Association

In 1986, while we were running the Garn reelection, we also had the Utah Hospital Association as a client. The association wanted to pass a constitutional amendment that would resolve the question of the tax-exempt status of nonprofit hospitals. Scruggs and I developed a plan, which included lobbying a legislative bill to get the question onto the ballot and then organizing a campaign to get it passed. It was one of the more interesting experiences of my political life. We had nearly unlimited resources because it was so meaningful to Intermountain Healthcare (IHC). Scott Parker, the CEO, made that clear to us during a meeting in his office. He told us that if we lost, he’d make sure everybody in the Utah business community knew we ran the campaign. It was such a departure from his calm and gentle manner, I thought he was joking and I started to chuckle. I looked up at him, and it was clear he was serious.

Bud and I called Rath and arranged to meet with him in Concord. During our meeting, we agreed to write a memo laying out a national organizational construct we had developed using the same approach we had designed for Jake’s fundraising. Our strategy was innovative: we were going to organize a national event centered on an announcement broadcast via satellite—space-age thinking at that point in time. We would use our cultivation system to run events in each state simultaneously. The strategy would create a national impression and raise enough money in one day to qualify the campaign for matching funds.

We dominated the campaign, and it looked like we were going to waltz to victory. With a week to go, we were ahead something like 63–29. At that point, a group of discontented people, led by Steve Pace and financed with a little money from IHC’s forprofit competitors, began running what appeared to be a weak campaign. They held a couple of demonstrations, which were well covered by the media, communicating a simple message that questioned how charitable IHC really was. During the last week of the campaign, we began to feel our lead eroding. It was clear that people simply thought it was wrong to have nonprofit status guaranteed by the constitution. They just didn’t believe our proposal on its merits.

They liked the concept. We were in the early stages of implementation when Baker’s wife got sick, cancer I think, and President Reagan asked Baker to be his chief of staff. Baker decided not to run for president. While our strategy was good, the commitment was enormous. I was relieved, in a way, that it didn’t happen. I had so much going on at the time with a young family, business responsibilities, and other political clients, that a presidential

In the final analysis, we lost the campaign by 1,350 votes. I learned many things from that experience. First, the public is smart. Second, referendum campaigns don’t start until the last ten days. I have wondered many times, if we had laid low and just blown people away in the last ten days, would we have been better off than trying to lay a foundation of logic? The experience also revealed how resentful people can feel toward large institutions.

24 Higher Education 1985 to 1989 • SUSC Board of Trustees; Board of Regents; SUSC to SUU In the summer of 1985, Governor Norm Bangerter appointed me to the Board of Trustees of Southern Utah State College. The board normally selected a chair during the first meeting. Mike Park, who was an incumbent member of the board, had talked to me in advance, encouraging me to run for chair. It seemed like a stretch for a new member, but it also seemed possible.

I began making contacts to see if I could get a majority of the board members to support me. However, Donel Horlocker, a man who became a dear friend, had also decided he would like to be chair. He was from Logan and had been nominated for the board by Gerald Sherratt, president of SUSC. On the day of the election, I had commitments from six of the ten members. If each of the six were

1989 Baccalaureate Service, Southern Utah University, Cedar City. Mike served as chairman of SUU board of trustees.

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firm, it appeared I could win. However, one of the trustees, who had committed to vote for me, did not. As her ballot was passed along the table, I could see that she had voted for Donel. That produced a tie.

We had several additional ballots, but the result remained the same. Finally, a coin flip was suggested, and we agreed. I won the coin toss, and at age thirty-four became chair of the college where I had graduated just six years earlier. I have often said that my path to elected politics may have started with a coin flip; my service as chair began to open doors that contributed to my future successes in elective politics.

An Agenda as Chair

I concluded there were two things I wanted to achieve as chair of SUSC. The first objective involved the System of Higher Education in Utah. Each college and university had a board of trustees, and then there was a Board of Regents that governed the entire system. There was often ambiguity between the two boards, so I contacted the chairs of the other institutional boards of trustees and suggested we ask the Board of Regents to clarify our role. I was subsequently appointed to chair of a work group to make recommendations. Our report was adopted.

“

What university are we talking about?

”

The experience was valuable to me. In the process of leading the panel, I had to read and study the laws and regulations governing higher education in Utah, and it provided me with a clear understanding of how the system of higher education worked. A few years later I became a member of the systemwide Board of Regents—and later governor. The basic understanding I had gained provided extraordinarily useful. The second objective I had as a trustee was more intensely focused on SUSC and Cedar City. I was resolved to grow the size of SUSC into a larger institution.

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Colleges and universities need scale to operate. All the funding formulas from the state were weighted heavily on the size of the student body. Likewise, the value of the degree in many ways is a function of the brand of the college or university. Often, brand follows size. SUSC was undervalued. At that point, SUSC had 1,750 students, and I sensed that the college almost unknown within the general public. So, I formed a strategic planning group. I approached the effort like we were planning a political campaign. I hired Dan Jones to do a poll, which ended up confirming my suspicion. People thought Southern Utah State College was a two-year school in St. George. I asked the SUSC economics department do a study, which showed that growing the school’s enrollment to 4,500 students would create 450 jobs and mean millions to the economy of the area. I knew from other work I had been involved in that the number of students coming into the Utah system of higher education would be increasing dramatically in future years—the course was readily apparent. We simply needed to define the college— give it an identity and brand, then aggressively seek a bigger share of a growing market. I went to the Cedar City Council, the Iron County Commission, and Utah Power & Light Co. where I was a director, and made a convincing case that increasing the college’s enrollment to 4,500 students was the single best economic development opportunity the area had, and that they should devote their promotion dollars to that purpose. They collectively agreed to contribute to a joint media campaign to rebrand SUSC. The college developed a TV ad campaign that was inexpensive but effective. A narrator began by listing accomplishments of the college, like having a championship debate team, then showing the high percentage of its students selected for professional schools. A narrator then said, “What university are we talking about? UCLA? Harvard? No, it’s Southern Utah State College. Four years of quality in Cedar City.” We burned that message in over a year-long period.

H I G H E R E D U C AT I O N

Within a year, we had dramatically changed the image of SUSC, and enrollments began to grow. By fall quarter of 1989, enrollment had increased 22 percent over the previous year’s enrollment—the largest increase of any school in the state. SUSC was well-positioned to capture a quality piece of

the market and did. For example, the average GPA of scholarship applicants was 3.87.1

SUSC—now called Southern Utah University—has grown to over twelve thousand students today. It has continued to focus on its brand as a small, high-quality liberal arts school, and the effort has paid off. Community leaders and people at the university still properly cite that campaign as the key to SUSC’s emergence as an institution. As one of my final contributions as a member of the SUSC Board of Trustees, I helped stop a voter initiative that would have been devastating to higher education. In 1988, a group of anti-tax activists gathered sufficient signatures to put a voter initiative on the ballot to reduce taxes by 25 percent. Because of my experience running political campaigns, the Board of Regents leadership and representatives of the business community asked me to co-lead a campaign against the voter initiative. This campaign is covered elsewhere in this history, so I will only mention that my success in defeating the initiatives built my stature substantially within the higher education community.

Board of Regents

In the summer of 1989, after four years of service on the Board of Trustees for SUSC, I was appointed by Governor Bangerter to the Board of Regents. The board was formed in 1969 under legislation pioneered, prodded, and passed by my father, Dixie Leavitt, when he was majority leader in the Utah Senate. The critical decisions delegated to the board by the legislature make it a prize in the array of governor’s appointments. (The most important of the duties was the power to hire and fire institutional presidents.)

It did not take long for me to be at full speed as a regent. My political experience and direct connections to the legislature and governor, as well as my leadership against the 1988 tax initiatives, all contributed. During the 1989 legislative session, a bill passed creating a statewide strategic planning commission for public education. It was directed to develop a long-term plan to improve public education, meaning kindergarten through twelfth grade. The primary sponsor of the bill was Nolan Karras, the Speaker of the House of Representatives. Nolan was a good friend and political ally of mine. The bill called for members of the Public Education Strategic Planning Commission to be appointed from members of several government organizations, including the Board of Regents. I was chosen to be the Board of Regents representative. Once again, this kind of appointment and experience became an important building block to my emergence as a leader because of the knowledge and relationships I developed in the process. Developing a plan for a statewide system of public education proved to be a challenge; the process was long and included many days of meetings and retreats. I found it fascinating, and it allowed me to learn the dynamics of the education community. I developed relationships of trust with leaders of many of the educational organizations, and it also cultivated my interest in public policy. In fact, the strategic plan became my platform on education.

Achieving University Status

One of the most important things I accomplished as a regent was the transition of SUSC to university status. The proposal had been brewing since the overwhelming success of our campaign to recruit more students to SUSC. Increased enrollments and improved stature within the system had given President Gerald Sherratt a platform. The thesis for the name change was driven by the fact that an institution with the word “university” as part of its name had a significant advantage over students who attended an institution with “college” in its name. Students intuitively knew this difference, and it hurt recruitment as well as

1. Anne O. Leavitt. “Southern Utah State College, 1969–1990.” Southern Utah University: The First 100 Years, A Heritage History., 205

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Southern Utah University campus today

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the value of the diploma. SUSC was a four-year institution offering bachelor’s degrees and master’s degrees in education and business, same as universities. But research showed graduates of a university were more marketable than graduates of a college when competing for jobs. It was clear to me that we wouldn’t get the name-change proposal through the legislature or the Board of Regents without joining forces; we just simply did not have the votes. The institutional councils of Weber State College (which was also eager to be designated to a university) and SUSC first proposed a name change to the regents on October 19, 1989, during our meeting at the College of Eastern Utah in Price. The SUSC institutional council (trustees) submitted a petition to the State Commissioner of Higher Education Wm. Rolfe Kerr and the State Board of Regents for a change in designation from Southern Utah State College to Southern Utah State University.2

“

. . . such a change would cause serious dislocation that will benefit some citizens and not others.

”

K. L. McIff, chair of the SUSC institutional council, emphasized that the request was not based on increase in enrollment but on SUSC’s mission and role, as defined by the Utah System of Higher Education, which mirrored that of other schools across the nation designated as universities. During this meeting, I recommended that a study of the proposal be included within the strategic planning that was then under way. I called for the study to be focused solely on name designation and not on change of mission.3 2. Anne O. Leavitt. “Southern Utah State College, 1969–1990.” Southern Utah University: The First 100 Years, A Heritage History, 205 3. Leavitt, 206 4. “ Utahns Beware: There’s More To A University Than a Title.” Salt Lake Tribune, 30 October 1989 5. Leavitt, 206

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The Salt Lake Tribune described the proposal by the institutional councils as a “bombshell.” 4 It was clearly a divisive issue for many reasons. Public universities protested the proposal on the grounds that it would spread funding too thin, and that the title of university should be reserved for research institutions.5 Dixie College protested that “. . . such a change would cause serious dislocation that will benefit some citizens and not others.”6 Presentations from WSC and SUSC were made during a December meeting, with a vote scheduled for January. In the meantime, my father, who was serving again in the State Senate, introduced a bill to approve the name change. Although technically the support of the regents was not required—the name change needed to be approved only by the legislature—it was clear the support of the Regents would affect the votes of the legislature.7 The January vote of the regents was held at the Salt Lake Community College. Thirteen voting regents were present. Elder Robert Hales was absent, and Evelyn B. Lee, who had recently been appointed to fill Don Holbrook’s seat upon his resignation, couldn’t vote because she had not yet been confirmed by the Senate. This was advantageous to us because it was believed that Lee was opposed to the proposal.8 Commissioner Kerr outlined three options he had identified: 1) reject the name change; 2) approve the name change; 3) more clearly identify the three categories of institutes of higher education by September 1990 to determine criteria to “define . . . the missions of teaching or comprehensive universities, as distinct from the categories of community colleges and of graduate/research universities.” Commissioner Kerr recommended option 3, noting he wasn’t opposed to the name change, 6. Leavitt, 207 7. Leavitt, 209 8.Leavitt, 209 8. Leavitt, 209 9. Leavitt, 209-210

H I G H E R E D U C AT I O N

on the condition that the structure and criteria of Utah’s institutes of higher education be refined. The recommendation was approved and seconded.9 This seemed to me an obvious stalling measure, yet we had the momentum to move forward and resolve the issue. Legislation was already in place to codify the name change; to delay the decision by nearly nine months would kill it.

“

Well, 7 to 6—what kind of a vote is that?

”

I called for a five-minute recess. Of the thirteen regents present, I knew the minds of all except one: Karen Huntsman. She had southern Utah roots, but close ties to the University of Utah. I approached her and said, “It looks to me that it pretty much comes down to you.” Karen thought for a moment, then said, “I’m with you.”10 Chairman Doug Foxley recognized me to make a substitute motion. I told the regents that in spirit, I was in total agreement with the commissioner’s recommendation; however, my proposed substitute motion would provide for the Board to take a position on the name changes. I said it was crucial to continue to have three categories of institutions. I recommended that the Board of Regents request that the legislature and the governor enact legislation, effective January 1, 1991, to change the names of the colleges. The Board would still need to “reaffirm and refine the descriptions and roles of its institutions” by September 30, 1990.11 After a discussion where several regents and presidents spoke for and against my substitute motion, a roll-call vote was called. As the regents’ names were called, they cast their votes. 10. Leavitt, 210 11. Leavitt, 210 12. Leavitt, 211 13. Leavitt, 211 14. Leavitt, 211

When the roll call ended, Chairman Foxley just sat there for a moment. He seemed stunned by the result, then said, “I guess it passes.” The vote was 7 to 6. Dale Zabriskie suggested that, to end the divisiveness, the vote be made unanimously affirmative. The motion received twelve yeas; Ian Cummings voted nay.12 When we presented the copy of the approved substitute motion to the Senate Committee on Higher Education, the chair, Senator Fred Finlinson, who was a strong advocate of the University of Utah, said, “Well, 7 to 6—what kind of a vote is that?” I replied, “It is, Mr. Chairman, in a democracy, a majority. It is the same as though the vote had been thirteen to zero.”13 Senate Bill 119 progressed toward becoming law. My dad, who was a member of the state Senate, carried the bill. He had sponsored the bill to make CSU a four-year institution (SUSC) and now he carried the legislation to make it a university (SUU).14 In the university’s history written by my mother, she wrote that my father received telephone calls and letters from people who objected to the proposed name of Southern Utah State University. “SUSU (soo soo) is a pig call,” one wrote. Some suggested that the acronym SUSU was an invitation for rivals to mock the school. Others felt it confused the institution with Utah State University (USU).15 Although my father waited for agreement from the college on the name, he was running out of time. He called me, and we concluded the name should be Southern Utah University. He added it to the bill and moved the bill forward. It read: AN ACT RELATING TO HIGHER EDUCATION; CHANGING THE NAME OF SOUTHERN UTAH STATE COLLEGE TO SOUTHERN UTAH UNIVERSITY.16 15. Leavitt, 211 16. Leavitt, 211

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It moved from the Senate to the House, where it was joined by the Weber State bill. Both bills passed the House by two-thirds majority. Students, faculty, and staff of the college were sitting in the House gallery, waiting for the bill to be passed. When it did, they erupted into cheers.

Volume three of this history discusses my proposal to create a new kind of university—a competency-based, technology-delivered institution called Western Governors University. My beliefs, ideas, and passion to innovate in higher education were a result of my service as a trustee and regent in the Utah System of Higher Education.

On Valentine’s Day 1990, Governor Bangerter signed the bills into law.17 In total, I spent eight years as part of the governance of Utah’s system of higher education. This experience was not only pivotal in my development of as a leader, but it also informed my thoughts about the future of higher education and the sustainability of the traditional model.

17. Leavitt, 212

Newly contstructed Dixie L. Leavitt Business Building at Southern Utah University.

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25 A Time of Political Turmoil 1987 to 1990 • Utah Election; Advising Governor Bangerter; Dixie for State Senate; Sales Tax Initiatives Throughout 1987 and 1988, the United States suffered a significant recession, producing one of the most difficult economies in many years. Personal incomes of individuals dropped, businesses failed, and state revenues fell dramatically. In Utah, Governor Norman Bangerter and the legislature were forced to make painful decisions including spending cuts and tax increases.

Simultaneously, several concurrent years of higher-than-average moisture caused the Great Salt Lake to flood. To save the airport and freeways, a decision was made to install pumps to redirect the water to the west desert. The proposal was controversial. Complex economic times almost always creates political turbulence, and 1988 was no

Norman H. Bangerter, Utah Governor, 1985-1993

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exception. The state tax increase inflamed the far right of the Republican Party and the governor’s popularity suffered. That year, 1988, was also an election year, and it became a highly consequently election season for me. I led a citizen effort to defeat a voter tax initiative; I advised Governor Bangerter in his reelection efforts; chaired Senator Orrin Hatch’s reelection campaign; and steered a campaign to help my father, Dixie Leavitt, pull a great upset victory in winning back his old State Senate seat.

The Backdrop of the 1988 Utah Election

To understand the election of 1988 in Utah, it is necessary to know about two people. The first was Merrill Cook, the son of a wealthy academic and businessman, Garfield Cook, who attained substantial wealth by building a company that manufactured explosives. Merrill Cook inherited the company, operated it for a time, and then sold it, gaining sufficient liquidity to pursue various elected offices on a self-funded basis.

In 1988, Merrill Cook engaged in two separate but connected political adventures. First, he ran for governor against Norman Bangerter. He also helped finance the gathering of signatures to qualify a voter initiative for rolling back taxes 25 percent across the board. His strategy was clear: if he could get people to vote for the initiative, he could leverage their anger to also vote against Governor Bangerter. The late 1980s was also the heyday of talk radio. Talk radio hosts were national and local celebrities, and they had loyal audiences and the capacity to call their followers to action. In the Utah radio market, Mills Crenshaw was the biggest, brashest, and most articulate radio host—he was a local radio version of national talk radio fame, Rush Limbaugh. He had a half-day program with K-Talk radio in Salt Lake City. Mills Crenshaw could spin a story with the best, and he had developed a huge following in Utah. Merrill Cook and Mills Crenshaw seemed to have a stormy relationship with each other, but their ambitions aligned. Cook wanted to win an election and Mills wanted ratings and influence. Between

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Cook’s money and Crenshaw’s audience, they were a formidable pair. They set out as allies focused on building a political bonfire around politically weakened Governor Norm Bangerter. The Cook and Crenshaw plan was in essence a one in two punch: Cook filed to run against Bangerter for the Republican nomination while Crenshaw used his radio program to relentlessly bash the governor, and then, with help of Cook’s money, they organized three voter initiatives that would roll back taxes and institute a tax credit or voucher for private schools. This team then began organizing rallies at the state capital during the legislature. Crenshaw and Cook would lead their followers in deafening shouts of “no more taxes.” It was a spectacle. Once the tax initiative had qualified for the ballot, the business community and other community minded groups realized what a serious threat the initiative was to the viability of state and local government function. Because of my growing role in the higher education community, and my knowledge of campaigns, it was somewhat natural for the Board of Regents to invite me to organize an effort against the revolt. I agreed with those who approached me that the proposal was wrong and dangerous. I also believed the voter initiative’s soft underbelly was how extreme the measure was. Had the referendum proposed for a 10 percent reduction, it would have had a real chance. However, I believed a 25 percent reduction would ultimately be so dramatic that the ideological middle would simply see it for what it was. I agreed to co-chair the effort to defeat the ballot initiative, along with Pat Shea, a well-defined Democrat who was emerging in a similar way I had. In fact, I think he may have been the chair of the Democratic party at the time. We wrote a campaign plan and began lining up an organization. Vicki Varela, who was the communications and government relations person for the Board of Regents, became the campaign manager. The issue pitted Utah’s political establishment against the leaders of the revolt, who fronted

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a strong anti-government sentiment that had developed during difficult economic times. The stakes were high.

A few days after he announced his candidacy, he and Karen invited me to his office, which was huge and decorated in intense shades of yellow.

I became the public face of what one would consider “the establishment” campaign—the business and mainstream from both political parties. I debated the leaders of the tax revolt on television, on radio, and in dozens of group meetings across the state.

Over lunch, they asked me to manage his campaign. It was clear, however, that little thought had been given to this. He didn’t have a plan to manage his company or his campaign—just a supreme confidence that he’d get it done.

With about a month to go, we began to see the polls move in our favor. We had a large, diverse coalition built around solid economic arguments. In October, we began to feel the weight of our effort cut through the sheer emotion and spirit of anger Crenshaw had stirred up. People indulged themselves with frustration for several months, but when it came time for a decision, with the future of the state on the line, logic ruled. We won a lopsided victory on all three initiatives: Initiative A: Tax and Spending Limitations 39 percent for, and 61 percent against Initiative B: Tax Reductions 38 percent for, and 62 percent against Initiative C: Tax Credit for Private Schools 30 percent for, and 70 percent against

The Governor’s Race of 1988

With a tax revolt brewing and with his political standing at an all-time low, Governor Bangerter was getting pressure from various Republican circles that he should not run for reelection. To his credit, he simply stated he was going to run—no matter what. Out of nowhere, Jon Huntsman Sr., a powerful industrialist and philanthropist, announced he was running for governor, saying his wife Karen had asked him to do it for her and for the state. It shocked the party and the community to the core. It was major drama. Jon Huntsman is a larger-than-life figure in many ways. I had known him since the early 1980s. I was the broker for much of the Huntsman Container insurance account, though at the time of his candidacy, he was not a client, gratefully. That did not spare me difficulty, however.

I told Jon exactly how I felt. I thought Norm was in trouble, and I thought Jon would make an excellent candidate and governor. However, I’d committed to support Norm and had, in fact, signed an endorsement card. (I was advising Norm but was not managing his campaign.) Jon argued that the situation had changed with his entry into the race, and that I should not feel bound. I was emboldened in many ways by conversations that I’d had with Senator Jake Garn. Jon and Jake were the best of friends, and Jake had told me he had made a commitment to Norm. I figured if Jake could say no to his best friend, we’d all go down in flames together. It was an uncomfortable conversation, and I didn’t handle it perfectly. The conversation with Huntsman turned out to be one of the most important events of my political journey, because it created such a strong political loyalty with Norm Bangerter.

Advising Norm

Ted Wilson, the former Salt Lake City mayor, had announced his candidacy on the Democratic side. He was the perfect candidate for them: he was a member of the Church, experienced, likeable, and seen as a moderate. It appeared to be the perfect storm. So, against what seemed like impossible odds, we began to plan a campaign for Norm. I worked as one of his closest campaign advisors. Dave Buhler managed the campaign, and Doug Foxley, who had masterminded the first campaign, was still involved. In addition, I connected them with Vince Breglio, a pollster I had worked with during the 1984 reelection campaign of Ronald Reagan, and Karl Rove, who would go on to fame in the Bush Administration but was at this point still in the

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direct mail business out of Texas. Karl had attended Skyline High School and the University of Utah. He had also helped me with campaigns for Orrin Hatch.

“

Are you sitting down? Huntsman is out.

”

I remember having a meeting at the mansion with Norm. I told him candidly that the first task was to raise some money, and that he had to be personally involved in the asking, which he hadn’t done in his first campaign. He needed to invite people for direct, one-on-one discussions at the mansion and put the squeeze on them. We worked out a fundraising plan, the governor agreed to it, and, to his credit, began to execute it with success. As he did, his confidence and resolve grew. We then set about developing a strategy to beat Huntsman. It was going to be a tough campaign. Given the governor’s unpopularity and Huntsman’s status, we had to find a way to level the playing field. Huntsman had taken a position on only one issue: he said publicly that he would reverse the non-deductibility of the federal income tax. (It was one of the provisions in the tax increase that the legislature had passed during the previous session.) Prior to getting in the race, Huntsman said publicly at a fundraiser he (Huntsman) had held at this office for Bangerter that the provision cost him $600,000 personally. We were preparing to frame up a race that pitted a common man against a rich guy looking to give himself and the elite a tax break at the expense of struggling schools. It wasn’t ideal, but at least it was an argument. There were starting to be lots of defectors and the whole campaign felt like an exercise in futile loyalty. One of the few defectors from Bangerter to Huntsman was Richard Eyre, who had been cultivating a relationship with the governor. He had actually written a campaign plan that used research the governor had paid for. Later, the Bangerter campaign found out that Eyre had made the plan available to Huntsman. It was so disloyal that it created

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a level of contempt for Richard Eyre, which was motivation for Bangerter to endorse my candidacy for governor pre-primary over Eyre four years later. Meanwhile, the media had started to take the shine off Jon Huntsman, like it does any white knight. An investigative reporter named Rick Shenkman, who went on to do national work, did a series of reports on an ugly dispute the Huntsmans had with the Olson Egg organization—Jon’s first employer when he graduated from college. The Olsons had a family relationship with the Huntsmans, but this really got ugly, and the Olsons were not only willing but anxious to reveal Jon’s imperfections. About a month after Jon announced he would run, we had a meeting to show the governor our strategy to beat Huntsman. I expected the meeting to be difficult, and that going on the attack would be uncomfortable for him—it was for me. However, the meeting went smoothly, and the governor seemed quite accepting—too accepting, I thought. About 10 p.m. that night, I got an explanation. The governor called me at home and said, “Are you sitting down? Huntsman is out. He’ll announce it at 10 a.m. tomorrow.” It was a stunning development and again, out of the blue. Apparently, Huntsman called Norm and asked him to go for a ride with him alone—no security. They drove to the parking lot of a church behind the Capitol building and talked for nearly two hours. Jon said he was willing to drop out and agreed to become the state’s economic development ambassador to carry out some of the goals he had for the state. I still don’t know the whole story, but it appeared to me that the combination of the criticism and the reality of what running would do to his business had begun to settle in, and he decided he’d made a mistake that needed to be reversed. After Huntsman got out, perhaps not confident he could secure enough convention votes to make it to a primary ballot, Merrill Cook decided to run against Norm as an Independent. There was a huge amount of drama at the state convention with the tax protestors showing up and essentially demanding that Merrill Cook be given the opportunity

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to speak. For a brief time, there were discussions about Merrill being allowed to be a candidate at the convention for the Republican nomination, but that was nixed. It was a wild day. Jake Garn went out and tried to calm the crowd, and it got ugly with him. I was there working primarily with my dad’s race for state senate, but I got deeply involved that day in helping to manage events behind the scenes. In the end, Bangerter won the Republican nomination, but was polling 40 points behind the Democrat candidate Ted Wilson. As the general election period started, it appeared the governorship would return to the Democrat hands it had been in for twenty years prior to Governor Bangerter.

The 1988 General Election

As the general election approached, I continued to press Dave Buhler, the Bangerter campaign manager to link the race with Wilson to the tax initiative. I believed the tax initiatives were beginning to fade. I reasoned that there was strong bipartisan support against the tax initiative, and that it was nearly impossible for the Wilson campaign to say, “You should vote against Norm Bangerter, but support the policies he espoused.”

Buhler was reluctant to link Governor Bangerter to Wilson too closely because he needed to hold the Republican base. However, we were able arrange a joint news conference between Ted Wilson and Governor Bangerter where they both indicated their opposition to the three tax initiatives. Not only did it discredit Merrill Cook and the anti-tax group, it also put Ted Wilson in an awkward political position. With about three weeks to go, the tax initiatives began to close, and, almost on cue, the governor began to close the gap. Norm was tenacious and campaigned with courage and conviction. I was impressed with how hard he worked. Late into election night, I sat in the governor’s suite at Little America, working a calculator to tally where the votes were coming from and what we needed to win. We won the tax initiatives convincingly, and at 2 a.m., with the last group of votes, Norm Bangerter won a narrow, three-way race: Bangerter—40 percent, Wilson—38 percent, and Cook—21 percent. What a comeback it was.

Norm’s victory was among the most rewarding moments I have had in politics. It was a wonderful demonstration that people often stick with those who stand by their principles and defend decisions they have made. My admiration of Norman Bangerter is high because of what I learned from him in that election.

Dixie Leavitt for State Senate 1988

During the same election cycle, yet another political drama unfolded in southern Utah—this one involving my father. For fourteen years, Dixie Leavitt had represented southern Utah first in the state House of Representatives and then the State Senate. In 1976 Dixie ran for governor of Utah, and in the process, was not able to run for reelection in the Senate, thereby giving up his seat. In the twelve years since he had left politics, St. George had grown greatly and now dominated the Senate district. Ivan Matheson, the incumbent from Iron County, had decided not to run and the people from Cedar City talked Dixie into running again. People from St. George were openly saying that it was their turn to have someone from St. George represent the area and were determined to win. Their candidate was a young county commissioner named Jim Eardley, and the community leadership was strongly behind him. No Democrat had filed, so the September primary was the whole race. As I look back on my time managing election campaigns, I think this campaign may have been the most perfectly executed plan I had been involved in. Any candidate from Washington County would have a huge numerical advantage. The race appeared to be impossible to win. We devised two alternative strategies to win— both long shots. Our first and best opportunity was to get 70 percent of the votes at the convention and win it there. If that failed, we had to win 20 percent in Washington County, 75 percent in Kane and Garfield counties, as well as turn out an enormous

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1 Jon Huntsman Sr. and Governor Norm Bangerter 2 Ronald Reagan and president elect, George H. W. Bush 3 Ted Wilson, Democratic candidate, 1988 governor’s race

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4 Merrill Cook, Independant candidate, 1988 governor’s race 5 Dixie Leavitt, State Senate Candidate, 1988

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percentage of the people in Iron County. In essence, we had to beat them with basics. I felt a lot of pressure on this campaign. For one thing, it was my father. We had lost the 1976 campaign with dignity and grace, but I had a feeling that I had been part of that failure and I didn’t want Dad’s political career to end that way. I honestly believed Dad was the best person to represent the area, and I was also intuitively offended by the “it’s-our-turn” mentality displayed by the St. George folks, most of whom were our friends. We turned the Leavitt Group into a campaign office. I don’t think there has been, before or since, a campaign with more sophistication at the Utah State Senate level. The level of data processing and computer power that we had available was well beyond what any campaign in the 1980s had. We used Leavitt Group IT systems. We had a full-time campaign manager, Alan Jones, and a staff of fulltime interns at SUU. (The program put the interns in touch with some of the best political minds in the country.) We made a strategic decision to put 80 percent of our resources—meaning time and money—into the Washington County area. We knew that getting our 20 percent-plus there was the hardest and most essential task. If we were to execute on our first opportunity by winning at the convention, we’d have to take them by surprise. We pulled off the surprise by organizing about fifty separate elections in Washington County’s party caucuses. We chose candidates, trained them, and supported them with a mail campaign and phone banks. When the dust cleared, we had elected an unbelievable number of people. We had the votes to win in the convention the morning after, if we could just hold them. In the weeks between the caucuses and the state convention, the Eardley people became aware of their situation and admitted it internally. Then they did an extremely clever thing: they shifted their strategy to admitting their situation and pleading with the public to give the people a chance. Eardley’s people used this line: “Look, Dixie Leavitt packed the Washington County mass meetings and elected enough people to win at the

state convention. There is no Democrat in the general election, and that means that the populace will never get a chance to vote on it. That’s unfair. We’re not asking you to vote for Eardley in the primary, but we’re asking you to let the people vote on this— not just a packed convention.” The strategy worked. We just couldn’t hold our own people, who thought they were putting fairness above process. You have to admire that, but it was a devastating experience, especially when Eardley got more votes at the convention than we did. We had to take on the more difficult strategy. We spent the majority of our time in Washington County, advertising hard and, frankly, keeping Eardley there also. At the same time, we were targeting the other counties with direct mail and phone banks, identifying our voters everywhere, and tracking the race with polls. It was a powerful organization compared to what you normally see in a race like that.

A Major Break

Near the end of the campaign, we got a major break. On the Thursday before the Tuesday primary, the Eardley campaign took out an ad in the Spectrum newspaper. The headline message was: “It’s St. George’s turn.” What they didn’t anticipate was the impact it would have in Cedar City when we finished exploiting it. We made copies of the ad and went door-todoor in Cedar City. “Did you see this? St. George residents think they deserve this instead of Cedar City.” It was like gasoline on a fire. On Election Day, we had poll watchers at every Cedar City voting place, we had phone banks in the other counties and called only our supporters in Washington County. We got sound trucks going from seven in the morning until eight at night. It was a massive turn-out effort—the best I’ve ever been involved in. That night we waited for the results at the Leavitt Group offices with serious nervousness. Slowly, the results came in, zigzagging back and forth. We were waiting for the last 10 percent to come in from around the district. We had been comparing our actual results with our goals and thus far we had

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been on target. We knew there was a big turnout in Cedar City, but nobody knew how big. About 10:30 p.m., Alan Jones, who had been on the third floor working the phones to see what he could find out, came bounding down the stairs, yelling at the top of his lungs, “We won! We won!” He had results from a couple of key areas that made it clear our strategy had worked. We met our targets in Washington County, Kane County, and Garfield County, but the key was an unthinkably high turnout in Cedar City. This needs to be verified, but it was near 70 percent turnout in Iron County, of which we got nearly 90 percent of the votes. The oversized turnout and massive percentage of Leavitt voters had offset Eardley’s nearly impossible advantage. What a great victory tactically and emotionally. The 1988 campaign season was a remarkable series of triumphs for Public Affairs Advisory Group (the consulting business I owned alongside Bud Scruggs) and me personally. Norm Bangerter won reelection; the anti-tax initiative I led won a come-from-behind victory; Orrin Hatch won reelection; my dad won. It was another clean sweep.

The 1990 Tax Initiative on Sales Tax

In 1990, Merrill Cook and his band of rebels once again drummed up enough signatures to put a repeal of the sales tax on food on the ballot. It was an idea that would have created problems that nobody was prepared to solve, but it was very appealing from a populace point of view. Once again, the education community called on me to lead the campaign against the proposal. We

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basically reassembled the team from two years before and went at it. Once again, we started out behind and slowly eroded the credibility of the opposition’s argument by demonstrating the damage it would do to education, public safety, and the poor. We won 56 percent to 44 percent. Like the other political campaigns I had been involved in over the years, the tax initiatives were profound learning experiences. The debate was not about one issue; in each case, the debate was about the direction of the state. The referendum sponsors attacked on every front. We debated education, health care, prisons, welfare, highways, and the meaning of the constitution. These were public policy free-for-alls, and I was put on a steep learning curve to learn the facts and arguments. I had access to great briefings, because people were so concerned about the complete impunity adopted by the sponsors of the referendum. They had no facts but lots of emotion. Though it never occurred to me at the time, one could not have invented a better training experience for a non-officeholder to run for governor.

26 Time-Out on Partisan Politics Dissolving PAAG; The Olympic Bid; Utah Power & Light Co. Board of Directors; Westin's Birth; Miscarriage After the 1988 elections, I was exhausted— physically and politically. The constant demands of my political business weighed over my ongoing church, family, and insurance business responsibilities. Once again, I needed to reevaluate the role of politics in my life. Bud Scruggs, my business partner, was feeling the same way. It was time to move on to other things in our lives. I could feel Bud was particularly anxious to move into his own light and out of the shadow I cast as his older partner. I understood, but found the process a little painful. There were never harsh interactions between us, but there were pressures. At one point, he proposed we change our relationship from 60-40 to 50-50. The truth is, he was doing more than his share of the work for Public Advisory Board (PAAG) at that point. In an interaction I regret, I resisted his proposal, saying that all the business in the firm was there because of our clients’ confidence in me, and that his salary was substantially higher than mine anyways. We were both feeling underappreciated by the other. In retrospect, I would have handled it differently. Mike, UP&L Board Member. Photo courtesy of The Salt Lake Tribune

We had always planned to end operations after the 1988 election, and that’s what happened. Running PAAG was a positive

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experience for both of us, but when it was time to move on, we did. Bud accepted the position of Governor Bangerter’s chief of staff—a great choice for both of them. As the new Bangerter administration began to take shape, aside from chairing the Governor’s Gala committee, I was not deeply involved. I started directing more of my attention to my family and Leavitt Group. However, there were circumstances that kept creating political opportunities for me.

The Olympic Bid

The community was getting energized about an Olympic bid. Tom Welch and Jim Jardine, who were in charge of the bid, kept calling me for strategic help. Ultimately, they concluded legislative action was necessary to build facilities, giving Salt Lake City a leg-up in the competition to become the U.S. bid city. We spent a fair amount of time helping to formulate a package for a $59 million bond to be paid back to the state if Salt Lake City won the Games bid. I was a secondary player in the pursuit of legislation; I was simply too tired and busy to do otherwise. In the end, the legislature allowed an advisory vote of the people and made the issuance of bonds contingent upon the people approving it. As spring approached and Tom Welch, Spence Eccles, Fred Ball, Jim Jardine—the Chamber of Commerce– types of the day—started creating a campaign, I was asked to handle it. I declined; I just needed to focus on other things. They then asked Vicki Varela, who had managed the anti-tax initiative, to take a leave of absence from the Board of Regents to manage the effort. They also contracted with Richard Eyre to write a campaign plan, which he agreed to do if he was paid. He said he would donate the fee back to the Olympic bid committee, saying he didn’t want to cheapen his services by doing the project pro bono. Somehow Richard’s plan didn’t work out, so a few months later, I ended up drafting a plan for Vicki that became the document they followed. Other than some periodic interactions with Vicki, advising her and others, that was essentially the limit of my involvement in getting the initiative passed.

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Pulling Me Back into Politics

However resolved I was to stay out of the political fray for a while, it didn’t last long. A series of events continued to pull me into the mix.

I was invited to join the board of directors of Utah Power & Light Co. during the spring of 1988. Utah Power was a New York Stock Exchange–listed company that operated in Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming. The company was locked in a bitter fight to keep control of the power franchise in Cedar City. The fight to go to municipal power was led by Carl Palmer, a former Cedar City resident and distant cousin of mine through the Leavitt line. It was a fight that his father had fought years ago. It formed a deep divide, which had been the catalyst for Jack Sawyers, my former football coach, in his defeat of Kerry Jones, the incumbent Cedar City mayor. Utah Power had retained a consultant by the name of Marlin Barrett to identify candidates for the board, and as best as I can tell, the board members concluded they needed somebody that would be seen as a Cedar City person and also add political influence. So, I was asked to be a board member. Despite my young age, he considered me to be a good prospect. I was in my early thirties and one of the youngest New York Stock Exchange company directors in the country at the time.

Issues Arise

When I had served for a couple of months, I received a three-inch-thick administrative action by the Division of Public Utilities (DPU) against the company and its coal mining operations, alleging dishonesty and inefficiency. The complaint alleged $168 million in damages to ratepayers. The company’s legal counsel and officers assured the directors that this was an irresponsible and inaccurate charge that they could deal with. I took the complaint with me to Newton for Thanksgiving with Jackie’s family and read it cover to cover. I was horrified by what I read. When I returned home, I called three other directors I knew well: Chase Peterson, Don Wheeler, and Deedee Corradini. I asked if they had read it. None had. I told them in blunt terms that if a fraction of it was true, Utah Power had trouble.

T I M E - O U T O N PA R T I S A N P O L I T I C S

What then ensued was a whirlwind of meetings among directors. The situation began to reveal serious problems. First, there was a clear division within the company’s management rank. Inside the company there were supporters of the chief executive, Jim Taylor, and another team that backed the general counsel, Sid Baucum. The factions had developed out of a long-time rivalry for the CEO’s chair, which Taylor won, largely because Baucum had been publicly tainted during a political scandal in which a lawyer/lobbyist went to jail for funneling political contributions on behalf of the company. The second problem was that the board of directors had been strategically stacked with four inside directors (those employed by Utah Power as officers) who had carefully co-opted a couple of outsiders who voted with them. The one thing that united the two factions was any hint of outsider control or a takeover by another company. The third problem was that there was substance to the claims of the DPU. The mines had operated under an agreement with Savage Brothers—a trucking company from Spanish Fork, run by people who were not only friends of mine but also clients. The Savage Brothers were good truckers, but not mine operators. The complaint made the point that the mines had been operated at a cost higher than if the company had run them directly. They also documented relationships that were not criminal, but somewhat questionable. I don’t remember all the particulars but clearly the public outcry and the ensuing damage to the company’s reputation and business focus was enormous; the company was consumed by the problem. As directors, we felt a need to become deeply involved.

Solutions

A period of intense intrigue and infighting began. It became so serious that as directors we saw the need to make bold moves to clear the decks, reorganize the company, and move it forward.

The outside directors began to meet privately and hired separate counsel. We decided to change the CEO, because it was clear Taylor couldn’t pull it back together given the nature of the circumstances. We also felt Baucum needed to go.

Taylor was a fine person, and under normal conditions, could have run the company. He had been a career employee who knew the operation from top to bottom. Baucum, a brilliant lawyer who knew the utility industry as well as any executive in the country, was likely a more skilled player than Taylor, but was eliminated from the presidency of the company by the political scandal. We had a meeting at Deedee Corradini’s office with the outside directors, where the decision was made that we would ask Taylor to resign and Baucum to announce his resignation within the next six months. We asked a retired executive named Frank Davis to return and become CEO. He served well for the next couple of years. D u r i n g the time in which this was unfolding, the board had conducted a strategic study with consultants out of New York on our relative position in the marketplace. The study clearly indicated that Utah Power was disadvantaged

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regionally by its complete reliance on coal. There was also a movement within the industry for consolidation, so the board had begun to look at various scenarios of merger or acquisition.

For a while, I was working nearly full-time on the merger. I recruited my friend Eddie Mahe to help the company develop a strategy and message. It took almost nine months, but we got it done.

We knew that with this complaint, controversy, and change in leadership, Utah Power was going to be targeted by other companies. I led an effort advocating an aggressive move to settle the DPU suit. I was appointed by my colleagues with authority to privately approach the state to settle. That led to a series of dramatic events that ultimately resulted in the settlement of the suit.

PacifiCorp had agreed to keep three Utah directors as a condition of the merger. I was chosen as one of them, along with Don Wheeler and Richard Edgley.

The inside directors had retained a renowned attorney named Dan Berman to represent the company in the complaint. In a way that was completely consistent with his best interest, Berman fought hard to scare us out of settlement by warning us of dire consequences and the prospect of personal liability. It was fascinating to watch how some of the directors were intimated by his insistence. One abstained from voting and said he didn’t want to be personally liable.

The Merger

Not surprisingly, the events attracted a proposal from PacifiCorp. The initial contact came from Stan Hathaway (the former governor of Wyoming) to Cal Rampton, (the former governor of Utah). Cal then made contact with Utah Power & Light Co. and negotiations began. The inside directors were dead set against the idea of a merger. However, it was hard not to look at it as an interesting idea for Utah Power shareholders. I remember clearly the moment when the momentum changed; it was when Don Wheeler said, “I have to admit this looks good enough to me that I think we have an ethical obligation to take it seriously.” He expressed my feelings and apparently the thoughts of others. I became a key player in selling the merger of the company to the public and regulators. I had developed a lot of credibility with regulators because of the DPU suit settlement, and I was well known within the Bangerter Administration. There were many obstacles to overcome with the public and stockholders, not to mention the five states that had to approve it.

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My service on the board was clearly a turning point for me, as it was the first time I emerged as a significant leader in a corporate setting of this size. The move required me to think on a different scale. I remained a director of PacifiCorp until 1992, when I received the Republican nomination for governor. There were lots of dramas and interesting moments during my service on that board. I remember one day during a flight from Portland, Don Wheeler and I confided in each other that we would have served on the board for nothing because it was so interesting. However, the money made a lot of difference to a young family. I must say that I believe the way the board of directors of Utah Power responded to the crisis of the DPU was exactly the way responsible directors should act. It’s a case study that has never been properly examined. We took charge on behalf of stockholders and created more than one billion dollars of stockholder value. Although things happened later with PacifiCorp that I don’t think necessarily represented the same standard, I feel great about the outcome for UP&L shareholders.

Westin Smith Leavitt

During the summer of 1989, Jackie played the role of Nellie Forbush, the lead character in the Murray Community Theater’s production of South Pacific. The role required singing and dancing, including a cartwheel. Jackie was thirty-nine, though no one in the audience would have known. She looked to be in her mid-twenties. In addition, she was in the early stages of pregnancy with our fifth child, Westin. As we got closer to the mid-February 1990 delivery date, Jackie was no longer doing cartwheels. In fact, the doctor recommended Jackie spend a

significant part of her day resting during the last month of her pregnancy because she was developing signs of toxemia. Her blood pressure and protein count were elevated. Both Jackie and I were extremely concerned about the potential for another toxemia episode. The experience with Anne Marie had been traumatic for both of us, and we didn’t want to take any chances. We did everything we could to minimize her activity. However, with a family of four children, that was nearly impossible. LaVon Gibb again offered to help. She had given Jackie so much aid before, so knowing LaVon would be there was a tremendous relief.

The Birth

On the fifteenth of February, the decision was made to induce labor. LaVon checked Jackie’s blood pressure the night before and agreed to pick her up the next morning at 5:45 a.m. I got the children off to school and took Anne Marie to a friend’s home. When they got to LDS hospital, Jackie learned that her protein levels had skyrocketed overnight. Jackie began to have chills and severe shivering; her vision deteriorated, and she saw spots. An understandable anxiety began to take over. LaVon told Jackie, “If you were on Laird Avenue, I’d be worried about you, but you’ll be all right here.” Jackie received magnesium to prevent convulsions, and she began to normalize. As the induced labor began, Jackie was monitored every few minutes for blood pressure. I was there during the entire twelve hours as the contractions became steadily more intense and frequent. Late in the afternoon, Jackie was given an epidural to block the pain. Jackie told me, “The baby just came down.” I rushed to get LaVon and Dr. Nelson, who got there just in time. At 6:07 p.m., Westin was born.

Westin Leavitt

Because of the potential of meconium, as soon as he was born, LaVon took Westin to be checked to make sure he didn’t have any in his lungs. I stayed with Jackie. When they returned, I took Westin, wrapped in a warm little blanket and wearing a

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little cloth cap, off to have his first bath. As soon as I got him out of the bath, ready to put his first diaper on, he demonstrated his urinary track was developed and functioning just fine by wetting all over my white shirt.

“

It’s a good feeling to know all our children are here safely.

”

When he was bathed and warm again, wrapped in a blanket, I sat down in a rocking chair and fed him a bottle of milk. He was really hungry. It became evident when he was born that, during the last month, he hadn’t been getting enough nourishment to put on weight. He weighed only 5 lbs, 14 oz. The cord had been constricted in an odd way. When I got back to the room, Jackie was happy to have my assurance everything was OK with the baby. She needed to rest. I went home to answer the questions of four children and to make the happy calls to family and friends. As we drove home from the hospital with Westin, I said to Jackie, “It’s a good feeling to know all our children are here safely.”

The Final Pregnancy

A year and a half later, Jackie became pregnant again. The possibility of another child was received as joyous news to our family, but there is no question it was demanding news too. I had already committed myself to run for governor, Jackie had just turned forty, and we already had five children. Jackie’s pregnancy went reasonably well. At the beginning of the seventh month, she was scheduled to have an ultrasound for the first time. We would also learn the gender of the new baby. Jackie and I decided to make a family event of it by taking all the children to the appointment so they could share in the excitement.

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As the technician applied the ultrasound equipment to Jackie, it was evident something had gone terribly wrong with the pregnancy. The baby’s heart was not beating; it had apparently died in the previous few hours. It was a devastating moment for our family. We went from happy anticipation to shocked grief in just a matter of seconds, all standing at the bedside together. I quickly moved the children to another room where I could console them. Our doctor, John Nelson, was called so we could consult with him. Over the next few days we waited through the hard process of the baby’s stillborn birth, which occurred November 23, 1991. It was a hard birth, especially knowing the outcome was already determined. Our baby was a little boy. I was able to hold him for some time despite his lifelessness; it created a lasting memory and bond. The experience required Jackie and I to confront some questions about the nature of life and our eternal relationship to this little person. We concluded to consider him a member of our family and to hope we will have an opportunity for association later. For our part, we named the child Ryan. We held a graveside service on a gray, snowy day in Newton where we laid his body to rest next to Jackie’s grandmother, Nana. The three years leading up to my entry into public service were a good period of my life. I was involved in politics but not partisan politics. I was contributing to the community, raising my family, and working hard at Leavitt Group. And then a telephone call from my friend Jake Garn set off a series of events that changed the direction of my life.

27 A Fire in My Belly Phone Call from Jake Garn; Potential Senate Run

Bud Scruggs and I closed Public Affairs Advisory Group in January 1989. The decision marked an effort to start simplifying my life. Managing campaigns every two years had taken a toll. Jackie’s and my children were young; I was serving in the Church; Leavitt Group was expanding steadily and needed my full attention. I was also serving on the Board of Trustees at SUU and the board of Utah Power & Light Co. When an intense political campaign was added to the mix, it was exhausting. I was tired and wanted a simpler life.

Norm Bangerter

Mike Leavitt

My commitment was immediately challenged. President-elect George H. W. Bush nominated former Senator John Tower of Texas to the position of secretary of defense. Tower entered the Senate confirmation hearings with impressive credentials. In the days following his appointment, however, it was clear Tower’s nomination was in trouble. His close ties to defense contractors and accusations of womanizing and alcoholism began to overwhelm the strength of his credentials, sending Tower on his way to be becoming only the ninth Cabinet

Jake Garn

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nominee, and the first Cabinet nominee of an incoming president, to be rejected by the Senate.

The Phone Call

A few days before Christmas, I got a phone call from Senator Jake Garn, asking me to meet with him at his condominium in Park City. He told me that two names were on the shortlist for the new secretary of defense—Dick Cheney, who at the time was the representative for Wyoming and the House minority whip, and Jake Garn. Jake told me if he were to be nominated, things would happen quickly, and he needed to be thinking about who his replacement would be. He wanted me to finish his term in the Senate. The Utah Constitution states that if a U.S. senator is unable to fulfill his or her term, the governor appoints a replacement. Jake said he had spoken with Governor Norm Bangerter, and that while he hadn’t firmly agreed to it, Jake felt confident he would appoint me. I left Jake’s condo feeling enormously flattered; I had not anticipated a conversation like the one we had. Driving down Emigration Canyon toward home, I was excited by the prospect of service as a senator for Utah. But when I told Jackie, she was not at all happy. I tried to reason with her, and explain what an honor this was. Still, she was not impressed. “Why would you foul up a life as good as the one we have?” she asked.

Despite the appeal of a more evenly paced life, I couldn’t see how it was possible to turn down an opportunity like the proposition Jake had articulated. Jackie was clear on how she felt about Jake’s request, and I didn’t press the matter. I concluded there was no reason to put Jackie through more worry unless Jake was nominated. Not long after my discussion with Jake, the Tower nomination was rejected by the Senate. Dick Cheney was nominated and later confirmed as secretary of defense in March 1989. Despite being a false alarm, Jake’s call held significance for me because it was the first time I seriously considered my prospects as a candidate for political office.

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From Campaigns to Public Policy

The next year was a period of quasi normality, and my interests began to revolve around public policy rather than getting people elected. Governor Bangerter elevated me from the SUU Board of Trustees to service on the higher education systems Board of Regents. I successfully lead the opposition to another voter initiative to remove the sales tax from food. I also became deeply involved in public education through membership on the Education Strategic Planning Task Force. I engaged in public lands debates—an unrelenting issue in Utah—by serving on the Coalition for Utah’s Future, a group organized by Scott Matheson, former governor of Utah, to take on important issues.

“

Why would you foul up a life as good as the one we have?

”

In the late summer of 1990, I was invited by Governor Bangerter to attend a meeting at the Governor’s Mansion. Seated around the table in the small dining room were Governor Bangerter and a group of advisers. The subject of the meeting was whether Norm should seek a third term in 1992. I assumed the governor wanted to make up his mind early to keep any other candidates from getting serious organizational traction. When he posed the question of running for a third term, everyone around the table said he should. Everyone, that is, but me. “I’ll support you if you run, and I will do everything I can to ensure your success,” I said. “However, I don’t sense that you have the fire in your belly for another term.” I went on to say that he had won a hard victory in his reelection, and as the economy improved, his success would be assured. However, my sense was that Utahns would likely view two terms in office as judicious and stable—even somewhat obligatory— but three terms would be harder to pull off. (I learned that to be true in a highly personal way later.)

A F I R E I N M Y B E L LY

I don’t remember all that I said, and I felt uneasy saying it, having no idea at that point that I would be the one to replace him. At the time I just thought he should get straight advice. I’m a little embarrassed about the conversation now as I think about how it must have looked to others. My political opportunities seemed more evident to others than they did to me—I honestly felt that I was in a period of political sabbatical. Dan Jones later told me that Governor Bangerter thought I would run for something in 1992; Norm had more insight into my future than I did at that point. Later that fall, Bud Scruggs and I met in the cafeteria of the Salt Lake Temple after a session. It had been a while since I had seen Bud. He had gone from PAAG to being Governor Bangerter’s chief of staff, and I wanted to catch up with him. Bud told me he thought I should run for governor, and that if I agreed, I needed to start making noises that I was interested. I told him I intended to stay out of politics, that I was concentrating on other things. I told him how much I was enjoying my life. At the end of the conversation, he said, “If you decide to do it, I want you to remember that right here in the Salt Lake Temple, I was the first one to suggest it and say I’d support you.” We had a good laugh over it, but the fact that I still remember the conversation would indicate it had some impact on my decision process. On November 29, 1990, the governor called a press conference and invited members of the media to assemble in the board room in the state Capitol. The governor, surrounded by family and friends, took his place behind the lectern and announced he wouldn’t seek a third term. He said he was in good health and planned to return to his construction business, and he ended any speculation he might seek another political office. He stated further: As you are all aware, we did not pick the easiest years to preside over the state. We have had some difficult times. We have not

concentrated on image or on protecting our popularity in the polls. We have taken the problems as they came—head-on—and we proposed the best solutions we knew—regardless of political consequences. This will not change. I want to go down in history as the governor who didn’t spend eight years worrying about how he would go down in history. Many of my positions and programs have been perceived in the beginning as lacking the support of the people. But every attempt to reverse those decisions has been turned back by the people. And I will always be grateful for their support in difficult times.1 The Deseret News, which at that time was an evening paper, ran a story written by political editor Bob Bernick Jr., announcing the governor’s decision. Bernick included a list of thirteen men who could be governor. I was on the list, along with Palmer DePaulis, a Democrat and mayor of Salt Lake City; Val Oveson, Norm’s lieutenant governor; Richard Eyre, a Republican and a well-known writer; Nolan Karras, Republican, speaker of the Utah House; Merrill Cook, Salt Lake businessman and former Independent candidate for governor; Scott Matheson Jr., Democrat and University of Utah law professor; Steve Studdert, Republican and former presidential adviser; Rep. Jim Hansen, Republican congressman from the First District; Jim Davis, Democrat, mayor of South Salt Lake; Paul Van Dam, Democrat, Utah attorney general; Joe Jenkins, Republican, Provo mayor; Dale Carpenter, Democrat, head of economic development for former Governor Scott Matheson and former gubernatorial candidate.2 Bernick had simply assumed I might run, because at that stage, I wasn’t considering it and had done nothing to indicate I might enter the race.

A Second Call from Senator Jake Garn

Just before Christmas, and few weeks after Governor Bangerter’s announcement, I got another call from Jake Garn. He told me that he, too, had decided he was not going to seek another term in the Senate and suggested I think about running for his seat.

1. Bob Bernick, Jr. “No Third Term For Bangerter.” Deseret News. 29 November 1990. 2. Bob Bernick Jr. “No Third Term For Bangerter.”

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He told me that with a couple months’ advance notice, I could be ready to announce my candidacy, and he could announce his retirement. He also promised he would support me. I have always admired Jake, and he has become a great friend. Having him initiate such a conversation was a powerful event in my life. I knew it demanded serious thought. I remember, quite clearly, introducing the topic to Jackie during our drive from Salt Lake to Cedar City for Christmas. It was an uncomfortable conversation; she was still concerned. I knew she was right in her concern, but I found the idea so alluring. After a couple of hours of conversation followed by a long silence, she repeated her point about not understanding why I would wreck a good life. “But I don’t want to be the reason you look back on a decision with regret,” she said. During the Christmas holiday in Cedar City, I spent time talking about Jake’s suggestion with my extended family. A decision to run for office would obviously have a big impact on them as well. Dane, for one, would have to step up and manage the business. No conclusion was reached while we were there, other than it was an opportunity of enough importance that I needed to give it serious consideration.

“

But I don’t want to be the reason you look back on a decision with regret.

”

In January 1991, Dan conducted a second survey. He asked 154 Utah opinion leaders their favorable or unfavorable impressions of certain individuals. The results were as follows: Mike Leavitt, 45 percent favorable—32 percent unfavorable; Richard Eyre, 17 percent favorable—44 percent unfavorable; Nolan Karras, 62 percent favorable—18 percent unfavorable; Val Oveson, 63 percent favorable—30 percent unfavorable; Joe Cannon, 51 percent favorable—30 percent unfavorable. I was reasonably well-known among opinion leaders but had my detractors. After the holidays, I went into a serious decision-making process of whether I should run for the U.S. Senate. I wrote a memo to myself in which I laid out four steps:

Due diligence required I go to Washington so I could get a better sense of the opportunity. I needed to understand what life would be like and test the political realities. I asked Dane to go with me.

1. Evaluate the decision in every way. I listed a series of matters that could have a bearing on my conclusion: lifestyle, impact on business, family implications, etc.

The Decision-Making Process

2. Make the best judgment I could, based on the facts.

During the second week of December, Dan Jones and Associates conducted a poll that included subscribed questions from various clients. It was Dan’s practice to periodically add questions to polls to satisfy his own curiosity as well. I suspect that is the reason why he added my name to the December poll. The poll asked six hundred respondents if they had a favorable or unfavorable impression of several potential candidates for political office. The poll confirms exactly what one might have concluded—few people had heard of me. In fact, 87 percent of respondents said they had never heard

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of Mike Leavitt or had no opinion. Only 11 percent had a positive impression. Two percent had an unfavorable impression. If I were to run, I would be starting from scratch with the public.

3. Seek a confirmation of the decision in a prayerful way. 4. If I don’t feel good about it, then I must be making the wrong move, and I should stay and start again. The memo also laid out a timeframe for my decision-making. I committed myself to visiting Washington, D.C., the last week of February and to reach a preliminary final decision by March 5. I also wanted a couple of weeks to just live with the

A F I R E I N M Y B E L LY

decision before I pulled the trigger. I was looking to have a course set by April 1. I wrote another memo titled “Pros and Cons.” It was about six pages long. It analyzed each part of the decision and how it would affect the aspects of my life. I considered each child, assessing his or her strengths and weaknesses and how this would affect each one. I judged that it would affect a couple of them in a positive way, a couple of them in a negative way, and assumed it would have an immediate impact on two because they were so young. It was not lost on me that the ultimate impact on the children of living in Washington, D.C., and in a political family would not be known for many years. The memo discussed Jackie and the effect it would have on her life. It was clear to me that it would have a negative impact on her, and that she was not enthusiastic about it despite her willingness to go along. I knew running would change the future of the business. The livelihoods of many families depended upon its continued prosperity. I had great confidence in Dane and thought the business was in a position that if I were to depart, arrangements could be made to effectively fill in the gap. The memo considered my own professional interests as well, and whether I would better enjoy the Senate or the insurance business. I concluded that I would very much enjoy serving in the Senate, though I was quite satisfied with my professional role. I also considered the impact such a move might have on me spiritually. I wrote a third memo titled, “Does God Call Men and Women to Work in Secular Things?” In essence, the memo concluded that running for office was not something which God directs, but it is certainly a permissible activity. If one has the inclination, instinct, and opportunity, it can be seen as a noble pursuit. In the world, good government requires good people to seek opportunities to serve. Good people also must be selected by the people. The memo reasoned being electable means one has to be in the right place at the right time and then has to be guided by his or her personal instincts.

The last week of February, Dane and I traveled to Washington, D.C., for the purpose of doing serious due diligence on what life would look like as a U.S. senator. We stayed for nearly a week. We took careful notes and wrote extensive, detailed accounts of the trip, including our impressions along the way. We looked at housing in the District of Columbia, Virginia, and Maryland, which was considerably more expensive than Utah (not a surprise); we reviewed the schedules of Senator Garn and Senator Hatch for the previous four years, counting the number of nights they were away from home; we measured the commutes from the Capitol and logical places to live. I had previously lived in Washington while working for the Reagan campaign and knew that traffic could be a major part of one’s life. I went to committee meetings and had extensive and candid discussions with staffers for Senators Garn and Hatch, including Dee Benson, who worked for Hatch and became a federal judge; Joanne Snow Neumann, who worked for Garn and then managed my D.C. office; and Skip Glines, who worked for Garn. Handwritten notes I made upon returning indicate Jackie and I were prayerful about the decision. My notes also indicate that at various times on Monday and Tuesday, I felt certainty that I should run. On Wednesday I wrote that I spoke with Chase Peterson and sought his advice. On Thursday, I noted feeling pretty good about running, but by afternoon that same day, I had a dark feeling of despair. The second week of March, I concluded I would not run for the Senate. I wrote a thick memo, referring to it as a decision memo. It described how I simply could not get to the point of feeling good about running. My primary reason was that having a family of small children did not seem congruent with being in the United States Senate. It wasn’t an unwillingness to do public service; it was more about being split between Washington and Utah. I then resolved to pray about that decision. Of all the things I have prayed about in my life, I would say I felt most powerfully confirmed in the decision not to run for the Senate. It doesn’t mean

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it wasn’t a difficult decision to make. My political juices had been stirred, but this was not the thing to run for, and I knew it. When I told Jake Garn my decision, he seemed genuinely disappointed. In fact, for years after, when he would introduce me, his standard commentary would include a reference to his disappointment. While I didn’t run for the Senate, it is clear his confidence and the jolt of his suggestions was a major part of what got me into a frame of mind to offer myself for public service. During my deliberations, I sought the counsel of Elder Neal Maxwell, a prominent leader in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints at the time. He told me a story about his decision not to run for the Senate. He was working for Wallace F. Bennett at the time as Wallace’s most senior aide. Senator Bennett made the same offer to Neal Maxwell as Senator Garn had made to me—Bennett had apparently called Neal into his office and told him that if he would run for Bennett’s seat, Bennett

Mike reading to Chase and Westin.

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would support him. Elder Maxwell told me he ultimately decided that there were other people who were willing to do that work and that he didn’t need to. I remember him saying that Heavenly Father cares more about people than about positioning people for his purposes. On March 31, 1991, I wrote to thank Elder Maxwell. The letter said, “For a variety of reasons, we concluded it would not suit our family situation or my personal desires. Jackie and I concluded that if circumstances are right, we are willing and able to do public service, but we would like it to be focused on Utah issues directly and in a situation where I can have real policy impact and then return to the private sector within a reasonable time.”

28 The Decision to Run for Governor 1991 •The Electoral Process; Official Governor Run Within weeks of my decision not to run for the United States Senate, I was talking to a good friend, pollster Dan Jones. He surprised me by saying, “The person who really ought to run for governor is you.” Those words had a profound impact on me, and the suggestion lingered in my mind. Later that week I was flying between Salt Lake City and Phoenix, where I was to meet Dane, who was flying in from Las Vegas.

During the flight, I spent time thinking about the opportunity to run for governor. A strong, almost overwhelming inclination to run began to grow in me. Dane and I had a two-hour-long layover, so we began to walk from one end of the terminal to the other, just talking. When I told Dane about my feelings, he was encouraging. I trusted Dane’s judgment; he had been with me for a week in D.C. doing diligence work leading to the decision not

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to run for the Senate. In addition, I knew such a decision would affect him almost as much as it would me, as he would be required to take over the Leavitt Group. From my conversation with Dane in the Phoenix airport forward, my commitment and enthusiasm grew. People often speak of the need for “fire in the belly” when a person decides to seek public service. This was the moment I was struck with the fire in my belly to run. Was I feeling ambition or calling? Probably it was closer to the former, but there was a powerful and deep sense of rightness about it. It felt audacious but almost magnetic.

Do It While You’re Young

Once home from my trip to Arizona, I again approached the subject of running with Jackie. She was accustomed to it by now, although I think she thought running for governor sounded even more outrageous than running for senate. She reasoned that at least with the senate it was just me involved. Were I to run for governor, there would be an expectation for her to be involved as First Lady. I could tell she was genuinely concerned about the impact it would have on her role as a mother.

“

You would love being governor.

”

I made two basic arguments. First, I told her that running would bring my involvement in politics to a logical conclusion. Either I would win and spend full-time in public service, or I would lose and we could move on with our lives. I couldn’t continue to do politics part time. The second was that being governor would allow me to work on issues I had come to care deeply about in Utah. While the whole matter created a perpetual sense of anxiety, there was a prayerful peace about the decision. I felt confirmed that the decision to run for office was up to me. God was not calling me to this work, but it was an acceptable alternative. Most importantly, my prayers reinforced the imperative to keep myself on track spiritually.

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During my deliberation, I had a PacifiCorp board of directors meeting in Portland during the period my decision was unfolding. One member of the board I especially enjoyed was Stanley Hathaway, the former governor of Wyoming. Stan Hathaway was a salty, wise, and experienced politician, and I wanted his advice. The night before our board meeting, I went to his hotel room and told him about deciding not to run for the Senate and my interest in running for governor. He could not have been more helpful. He related how much he had enjoyed being governor, telling me story after story to illustrate his point. He then told me about his experience in Washington that nearly killed him. He was nominated by President Gerald Ford to be secretary of the interior, but his nomination was attacked by environmental groups who demonized him. He was confirmed, but the controversy caused his health to suffer. He served in Ford’s cabinet for only one month, then resigned citing health reasons. He spent weeks recovering. I could tell it was a terrible experience for him. His final advice was this: “You would love being governor. But do it while you’re young, full of piss and vinegar, because that’s what it takes.” It was another influential conversation.

Clearing the Air with a Close Friend

Nolan Karras was a very popular speaker of the Utah House of Representatives who was considering running for governor himself. He was also a close friend. Many people had encouraged Nolan to run, including me. However, he just couldn’t get a good feeling about it. In a visit at his office, I asked him to decide about running because I was interested in putting myself forward if he chose not to run. It was an awkward, difficult discussion between two friends. Nolan told me that he knew he needed to decide, and that we could talk in a couple of weeks. Two weeks just dragged by. I was tortured by what I should do and felt trapped by his indecision. We met multiple times, but still no decision. Finally, I asked Nolan to release me from my commitment to support him if he ran, because I wanted to see if

THE DECISION TO RUN FOR GOVERNOR

I was viable. I told him that if he decided to run, I would have to decide what I wanted to do then, but I needed to start thinking about a campaign. About two weeks after that, Nolan told me he had decided he was not going to run. He told me he wasn’t interested in campaigning for a year and a half, and it seemed clear to him that I was willing to. He told me I needed to proceed with my plans. On May 6, Nolan made a public announcement that he was not running for governor. He included a reference to the fact that I was going to run, and that my decision had impacted his decision. It was clear to me that Nolan didn’t feel good about the way things had turned out, and he was struggling with the fact that he was giving up the option. I think it was even more irritating to his wife Lynda. I suspect she was likely ambivalent about whether Nolan should run or not, but may have felt I had betrayed him by pressuring him for a decision.

After he had decided not to run for governor, Nolan spent some time thinking about running for Garn’s senate seat. However, he was called to be a stake president, and his course became evident.1

The Electoral Process

The process of running for election to a statewide office in Utah is not simple. In 1992, a candidate would need to prevail in four successive elections to be elected governor. The process required endurance and resiliency. Party Caucuses: The first election is actually two thousand mini-elections, held at party caucuses in each voting district throughout the state. Typically, these gatherings occur in the living room of a home, or in a school, or in some other public meeting place. The caucuses are attended theoretically by only members of the party—though little effort was made to credential attendees. Some of

Electoral Process

Party Caucuses Two thousand neighborhood elections to elect delegates to a state party convention. April 27, 1992

State Convention The delegates vote. Top two candidates advance to the primary election. June 27, 1992

Primary Election

Statewide, all registered Republicans vote for one of the two candidates nominated at the state convention.

General Election Final election among all voters to elect governor. November 3, 1992

September 8, 1992

1. A stake president is a leadership position within the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Leadership positions like this have many responsibilities and require a lot of time, therefore making a run for governor or senator difficult. It is also an unpaid, voluntary position.

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the caucus meetings would have seventy-five to a hundred or more people, while others would be very small, all depending on the region of the state and the degree of engagement that exists among the party’s voting precinct leadership. The primary purpose of the neighborhood caucus is the selection of delegates to the state convention. This is critical because it is at the state convention that the delegates vote to narrow the field of candidates down to the two candidates who will be on the ballot of the party’s primary election. These are intense gatherings, because every candidate for every office tries to assure delegates friendly to their campaign are elected. In 1992, the party caucuses were held on Monday, April 27, 1992. State Convention: The second election in the gauntlet is the state convention, attended by roughly 2,500 delegates elected at the party caucuses. These are raucous two-day affairs held on a Friday and Saturday. For the months in between the caucuses and the state convention, every candidate and campaign is focused on winning the support of this small group of people. At the convention, the candidates formally present themselves in nomination, make speeches, and wait for the convention to vote. In 1992, the rules of the convention stated that if a candidate received 70 percent of the vote at the convention, they automatically became the party’s nominee in the general election in November. If no candidate got 70 percent, the two candidates getting the highest and second highest totals advanced to the primary election ballot. Many a good candidate has been eliminated at the party convention.

“

I am thinking of running for governor.

”

Primary Election: Once the party conventions have narrowed the field down to two candidates, a statewide election is held. Only voters registered as Republicans are allowed to vote in the Republican primaries, and only Democrats vote in the Democratic primaries. The candidate

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gaining the most votes then becomes the party’s nomineeandadvancestothegeneralelectionballotin November. In 1992, the primary election was held September 8th. General Election: Once the primary election has determined the nominees of each party, the final step to being elected governor is winning in the general election.

Natural Insecurities

Why did I think I could become a legitimate candidate in 1991? I suppose it is natural to harbor all kinds of insecurities about such a public process as running for office. My instincts and experiences told me I could, but to know for sure I would need to put myself at risk by openly exploring it with people. In May 1991, I started quietly telling select people I was considering a run for governor. At first it was hard to say it; the whole thing just seemed like such crazy high stakes. However, over time, I became more comfortable and stopped feeling like staring at my shoelaces every time I used the words, “I am thinking of running for governor.” There was a fallback thought that got me through moments of insecurity. I reasoned if I lost or withdrew, the indignity I might suffer would be short-lived. This gave me the confidence to started moving forward. Obviously, I turned out to be a viable candidate for governor. Why? There are many pathways to candidate viability. However, a person who has never run for office before needs to have good reasons to believe. Thirty years later, this is my best take on why it made sense. First, I had a home field advantage in the campaign process. I had managed or chaired eight statewide campaigns in the previous fourteen years and a dozen other campaigns. I understood every aspect of what makes a campaign work and how to reach voters. I knew it would require raising at least two million dollars, because the process is long and complex. I knew I could raise the money because I had raised millions in campaign finances. I knew the donors, they knew me, and I was not afraid to ask for their help.

THE DECISION TO RUN FOR GOVERNOR

1 Local high school holds caucus 2 State convention

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I knew neighborhood caucus process. I knew how state conventions worked, along with the primaries and general elections. I knew the party workers, the public officials, and the news media. More importantly—they knew me. Being at 1 percent in the polls when I started did not worry me. I knew almost every successful candidate starts small and then becomes elevated through the process. And I was comfortable with the process; not only had I been a constant stand-in for the incumbent candidates I managed, like Marriott, Garn, and Hatch, I had been the principal figure in two major initiative battles. I had felt the demands of campaigning—debates, speeches, television interviews, town halls—and liked them; and, to a degree, I felt tested in those settings. I knew I could reach the general population and rise in the polls. A second rationale was my appetite and aptitude for public policy. Through my service on the Board of Regents and SUU Board of Trustees, as well as the strategic planning task force on public education, I developed serious ideas I wanted to see implemented. The voter initiative campaigns I led required me to develop a working knowledge of the state budget and the way the system worked. I had come to believe I was pretty good at solving significant problems.

Finding a Political Base

Careful study of Governor Norm Bangerter’s run for governor in 1984 reminded me that he had obtained support from the vast majority of his fellow legislators. It was a natural constituency because he was speaker of the House of Representatives, and therefore it became his political base. It was my sense that Val Oveson, the lieutenant governor, and Jim Hansen, who was a member of Congress, would be my strongest opponents. Both were widely recognized and already had a significant political base. Successful campaigns need a political base—a large group of voters from whom a candidate can count on a disproportionately high percentage of support. Intuitively, I knew one of my most

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significant deficiencies as a candidate was that I did not have a political base. To survive the primary process, I would need to develop one. I thought rural Utah might be a possibility for me, but I knew that Jim Hansen would also be strong there because he had represented that constituency in Congress. Educators were another possibility because of my work on the strategic plan for education and the tax initiatives. I sensed the business community might be a possible starting point because they would view me as business friendly. I also realized it was important to neutralize the natural advantage Val Oveson had with legislators; I worried Val might have the ability to replicate what Norm Bangerter did in 1984—Norm had made it virtually impossible for other candidates to get a real foothold because of his support from legislators. My operating theory was that if I could get a respectable number of legislators to support me, it would help to prevent Oveson or Jim Hansen from dominating the field. I undertook an aggressive schedule of visiting legislators. I knew most of them already because of work I had been doing with the tax referendums, higher education, and the public education strategic plan, among other activities. It was as much a blocking maneuver as it was an offensive move, and truly, I didn’t start out trying to duplicate Governor Bangerter’s success with legislators. I will never forget the first legislator who said he would support me for governor. Richard Bradford, a Republican legislator from Sandy, had worked with me on the Education Strategic Planning committee and served as the group’s chair. I was driving northbound on I-15, talking on my car phone with Richard, when he asked if I would consider running, and said he would support me. I have to confess his words hit me so hard I actually became dizzy. The fact that there was an honest-to-goodness, real-live person willing to support me, Mike Leavitt, for governor of Utah, was overwhelming to me. I report the event not as an expression of humility, but to acknowledge I was still not sure I could pull it off. I was only forty years old, and deep-down inside, the whole thing just seemed like an audacious idea. I needed that kind of real affirmation.

THE DECISION TO RUN FOR GOVERNOR

I developed a strategy to work with key legislators like Byron Harward and Marty Stephens. I invited them to go with me on a two-day cattle drive near the ranch in Loa the first week of May. We got to know each other well, and I was able to talk to them about my thoughts on running for governor. I traveled the state from Monticello, where I spent time in Dave Adams’s home, to Bear River, where I met with John Holmgren. I crisscrossed the state not once, but many times. I was not focused on anyone else but legislators. Time was on my side. I was quiet about my efforts; I saw no reason to wake up the other candidates, who had a natural opportunity to get legislative support, while I found out if there was any for me. My approach was to take whatever time was necessary for legislators to get to know me. I rarely asked anyone for support during our first conversation. I would, however, make a straight forward proposition: “I am thinking of running for governor. If a state legislator like you believes I am a viable candidate, there is some reason to believe I could win. So, I am prepared to take as much time as necessary for you to get to know me well enough to make that judgment. If you’re willing to spend the time, I am. I will show you who I am, and what I stand for. All I ask is when we’ve reached the point where you feel like you can make a decision, you tell me honestly.” In many cases I would go back three, four, and five times. I visited Jordan Tanner at least five times. I finally had to go for a hike with him in a canyon above Provo that he liked. At the conclusion of it, he told me he had watched me long enough, and felt safe in pledging his support. There were some I visited where I worked alongside them as they baled hay or fed their cattle. Some legislators had specific issues they wanted to talk about; others just wanted to feel like I cared about their support. I had long, searching conversations with some, especially the most ideologically driven ones.

Members of the legislative leadership were slow to make any commitments, but they, too, in time, came around. After I had been doing this about a month and a half, I realized I was actually making a lot of progress. I was surprised by some of the legislators who were willing to support me. My initial goal was to get one-third of the legislature’s support, so that I would at least have my share, and Val Oveson would not be able to run the table. As I got into it, I realized it was not only possible to get one-third, I could literally get a majority. When I got closer to a majority, I then realized I could not only get the majority but maybe even a vast majority. And I just kept working. This went on for more than four months. In retrospect, it was wise of me to ask my legislative supporters to sign an endorsement card. When they committed to me, I told them that I never wanted to have any misunderstanding about their commitment, nor did I want to use their name in a way that was uncomfortable for them—hence, the card. As I approached the end of summer, it seemed possible to me that I could get the support of 75 percent of legislators. I worked especially hard in Utah County because that is where Val Oveson lived. One at a time, legislators like Jeff Alexander, Norm Nielsen, and John Valentine committed their support. Each was a quiet milestone. Don LeBaron committed to support me when Jackie went with me to visit him. LeRay McAllister was a senior statesman who had worked with my father over time, and when he gave his support, it was a real boost to my confidence, not to mention my list of endorsements. There were a couple of legislators whose support I especially wanted. One was Chuck Peterson, the other was Haven Barlow—both state senators who had served with my father. Both were in their seventies with long experience in state government. Months earlier, before I had even thought about running, I had been at an event with Chuck Peterson. He was sitting behind me and completely out of the blue he said, “When you decide to run for governor, come see me.” It seems evident now, based on all the time I had spent in politics, people assumed I was positioning to run.

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Haven Barlow had been in the Senate for almost forty years and had served as Senate president. He is the father of applied technology in Utah; it was his passion. One thing he wanted to know was how I felt about applied technology centers. It was another place where my support for the education strategic plan and the time I had spent on the tax referendum gave me credibility on a specific issue. Despite my relationship with both Senators Barlow and Peterson, both were seasoned political figures and knew their endorsement would have profound meaning, so they held back for a long time before finally giving me their endorsements.

Other Competitors Join the Race

Although Val Oveson and Jim Hansen were potentially formidable opponents, there were others eyeing the race. About that time, Rick Eyre, who was a well-known Utah author, began to launch a marketing campaign for a book he had written called Utah 2000. Everybody in town knew he was writing a book because he asked most of the people who had any expertise in either politics or government to help him write it. It was a clever way to get to know people by asking them to share their views, and a clever way to recognize their expertise by including them in his book. Rick always told people his purpose was to lay out a vision for the state. Everybody knew he was running for governor. Rick is an extraordinarily bright man and a New York Times bestselling author on parenting, so he knew the publishing process and how to go about it. The book created a clear brand, a brand that spoke to a conservative base. It strongly advocated things like school vouchers, among other conservative issues. Rick was able to leverage it for a lot of publicity, giving speeches where he laid out this vision for the state; putting up billboards and starting a group called Citizens for Utah. He spent a lot of money to promote the book. Spending his money this way was not only politically clever—it was a smart financial move. It meant he could deduct the entire amount as a business expense. Most people who put money into a campaign do it in after-tax dollars. Eyre also did a radio show on KSL called the Blue Roads Tour. He and his family toured the state

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by driving on secondary roads—roads that are colored blue on a physical map—and visiting every city in Utah. He called in to give reports from his stops around the state. It was a brilliant marketing effort. On June 6, 1991, I met Rick for breakfast. I told him I was running for governor, though at this point he still denied he was.

An Official Campaign Run

The first of June, I started clearing my other obligations and political conflicts. Then later, on July 11, 1991, I held my first formal campaign organization meeting. Bud Scruggs conducted this meeting of what we called the steering committee. During the meeting, we laid out a series of important objectives. On July 29, 1991, we would form an exploratory committee and issue a press release announcing at least 250 prominent people who had signed endorsements. On November 15, we would make a formal public announcement of my candidacy. Then April 20, 1992, we would begin our focus on delegates after the caucuses. We forecast the third week of June 1992 as an approximate date for the state Republican convention. The minutes record our first and main goal was to recruit names for the announcement. A second goal was to raise $150,000. I reported to the steering committee members that I was exclusively enlisting support from state legislators, and at that point had thirty firmly committed legislators. Among those remaining, I thought Hansen had five and Val Oveson had three. During the meeting, Mayor Joe Jenkins from Provo offered to have some small breakfast meetings in Utah County. Tim Anderson, who is from St. George and a longtime friend, said that we needed to divert attention away from my dad’s 1988 race for the state senate and create an identity to distinguish me from my dad. He indicated that a lot of the politically active people in St. George and southern Utah would lean toward Jim Hansen. Others spoke up as well. Brent Hatch, Orrin Hatch’s son, talked about the state being less conservative than it used to be, and opined that conservatives were bitter over it. The biggest problem

THE DECISION TO RUN FOR GOVERNOR

I’d have would be name recognition and the fact that some conservatives knew me and didn’t like me. He characterized them as non-rational people but still necessary to recruit for some support. Kirk Green, a friend and local businessman, said that he thought I had a pretty good chance of being the downtown business community candidate. He felt Jim Hansen appealed less to them, and that Val was not strong there, either. He said we needed to get together with the chamber of commerce people like Fred Ball. Dan Eastman, one of my best friends, said we needed to remember that Davis County really had two personalities: one was a less-urban native class and the other was the under-forty class, which had more connection to Salt Lake County than Davis County. He said South Davis was like Sandy—basically part of Salt Lake. Jon Memmott, who had been Norm Bangerter’s chief of staff and was well experienced in state government, recommended that we deal with county commissioners and let education be the biggest issue. He said the Utah Education Association (UEA) really liked me, but we needed to be careful to not let that become a statement. Marty Stephens, who was an up-and-coming state legislator representing Weber County, said that we needed to emphasize that the state line doesn’t end at Davis County—every county needed attention. Bangerter was not well liked in his district, and Marty felt that was because he had never appointed any judges from Weber County. He pointed out that Flora Ogan, the editor of the Ogden Standard Examiner, was also “not Mike’s best fan,” and suggested we talk with her. When it came to the primary, Marty said I needed to appear more confident than Val Oveson. Mike Wilkins, an attorney, talked about name recognition being the greatest challenge. The timing of the meeting coincided with the visit to Salt Lake of two friends who were political consultants, Eddie Mahe and LaDonna Lee. LaDonna reminded all of us not to forget what she called the bell cows—the hardworking, loyal, party people. Eddie pointed out that we should not miss any gee-whizzers. He was referring to

prominent people whose names would give the campaign some lift. He also recommended not using any specific numbers; I think he was referring to the 250 endorsements or specific number of dollars. He said that it would set me up for failure. He also counseled us not to back down from a primary because it would help us in the end.

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My experience is they will tell you one thing, but when it comes right down to it, they will do what is in their best interest will do what is in their best interest.

Senator Chuck Peterson’s Endorsement

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At the end of July, a critical event occurred. I got a telephone call from Senator Chuck Peterson. “Mike, this is Chuck Peterson. You better put me on your list.” I didn’t know exactly what he meant. He continued to tell me I could count on him for support. “I need to tell you I had a conversation with Val Oveson,” he said. “I told him I was going to support you, and that all the legislators were going to support you, and that he [Val] just as well get out of this thing right now because he wasn’t going to win.” It was a remarkable conversation. And it had real impact. Fortunately, by that time, 75 percent of Utah’s legislators had signed my endorsement cards. It motivated Val—he began to work extremely hard to try to solidify the support of the rest of the legislators. He told me later that he had no idea that I was spending that much time with legislators and that I was getting that kind of support.

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About a month and a half later, Val told me he was indeed not going to run. He told me that he didn’t have the energy or the desire to run for a year and a half. “Out of curiosity, have you ever read The Art of War?” he asked. I said I hadn’t. “I wondered if it was a deliberate strategy of yours to run directly at my political base,” he said. I don’t remember exactly what I told him. The truth is it was more instinctual than deliberate. Val made another point worth remembering: “For the last month and a half, I have talked with legislators who have been in conversations with you. What impresses me is that I have not found a single situation where you have said anything negative about me, and I want you to know that I admire that and appreciate it. In time, I will likely support you if for no other reason than that.” Val ultimately did agree to support me a couple of months later, and it was a big lift to my effort. He also worked in my administration and has remained a dear friend.

Would Jim Hansen Run?

With Val Oveson out of the way, I assumed Jim Hansen might run. I visited Jim hoping that I could figure out where he was coming from and then begin cultivating his support if he didn’t run. We met in a little cabin in Farmington where he had his campaign and congressional offices. It was just the two of us. I carefully and respectfully told him that I intended to run, which he said he knew. I told him I was getting good support from state legislators. “Oh, I wouldn’t be too impressed with that,” he said. “My experience is they will tell you one thing, but when it comes right down to it, they will do what is in their best interest. If I get into it, I think a lot of them will come to support me.”

strength, and, after all, I wasn’t completely sure he was wrong. At that time, Jim was a polarizing figure in Utah politics. Conservative Republicans loved him. Rural Utah loved him. They had every reason to—he was a good congressman. He had not lost an election in more than twenty years. He had been speaker of the Utah House of Representatives before he ran for Congress, and members of the legislature related to him. He was mature, could raise money, and had been in Congress for ten years. He had started to gain support and seniority, and I assumed he would run for governor. I thought my job was to get the second spot in the convention—I just had a feeling I could beat him in a primary. It was a dangerous and difficult path really. Had both Val and Jim run, I would have probably lost in the convention. I left the meeting with no idea whether he was going to run or not. He displayed a slight edge during the meeting, and it took several years for that edge to wear off. I hadn’t yet earned my stripes with Jim; I think he saw me as a junior varsity player working hard to make the squad. He also saw me as a potential competitor. Eventually I came to feel a bond of genuine friendship with him and collegial support for purposes we had in common. Those relationships take time to build, especially in politics. On October 13, 1991, the results of a poll, asking whether Jim Hansen should stay in Congress or run for governor, were released in the Deseret News. Thirty-two percent of respondents felt he should run for Congress. Seventeen percent thought he should run for governor. Twenty-seven percent thought he should retire from public office and 24 percent had no opinion.2 I don’t know what impact it ultimately had on him, but people were quite clear they wanted him to run for Congress, not for governor.

I didn’t tell him they had all signed endorsement cards. He wasn’t about to admit I had a position of 2.Bob Bernick Jr. “Utahns Prefer Hansen as Congressman.” Deseret News, 13 Oct. 1991: A1.

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29 I Need Boosters and Backers Campaign Staff; Lincoln Day Dinners; Final Candidates Financing the campaign of any first-time candidate is a challenge. I had raised a lot of political money in Utah during the campaigns I had managed, but raising money for an incumbent U.S. senator is a dramatically easier prospect than it is raising money for a newcomer in a crowded race. It reminds me of the difference between raising money for a start-up business versus profitable publicly traded company.

Two characteristics of both start-ups and new campaigns: first, most of the money is raised by personal appeal of the entrepreneur or candidate. Second, both look initially to friends and family supporters. My campaign was no exception, and I spent the bulk of my campaign time fundraising. Specifically, I had to find a handful of people who would put big chunks of money into the campaign—there is just not enough time in the day to raise money $250 at a time.

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I also leaned heavily on our family businesses. Utah’s finance law permitted corporations to contribute, so I borrowed $20,000 from the Leavitt Group to get started. I also turned to each of the Leavitt Group agencies. Al Bowen gave the campaign $10,000 from Bowen-Leavitt. Leavitt Agency in Las Vegas made a sizeable contribution, as did nearly all the agencies that were profitable. These were wonderful gestures. Realistically, we all knew that the Leavitt-family side of the equation was contributing 60 percent of the funds, but it was a source of money. I turned to some insurance companies as well. Joanne Firley, the widow of my dear friend and mentor Art Firley of Casualty Indemnity Exchange, sent $10,000. Were it not for early money like that, starting a statewide campaign would have been extremely difficult. I have seen how many able and good people are excluded from running for elected office because they can’t raise the money. Some people argue the remedy is to have public financing of campaigns, but I am more inclined to believe raising the money is an important market test for a candidate. However, both are lousy systems. Raising money for politics is hard and humbling. In my papers, I found a memo dated October 18, 1991, laying out a finance plan, which I’m guessing I wrote. At that point in the campaign, I was not only the candidate but also the chief strategist and de facto campaign manager. The memo laid out three categories of fundraising: large donors, a finance committee, and direct mail. The large donor plan was straightforward—find 150 people capable of giving $1,000 or more, and I would call on each person personally. The finance committee had more moving parts. We planned to recruit people in every county for the committee, asking them to nominate potential donors that the campaign would further cultivate them with letters and mail. A member of the finance committee member would then personally ask for the donation. It was the system Bud Scruggs and I had perfected during our years at the Public Affairs Advisory Group.

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The direct mail strategy would take more time. As we accumulated names of people interested in the campaign, we periodically sent letters to them, asking them to donate. The memo set our goal at $400,000 by February 1992. We fell short of that goal; it took us until the June convention to raise the first $400,000. However, we raised more than our competitors and spent it wisely. I would estimate 65 percent of the $1.8 million the campaign raised during the entire campaign was raised by me personally. There is no other way unless the candidate wishes to write a check to himself or herself; not an option or inclination I had.

Refining a Finance Pitch

Every candidate needs a finance pitch, especially at the beginning. You have to persuade people that winning is possible and motivate them to help. My pitch had four components: first, I would take enough time to listen to the person. They would generally tell me something about their inclinations right away, and it was typically something I could tie into my presentation later. Second, I would tell them why I was running. I would generally talk about a series of events, starting with the campaigns I had run and how they led to service on the Board of Regents and the Education Strategic Planning Task Force. I would talk about how the interconnection between economic growth and education had come to me and what I wanted to do about it. I would always bring up the obvious question people had by saying, “A lot of people wonder if a person who isn’t broadly known can win a race like this. My candidacy follows an interesting pattern: of the past four governors, none of them had ever held statewide office. They all came from the business community, had backgrounds outside Salt Lake City, and none of them were widely known when they started.” There would typically be some banter back and forth on questions and opinions. I would wait until the person said anything positive about my

I NEED BOOSTERS AND BACKERS

willingness to run, and then I would say, “I’d like to tell you an experience I had. Jackie and I had a dinner at our home. Among the guests was a young woman who worked at my office. She had brought her boyfriend, a likable young guy who was a rodeo cowboy. He competed in several events and had done well in local rodeos.

backers know they could give money as an individual or as a business.

“We were all fascinated by his stories. Somebody asked him if he had ever considered joining the professional rodeo circuit. He said he had thought about it. The table turned into a chorus of encouragement.

Developing a Campaign Staff

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We have formed a campaign committee in every county.

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“He listened and asked, ‘Do you know what the professional rodeo circuit is like? You go to a rodeo in Billings, Montana, and you get kicked by bulls and thrown by broncos. Then you get in a pick-up truck and drive three hundred miles to Cheyenne, Wyoming, where you get kicked by bulls and thrown by broncos. The next day it’s on to Denver, where the same thing happens. “‘It’s a tough life, and it takes money. I’d like to give it a try, and I think I can win.’ One of the other dinner guests said, ‘You should do it. We’d be your biggest boosters.’ He said, ‘Frankly, what I need are boosters who are also backers. I’m willing to ride the bulls and broncos and endure the travel, but I need backers.’” I would then segue to my own pitch, saying, “I’m warmed by the encouragement you have given me, but to make this work, I need financial backing. I’m willing to take the political equivalent of getting kicked by bulls and thrown by broncos, but I’m wondering if you would be willing to back the campaign financially.” Then came a pause as I awaited their response. If they said yes, I found it important to talk about specific amounts and tie those down. I explained how state campaign finance laws worked and let

Many of the campaign’s core supporters started by donating a couple thousand dollars to my campaign, and then invited me to come back if I was successful in getting out of the convention.

On October 21, 1991, I wrote a letter to about three hundred people whom we referred to as our core supporters. They were folks who had volunteered, given money, or pledged to help in some way. My letter gave a general update of the campaign. It announced that Nolan Karras had agreed to be the chair and that Bud Scruggs was chair of the strategy committee. I was able to report that 60 percent of the state’s legislators had already pledged their support. “We have formed a campaign committee in every county,” I reported, “And I’m logging about one thousand miles a week on my car.” Up to that point, the entirety of the campaign staff was Matt Anderson, who had joined me as an intern from the University of Utah and had been by my side from the very beginning. However, we needed to build a campaign staff, starting with a manager. Bud Scruggs was teaching at BYU and had a student, Rob Glazier, he was sure could do the job. Rob had managed some campaigns before. I interviewed him, and mainly on the strength of Bud’s recommendation, hired him. Rob wasn’t able to work full-time until he completed school in December, but he worked when he could and proved to be an able organizer. Rob recruited KayLin Loveland, who had worked on campaigns with him before, to the campaign. Campaigns need people who just immerse themselves twenty-four hours a day, and both Rob and KayLin did that.

A Key Figure Joins the Campaign

In time, I sensed the campaign needed a more seasoned person to provide leadership. Somebody that knew Utah politics and could deal with people as a peer. LaVarr Webb had been a friend

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1 Nolan Karras 2 LaVarr Webb 3 Merrill Cook, Independant candidate, 1992 governor’s race

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4 Stewart Hanson Jr., Democratic candidate, 1992 governor’s race 5 Richard Eyre, Republican candidate, 1992 governor’s race 6 Pat Shea, Democratic candidate, 1992 governor’s race

I NEED BOOSTERS AND BACKERS

of mine since 1978 when I managed the Marriott campaign. He had been the political editor at the Deseret News and had advanced to various positions until he was the paper’s managing editor. A few months earlier, LaVarr had left the newspaper to pursue other business opportunities. He and his wife, Jan, were in a study group we attended, along with Bud and Shirley Scruggs, Dave and Holly Jordan, and Mike and Diane Wilkins. I asked LaVarr and Jan to come to my home to talk. I explained the situation and asked if he would help. I said I was willing to pay him the salary he needed, but he needed to know the uncertainty of a campaign like this. Money was short, victory uncertain, and the work unrelenting. I did promise him two things: first, that nobody in the race would outwork me. Second, win or lose, it would be a chance for him to see and understand politics in an entirely new way. I don’t recall if they agreed that night or later, but it constituted perhaps the most important decision I made. LaVarr brought enormous talent and intellectual power to the campaign, plus he was somebody I trusted and enjoyed. Nobody could have been more devoted or worked longer hours.

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This is a period of the campaign that requires patience.

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thoughtful, personal decision process, making the decision to run. Then, in the seven months that followed (June to December 1991), the campaign had been organized, a small staff developed, and enough money raised to sustain the campaign and the staff. We had also seen several of our most formidable potential opponents step back and join with us. While other candidates were organizing campaigns, the field was beginning to take shape. Most importantly, we had a clear picture of what we had to accomplish during the next six months leading to the Republican State Convention. Perhaps our most notable accomplishment during that behind-the-scenes period was the beachhead of support we built among Republican legislators. It started out as a blocking move to deny legislative allies to other candidates but became an important part of my base. My ability to reference their near unanimous support was the gee-whiz reference my consultant friend Eddie Mahe had alluded to months earlier. It gave me an important reference point with potential donors and others. I had become a credible candidate. To close out the year, we worked to leverage the strength I had with legislators, and to extend our endorsement base further, by organizing a reunion for former legislators. We held the event in the State Capital Building. It was co-chaired by three former speakers of the House of Representatives: Nolan Karras, Bob Garff, and Glen Brown. We had good attendance at the event, but the fact that it happened at all reaffirmed the message: Mike Leavitt is a serious contender for governor.

With LaVarr on board, our effort began to gain intellectual traction. We engaged people to start writing issue papers and develop material for distribution. Rob and KayLin began to gather a staff of young people who could organize a grassroots campaign. I just kept raising money.

1992: The Election Formally Begins

Finishing out 1991

Once again, I felt a need to calm worries about the polls, writing, “This is a period of the campaign that requires patience. Early polls measure nothing but name identification, and we must not expect to see big improvements in the polls until late spring.

As we approached the Christmas holidays in December of 1991, the behind-the-scenes phase of the campaign was ending. There was reason for our campaign to feel satisfied—I had undergone a

In a January 3, 1992, letter to supporters, I wrote of LaVarr joining the campaign and the positive feel and pace of our efforts. The letter announced January 7–8 as the dates of our kickoff—a twentyfour-stop tour of the state.

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We have made a conscious decision to wait until after the holidays to launch our public campaign. “Our plans to increase identification are consistent with other successful campaigns.” I cited Bangerter (who trailed his primary opponent 41–8 initially), Matheson (only 11 percent in June of 1976) and Hatch (below 10 percent until August). The letter closed by announcing Bob Garff and Dave Simmons as the finance committee chairs and restating our goal to have one hundred members on the committee. We launched the twenty-four-stop kickoff tour at our home on Laird Avenue. We cleared out the sofas and other furniture, put a small podium in front of the fireplace, and hosted the media. At the news conference I said, “I am running to bring quality jobs and quality education to Utah. I chose my home as the venue for my announcement because it symbolizes the things most important to Utahns.”

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gestures to define him as a different kind of candidate, he publicly proposed to limit contributions and swore off thirty-second ads. The Salt Lake Tribune reported on December 29 the response of the other candidates, including me: we all rejected the idea.1 He then made a formal announcement of his candidacy on January 18, surrounded by people well defined as the right-wing of the party. They would clearly become his base.2 On February 3, Mike Stewart formalized his candidacy.3 In the Democratic Party, Kem Gardner, a developer and partner in the Boyer Company, announced his candidacy for governor on December 7,4 but withdrew from the race in mid-January, saying he didn’t want to put his business at risk or face the possibility of a negative campaign, “considering I’m Richard Eyre’s (LDS) bishop and Mike Leavitt is my friend and insurance agent.”5 Later, Pat Shea announced his candidacy.6 Pat’s entry into the race had some interesting irony to it. Pat had been state chairman of the Democratic Party and had also been my co-lead on the 1988 tax referendum, so I knew him well. He was joined by a former district judge Stewart Hanson Jr.

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The billboards are working.

Merrill Cook did us all one better. He had indicated publicly he intended to file as an Independent, and started running television ads in January 1992 simply because he could. Merrill had family money from a business his father had built, which Merrill later took over, called Cook Slurry Company, which specialized in aqueous explosives. Merrill had already run for mayor of Salt Lake City and governor against Norm Bangerter in 1988. He had no opponent at the time, so the expenditure made little sense to me, but it drew attention to the race. Richard Eyre had finally confessed his ambition to be governor and had started to organize a campaign. In what would be a string of populist

On January 31, The Salt Lake Tribune carried an article reflecting Dixie Minson’s frustration that she wasn’t being taken seriously as a candidate by Republican Party officials, whom she also accused of blocking her attempts to raise money.7

Our First Public-Facing Move

We knew it was important to begin strengthening my name identification. I was credible as a candidate among community and party leaders,

1. “GOP Opponents Reject Eyre’s Call to Cap Campaign Contributions.” Salt Lake Tribune, 29 December 1991. 2. Bob Bernick Jr. “Eyre Hails Volunteer who will manage his Campaign for Governor.” Deseret News, 18 January 1992. 3. Christopher Smart. “Candidate Seeks Quiet Path to Governor’s Seat.” The Salt Lake Tribune, 3 February 1992. 4. “Developer Kem Gardner will join Governor’s Race.” Deseret News, 8 December 1991 5. Bob Bernick Jr. “Gardner Says Governorship Isn’t Worth Costs.” Deseret News, 22 January 1992. 6. Paul Rolly. “On Leap Day, Shea will Jump into Governor’s Race.” Salt Lake Tribune, 29 February 1992. 7. “Republican Power Brokers Snubbing Me, Minson Says.” Salt Lake Tribune, 31 January 1992.

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but virtually unknown among general public. This meant as polls began to measure the strength of the candidates with more frequency, I would be diminished. I had developed a theory during previous campaigns about name identification. I believed it developed in four stages: first, people recognize the name but associate nothing with it; second, people have heard the name and associate it with an individual running for office; third, people know the name, know the person is running for a specific office, and can identify the candidate’s face; fourth, people know the name, know the person is running for a specific office, recognize the candidate’s face, and have a positive or negative impression of the candidate. We devised a billboard strategy to move people through each phase. Our first billboards simply displayed the words: Mike Leavitt, Governor. A month later we reposted the boards, this time with my name and picture. Shortly after we put the picture up, I had just finished a fundraising event and stopped to get gas at a convenience store. As I stood at the counter to pay, the cashier pointed at me and said, “Mike Leavitt.” I said, “Oh, thank you for recognizing me.” I thought to myself, “The billboards are working.” The clerk said, “I didn’t recognize you. You just left your name tag on.” Experiences like that in the early days of a campaign keep one’s ego in check.

Lincoln Day Dinners

In February, every county holds a Lincoln Day dinner. This ritual is both a fundraising opportunity for local party organizations and a showcase of aspiring candidates. It was a chance for party faithfuls to get an early glimpse. The schedule was coordinated in a way that candidates and state officers could travel to most of them, so attendance was nearly mandatory for serious candidates to attend.

Often candidates were given an opportunity to speak for two or three minutes; other times, we were simply introduced. Regardless of the method, each event took a lot of time. For example, the Salt Lake County dinner that year was the political dinner from hell. It started at 6:30 p.m. with a reception. The Salt Lake County chair, Rich Kuchinsky, insisted on giving commentary between all sixteen speakers (no exaggeration) and five musical numbers (still not exaggerating). Then at 10:45 p.m., an introduction was made for keynote speaker, Richard Richards, a former head of the national Republican Party who had flown in from Washington. I can still remember him saying, “Given the late hour, I’m going to cut my remarks short.” He finished at 11:15 p.m. The whole event was akin to torture. Another memorable Lincoln Day dinner was held in Vernal. I had been working in Cedar City and asked my brother Mark to fly me to Vernal for the dinner. The next morning, the Washington County party was having a breakfast event, and I knew that flying would enable me to attend both. However, as the dinner proceeded, a snowstorm blew in. It was clear we were flying nowhere. Mark ended up staying the night in Vernal. To ensure I would get to the breakfast in time, I hitched a ride with Ted Stewart, a candidate for the U.S. Senate, and his team. It wasn’t the most ideal situation. They were driving a compact car, and my introduction to the mix meant three people, including Ted’s brother Tim, had to sit in the back seat. But we made it work. We drove for seven hours in a snowstorm, switching off driving duties, arriving in Cedar City about 6 a.m. Then Ted dropped me off at my parents’ home, I showered, and then drove to St. George for the breakfast, which started at 8 a.m. The drive between Vernal and Cedar City was a memorable time for Ted and me; it was the first time we had ever really talked. We told stories and exchanged ideas, debated points of politics, religion, and life. By the time the ride was over, I had a friend for life. Six years later, I would appoint Ted to serve as my chief of staff.

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The Final List of Candidates

Though it was evident who the candidates were, it was required by law to file papers at the lieutenant governor’s office to become a formal candidate. For months I had this nightmare we would forget, so I filed well in advance of the March 10th deadline. It was a relief to get it done. When filing closed, there were two Democrat candidates for governor—Pat Shea and Stewart Hanson—and five Republican candidates: me, Rick Eyre, Mike Stewart, Dixie Minson, and a young man named Dub Richards. Dub was a rather remarkable person, actually. He had been disabled in an accident and depended on a wheelchair for his mobility. It was clear to me this effort was about proving to himself and the rest of the world he did not have limits. Dub had no resources, knew nothing of politics or the issues, but he had a van equipped with gear so he could drive, and by the sheer force of his will he got to almost every major event where candidates were expected to be. His signs were homemade, his speeches quite radical, but I admired him, and I think others did too. I remember seeing people help him with his signs because he was often alone. He would not ask for help, but at times receiving assistance was the only way. One day, I saw his van stopped alongside the road with a flat tire and the staff of some other candidate was helping him. Running for office takes courage, and he was clearly the most courageous of us all. Dub ran in subsequent years for various offices. He was never a serious threat to other candidates, but my admiration continued.

Should Dixie Run Again for the State Senate?

One issue we had to confront was whether my dad would run again for the state Senate, though the issue was ultimately resolved by logistics and politics more than anything else.

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The 1992 legislature had passed a reapportionment bill based on a new census. Everyone expected St. George and Cedar City would be in separate districts, due to being the two largest communities south of Provo. There is no way it could happen otherwise—unless politics were in play. And they were. Arnold Christensen was president of the Utah Senate at that time. When Dad returned to the senate after a twelve-year absence, he and Arnold had continual disagreements. Dad resented what felt to him like heavy-handed tactics, and he often made his feelings known, also refusing to support Arnold for president of the senate. When it came time for reapportionment, rural Utah was divided in a way that would protect Cary Peterson, the senate majority leader who was from Nephi, and disadvantaged Dixie, my father. Arnold made sure Cary survived, and Dixie was sacrificed. It was politics at its ugliest, and everybody knew it. Given the reapportionment, there was no way we could duplicate the miracle we pulled off four years earlier to get Dad elected. Though it was never spoken, it also seemed awkward for me to be running in a primary election at the same time he was. There is little question it would seriously damage my capacity to get support from Washington County. So, Dad decided he would not run again. It was the right decision, but a painful one for him and for me. On March 10, the final day of filing, Dad announced he would not run.

30 Defining My Political Philosophy Education Reform; Utah Public Employees Association; Mike Stewart; Caucuses and Conventions; LaVarr Webb As soon as the filing deadline passed, the campaign intensity notched up again. The play was cast; the media now knew the characters. The next governor would be from among the list. It was time for me and my campaign to begin developing specific plans and proposals. It was also a period during which various groups and constituencies would start to make formal endorsements.

I have a decidedly center-right political philosophy. I believe in limited government, but I also believe government has a critical role in a free and just society. At this point in the campaign, I had to begin framing issue positions consistent with my philosophy. Historically, the preponderance of delegates to the Republican convention are more conservative

Candidates Mike Leavitt and Mike Stewart being interviewed by KSL News.

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than the at large Republican party, presenting a dilemma for a center-right candidate. And it became clear from his earliest messaging that Richard Eyre advocated for positions far-right conservatives would respond to in order to attract support in the party convention. He would then try to reposition himself in the primary to appeal more broadly. Mike Stewart, on the other hand, was politically to my left. Not by a lot, but distinguishably. Dixie Minson withdrew before she was able to establish an ideological brand.

Education Reform

Education reform was the first issue where the difference between Eyre and me became evident. Eyre sought to make education a defining issue, and I welcomed the skirmish because I believed the primary election would ultimately be settled by a broader Republican electorate.

This issue would, in many ways, define the choice. Two Republican candidates had education plans that were dramatically different. The Eyre campaign centered on a voucher system, which played to the constituency he was cultivating. Under Rick’s plan, parents would be given a government-issued certificate for $1,000 to go toward the child’s education at a school of their choice— public or private. Rick believed it would encourage free-market competition among schools. I believe in markets; I also happen to think public education is a monopoly needing a challenge. My instincts were to find a better way to inject market forces into public education. I ultimately found the mechanism in charter schools, which provide choice within the public school system to parents who desire a greater challenge or a specialized learning environment for their children. A few years later, education vouchers were put on the election ballot as a voter initiative and lost. My instincts were good.

My Education Plan

My plan for education borrowed heavily from the state strategic plan I had worked on so hard over the previous four years. It centered on competency-based education, local control of schools, and the use of new technologies in the classroom.

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Competency-based student progress is a concept that was carried forward throughout my entire service. At a primary education level, my concern was that many students in Utah schools were advancing from grade to grade even though they had not developed the skills to succeed in higher grades. I was particularly concerned about reading skills. Having faced this very experience in our family, I knew its importance. On the other hand, students in their final years of high school were capable of finishing the requirements for a diploma early, even taking college or university courses toward an advanced degree while finishing their senior year and thus getting into the workforce at a faster rate. But students were not given any incentive to do so. Competency-based advancement and technology enablement in education were introduced in the first campaign and remained primary themes throughout my time as governor. (These two core principles were foundational in the development of Western Governors University.) My campaign’s education plan was also linked directly with my economic proposals—I constantly talked about the connection between quality jobs and a quality education. I also made the point that the ability to pay for education was directly linked to a strong economy. During the early nineties, the state was strapped for cash. The student-teacher ratio in some classrooms was as high as thirty-two to one, and teacher salaries were not on par with those in surrounding states. Candidates who believed they could dramatically improve education without money were either naïve or untruthful. We had to either grow our way through the problem or ask people to give up a bigger share of their paychecks. I supported the former.

Gaining UEA’s support

My leadership on the tax initiatives, being a member of the Education Strategic Planning Task Force, and the personal relationships I had built within the education community formed the foundation of the Utah Education Association's support and played a critical role in getting me through the convention.

DEFINING MY POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

The members of the UEA decided whom they would endorse via the group's UEA’s political committee—the committee would vote on a candidate after subjecting candidates to a questionnaire and an interview. The questionnaire was extremely delicate, with finely tuned questions designed to measure how much support a candidate was willing to provide to education. Bottom line, they wanted a pledge to raise taxes for education.

“

Quality jobs, quality education.

”

The members of the UEA saw Richard Eyre as their clear enemy. The voucher debate was just beginning in earnest at this point, and his voucher plan was viewed as a threat to public education and everything it stood for. (The far right, however, saw it as a real measure of a person’s conservative bona fides. I knew I needed to stay out of that box.) The evident challenge to me in getting the support of the UEA wasn’t Richard Eyre—it was Mike Stewart. He was a former history professor and held a PhD in constitutional law. More significantly, he was willing to say he would raise taxes for education. I knew that if Stewart got the UEA, it was a serious base he could build on.

told them I wanted to talk with them before turning it in. When we met, I told them the questionnaire sought a commitment to raise taxes, and I would not give it. It was inconsistent with everything my campaign stood for. I told them I guessed Mike Stewart’s questionnaire would reflect what I’d heard him say—that he’d be willing, under the right circumstances, to raise taxes. I was certain it would appeal to the board for a candidate to make that commitment. I asked them to keep something in mind as they wrestled with this: Mike Stewart couldn’t beat Rick Eyre, but I could. If they pledged their support to Stewart on the strength of his pledge, they would end up fighting Rick Eyre for the next eight years. It was a sober, steely-eyed meeting. They wanted me to pledge; I simply wasn’t going to. When we left the meeting, LaVarr and I knew this was a turning point. However, I felt we could not just leave the dynamics of the meeting to chance; we needed to focus on this in a way that gave us an advantage. The UEA meeting was a week away, and I had a list of the twenty people on the political committee. I decided to visit each of them, one-onone, in their homes, to build a direct relationship and to make my pitch. This was a huge commitment because it required me to drive across the state. However, at that point in the campaign I concluded there was nothing more important I could do than keeping the UEA away from Mike Stewart.

The day before the UEA questionnaire was due, LaVarr and I spent hours crafting our answers. We felt good about the entire document except for one question about raising taxes. The Eyre camp had started to attack my support of the Strategic Plan for Education, saying it would cost $500 million and questioning where the money would come from if taxes weren’t raised. It was a fictitious number, but Eyre’s people were effective at making the number stick. (I’ve learned that if a number gets printed enough times, it’s regarded as fact.) I knew Eyre would pounce on any answer that showed the slightest wavering on the question of taxes.

I already knew several of the political committee members, but I visited them anyway, even the members who belonged to the Democratic Party. My strategy worked. On March 17, the UEA announced its primary endorsement of me. Pat Shea was the favored Democrat.

I had a decision to make. I wrote the answer in a way that made it clear I would not raise taxes. I called UEA leaders Lily Eskelson and Pat Rusk and

Utah Public Employees Association

This endorsement gave me significant advantage. The UEA had been working for months to organize its members to run at the party caucuses, and I knew from experience that a significant number of delegates who belonged to the UEA would be elected.

Another major group that could affect the mass meetings was the Utah Public Employees

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Association (UPEA). The executive director was Nancy Sechrest—a smart, former health department employee who had turned UPEA into a serious political force. Nancy had been a strong supporter of Nolan Karras. Though harboring great disappointment that Nolan had chosen not to run, she concluded I was the likely winner and chose to help me in subtle ways. It was delicate for her, however, because her membership had to be brought along. Like the UEA, the UPEA interviewed candidates. Once again, I thought Eyre didn’t have a prayer of getting the organized help of a group like this, but Stewart clearly did—he had a good relationship with the county employees who were part of the organization. Although I wasn’t convinced they could deliver delegates like the UEA, there was no reason to give Stewart any momentum. I didn’t go to the length of visiting board members individually, but my interview went well and Nancy’s help with various members proved to be enough. I got the endorsement.

Defining Each Other

The candidates began serious efforts to define themselves but also each other. Eyre defined himself as a serious, issue-oriented thinker with a plan for the future. He portrayed me as a young political operative who hadn’t thought out the serious issues of the future. I worked to establish a brand as a business executive with a plan to enhance Utah’s economy by improving the education system, and as one who had the support of Utah’s respected leaders. I painted Eyre as an ethereal writer with suspect capacity to implement his campaign promises. As the campaign unfolded, both of us refined and shifted our attacks. Mike Stewart repeated the mantra that his record showed he could perform. He would say, “Don’t read my billboards. Don’t read my signs. Don’t read my book. Read my results.”

Keeping Mike Stewart at Bay

While Rick Eyre was clearly emerging as my best-defined opponent, I was actually less concerned about him than I was about Mike

Stewart. Eyre had a devoted base of strong conservatives, and I felt certain he would get through the convention. I wanted to win the convention, but at the very least, I had to take second. I felt confident in a primary election that my less strident positioning would allow me to beat Eyre. Stewart, on the other hand, was a sunny-dispositioned, well-liked county commissioner, plus a former teacher. The polls showed I got a healthy share of strongly conservative voters, but I got a strong majority of the somewhat strong Republicans and moderates. If I allowed Stewart to erode me there, the race for second at the convention could get very close. The primary difference between Stewart and me was on taxes. I took the position that I did not see a need to raise taxes. Stewart stopped short of such language. During a debate in St. George that was sponsored by the Utah Motor Transport Association, something happened that really affected me. One of the questions came from Wayne Winters, a member of the highway commission for more than twenty-five years. He stood in the middle of the audience, raised an inch-thick stack of green-bar computer paper above his head, and then, holding onto the first page, allowed the subsequent pages to cascade to the floor. He said, “This is the backlog of unmet transportation needs. I want to know how you’re going to finance them.” I’ve never forgotten that visual. It was one of those defining moments along the campaign trail when one sees firsthand—and in a startling way— some of the most critical problems facing the state. Wayne was quite articulate in describing the challenge. Importantly, it provided an indelible reminder of the problem, and I dealt with it in a big way during my third year. I often told Wayne Winters he contributed greatly to my education on roads. As he always did, Richard Eyre referenced the applicable chapter in his book. I indicated we would need to keep the economy growing. Mike Stewart referenced raising the gas tax. The next day in the Deseret News, the headline was: “Stewart’s Ready to Hike Taxes for Light Rail; 3 of His Foes Aren’t.” 1

1. Don Rosebrock. “Stewart’s Ready to Hike Taxes for Light Rail; 3 of His Foes Aren’t.” Deseret News, 19 April 1992.

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DEFINING MY POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

This became a pivotal moment because it allowed me to position myself between Eyre and Stewart. In my first term, we didn’t raise taxes for transportation, but it became clear to me it was necessary, and in the second term, I put together the Centennial Highway bill to answer Mr. Winters’ question. It was the most significant commitment to building infrastructure in the state’s history—$3.5 billion, including forty-one major projects statewide. It was planned to take ten years, though it took longer. But this experience indicated to me how campaigns are an important part of the public policy process. As we approached the next critical point in the election, party caucuses, The Salt Lake Tribune carried a poll that ran April 13, 1992. The poll showed Merrill Cook (who was running as an Independent) as the preferred candidate among 16.4 percent of Utahns. Rick Eyre was at 15.5 percent, I was at 12.8 percent, and Mike Stewart was at 2.7 percent. The undecided were 42.5 percent.2

Party Caucuses

Over the years I organized for the party caucuses many times. I knew how to do it well. The difference this time—I was the candidate, not the campaign manager. However, our team knew what to do.

In 1992, Utah had roughly two thousand voting districts. The Utah Republican Party organized each of the voting districts with a chair, vice chair, and a secretary. It was their job to find a suitable place to hold the gathering. Usually, they were held in a private home or public building. Most of the neighborhood caucus (sometimes referred to as mass meetings) attracted twenty to fifty people. The meeting agenda included watching a prerecorded program played by public television that featured the state party leadership lauding the virtues of Republicanism. Then the Democratic party leadership made their pitch. Following the television broadcast, the attendees would elect new district officers and then move to the real business of the meeting, the election of delegates to the state Republican and county Republican conventions.

Every campaign organization for statewide offices and congressional seats had organized to help their supporters be elected as delegates. Some campaigns had elaborate systems to help them. The process is simple. Attendees are nominated by other attendees. Each of those nominated make a short speech as to why they should represent the rest of the voting district at the state Republican convention. Often, those seeking to attend the convention will be asked to disclose which candidates they will support. A vote then occurs. It is a highly informal process —in some cases, the local Republican officers pass around paper to write who the attendees voted for as a delegate. After the ballots are collected the organizers of the meeting walk into another room and count the ballots. In other meetings attendees raise their hands. In 1992, the party caucuses were to be held on Monday, April 27. Statewide in 1992, approximately 3,500 delegates were to be elected in two thousand separate voting districts. Two days before the party caucuses, The Deseret News ran a front-page story reporting that I had pulled ahead of Rick Eyre in the polls.3 When respondents—regardless of political party—were asked to choose between only Leavitt and Eyre, I led 34 percent to Eyre’s 24 percent. Among Republicans, I had a two-point lead over Eyre. This was a big momentum booster for our campaign. The Sunday newspapers ran a full-page ad, paid for by my campaign, with a long list of endorsements, including all the legislators I had at that point. The ad was headlined: “Quality jobs, quality education.” Finally, the caucuses had arrived. That night Jackie and I hosted our voting district in our home. Jackie was elected as a delegate, and I chose not to run. A Richard Eyre supporter Richard Snelgrove, who lived in our district, ran telling people he was “undecided.” I had to roll my eyes. After the meeting, we went to the office where the campaign staff was calling our workers to get

2. Mark N. Trahant. “Utah Races: Most Voters Undecided. No Candidate Attracts More Than 17 Percent.” The Salt Lake Tribune, 13 April 1992 3. Bob Bernick Jr. “Race for Governor is Wide Open with No Clear Leaders in 2 Parties.” Deseret News, 25 April 1992

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a sense of how we had done. There was no way to get an accurate read, but it felt pretty good. We had at least connected on our share and could now start the real battle, which was for the hearts of 2,500 delegates. Due to the number of high-profile races and the amount of money being spent in the U.S. Senate race, delegates would be wooed more aggressively than any in Utah’s history. Bud Scruggs and David Magleby, a professor of political science at Brigham Young University, conducted a study of the caucuses and election of delegates. Bud was an aspiring professor needing to publish, and David was his mentor. Their plan was to exit poll the participants as a means of getting an idea of how the state convention would go. The study found that caucus participants are more likely to be strong partisans, women, welleducated, middle-aged, and members of the Church, rather than general election voters or persons from the same party who voted in the general election. And, because of the significant races, the attendance at the meetings was higher than normal. The report further stated, “Because both parties had several contested races, we expected to find a high degree of candidate activity in identifying prospective delegates, mobilizing neighborhood support, building coalitions with supporters of other candidates, and other delegate-maximizing tactics. Instead, we found most caucus participants attended out of interest in their party rather than as a result of campaign recruitment; that few delegates left the caucuses committed to a slate of candidates; and in spite of record-high, pre-convention campaign spending, the caucuses were characterized largely by the absence of candidate-driven maneuvering.” The report didn’t match our experience in the field. Frankly, I suspect people didn’t tell the survey takers the truth. It is hard to imagine too many people admitting they went to a caucus to elect a specific candidate. Plenty did, and many were elected as delegates. The BYU study concluded that after the caucuses, Eyre had support of about 38 to 40 percent

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of the delegates; we had 33 to 35 percent and Stewart about 20 percent. One statistic of significance is the number of teachers elected—more than 9 percent of the delegates. Winning the support of the teachers was an enormously important part of my pre-convention strategy.

County Conventions

With the party caucuses over, the county conventions began. Once again, all the candidates were required to join in a traveling road show, moving from county to county several nights a week. In order to hold all twenty-nine conventions between April 26 and the state convention in June, two conventions were often held in one night in neighboring counties. One convention would start around 6 p.m. and the second would start at 8 p.m. The candidates and their teams would put up signs outside and inside the venue. When the convention attendees were inside, the signs would come down, and teams would drive to the next town to set up. The candidate would await his or her turn to speak, and then drive to the next convention. Every candidate would give essentially the same speech at each convention. In short order, the entire traveling band could give the others’ speeches, including their jokes. On one occasion, as a good-natured prank, one of the candidates gave his speech in Kanab and headed to Panguitch for the Garfield County convention. His opponents followed in order of their speaking arrangement at the first convention. The first candidate got to the second convention just in time to speak. Knowing the second candidate was right behind him but not yet there, the first candidate gave the second candidate’s speech nearly word-for-word, including his jokes. The second candidate arrived, walked straight to the podium, and delivered his stump speech. When he got to his punch lines, nobody laughed. It completely disoriented him. The entire troop of campaign workers got a good laugh out of it, though. There were, of course, rivalries and disputes along the way, but for the most part, people responded in a respectful way, and many friendships were cemented.

DEFINING MY POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

I always took one of my children with me to the county conventions so I could spend some time with them. When it was Chase’s turn to accompany me, he sat on the front row of a large auditorium while I sat on the stage, waiting for my turn to speak. He was about eight. When Rick Eyre approached the microphone to give his speech, Chase grabbed one of his signs, turned to face the crowded auditorium, and gave them a big thumbs down. Mike Stewart leaned over to me and said, “I’m gonna buy that boy an ice cream.” Each campaign developed signature ways of getting attention. The mega-buck Senate campaigns of Joe Cannon and Bob Bennett spared no expense; Joe offered rides in a hot air balloon and Bennett grilled steaks. I had been through county conventions many times before in managing campaigns, so I knew the circuit like the back of my hand. I personally attended the majority of the conventions, but I also knew that spending a day to drive to some counties just wasn’t worth the effort, and that a candidate was a lot better off staying in the urban areas raising money or visiting state delegates. While some counties elected state delegates at the county convention, most of the delegates were elected at the caucuses. We developed a strategy where I called each of the state delegates in the smaller counties on the phone and talked with them for a while, then sent a representative to the county.

The Incredible Work of LaVarr Webb

At critical junctions in the campaign, LaVarr and I would sit in the conference room of the Leavitt Group office and talk for a couple of hours, sorting through the options and priorities. Others would often join us. I found a memo in my papers spelling out our organizational concept. It was titled: “The Next Two Months.” LaVarr became a one-man policy shop, and he could simply pump out work at an astounding rate. He is talented in many ways, but his most valuable skill during the campaign was to consolidate good

thinking and put words on paper. LaVarr almost single-handedly gave the campaign substance. For the two months between the caucuses and the convention, we had to produce a steady stream of materials for delegates. We were also developing policy papers and responding to requests from dozens of groups.

Getting to Know the Delegates

From the night after the party caucuses until the state convention, it was all about those 2,500 people. Our pattern was to arrange small meetings with delegates at breakfast, lunch, and in the evening. Most days the first meeting was at 7:30 a.m., and then in the evenings, unless we had a convention, we tried to have one at 6 p.m. and another at 8 p.m. In between those times, I was either on the phone with delegates or raising money. The delegate meetings were generally held in an office, restaurant, or public building. We tried to have some simple refreshments, a banner, and some material there, but for the most part, it was about looking people in the eye, talking, and listening. It was grinding, retail politics. It was not unusual for me to spend five or six hours a day in small group meetings, getting to know the delegates. I developed a strategy to make these meetings more of a conversation. I would begin with a fifteen-minute introduction to give delegates a sense of who I was, why I was running, and what I stood for. We would then do forty-five minutes of Q & A. The process would repeat itself over and over each day. Sometimes we met with a dozen delegates; other times, only two or three.

Keeping Track of the Delegates

It is essential in a campaign to meet and get to know as many delegates as possible, and that is where Rob Glazier came into play. As part of his job, Rob was to keep track of the status of every delegate—2,500 of them. We needed to know which ones we had met and which ones we had not. It was important to know who had committed to supporting us and who was supporting our opponents. It was a massive undertaking.

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To do this, Rob divided the state into areas and appointed a staff person over each area. That person was responsible for organizing the delegates I needed to see when I was in that area. Matt Anderson and Mason Bishop were the area directors. We asked Kirk Green, a good friend of mine who had worked as the number-two man at the Utah Office of Economic Development, to organize our state convention efforts. This is where scheduling was important—but scheduling for a campaign is a nightmare. I quit keeping a schedule myself, and each day, KayLin Loveland provided one for me. Campaigns are, by nature, near chaos. There are inevitable mistakes, meetings missed, people who get offended. You just have to keep moving forward and go with the flow of things, and hope that 80 percent right is better than what one’s opponent is doing. Fundraising was an ever-present pressure. It was often hand-to-mouth—payroll presented difficulty, and we had to push toward collecting pledges when our media payments had to be made. I don’t think I ever prayed to win the campaign, but financing the effort was a different matter. The fact we were able to raise the money is one of the true miracles of my life. I suppose it is like many miracles—we just worked and worked every day, and somehow, when things seemed desperate, something would happen.

An Important Political Lesson

We had made a strategic decision to refrain from formally announcing the support I had from legislators until just before the state convention. On May 7, we played that card. We’d talked about it enough publicly that it didn’t feel like a new piece of information, but we felt that actually releasing it would give us a boost right after the caucuses and before the county conventions.

I had been careful to get signed endorsement cards from every single legislator except Kevin Garn. Kevin had committed to support me the first time we met, which surprised me and made me feel a little uneasy. It felt uncomfortable for me to go

back and ask him to sign a card, so I just called him on the phone and said, “Kevin, I’m going to release the names of legislators who support my campaign, and I want to make sure you are willing to be listed. I have not asked you to sign a card like I have the others, so I want to reaffirm your willingness to be listed.” Kevin told me he agreed. What happened the next day was an important political lesson for me. We released the names during a news conference. Right after, Eyre held a news conference and disputed my claim, saying legislators were telling him that they supported his campaign. He gave the media the names of Kevin Garn and Merrill Nelson. Rather than focus on the fact I had all but a few of the legislators supporting me, the media focused on the dispute. Eyre was effectively able to take away the strength of the announcement by turning it into an argument. Kevin Garn had been quoted as saying he supported both of us.4 It was clear to me he had made some stupid commitments to Richard and didn’t realize he would be held publicly accountable for them. I think Richard knew Garn supported me but exploited the softness of his commitment in a clever way. Garn knew he had made a mistake and felt a need to make a significant campaign contribution to get out of the doghouse. We needed the money badly enough I was willing to let him out. Merrill Nelson, on the other hand, really surprised me. I had spent a fair amount of time in Merrill’s home getting to know him and his wife. He had signed an endorsement card several months prior. I called him on the phone to ask him about it, and we had an uncomfortable conversation. He basically said, “Yes, I did sign the card, but since then I’ve had conversations with Richard Eyre, and I like him too.” There was little reason to make more of an issue out of it. I told him I’d take him off the list, but in the future he might do better to let people know when he changed his mind.

4. “GOP Candidates Firing Shots in Heated Gubernatorial Race.” The Salt Lake Tribune, 23 December 1991

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31 A Big Bet, a Running Mate, and the State Convention As June 1992 arrived, every resource of the Mike Leavitt for Governor campaign was focused on gaining support among delegates for the State Republican Convention and preparing for the convention itself. This included two significant strategic decisions with longer term implications. The first was whether to make a significant investment in media before the convention to position me better coming

out of the convention. The second was the selection of a lieutenant governor running mate. Getting through the convention but losing the primary election would be a hollow victory. Based on previous experiences, I knew the Republican electorate would quickly form an opinion after the convention on which candidate could win in November. We needed to not only do well at the

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convention—we needed strength in the public opinion polls I knew would be released the weekend after the convention. Moving the polls at that point would require advertising. We believed making a significant investment in campaign advertising before the convention would benefit the campaign post-convention. Although we had enough money to get through the convention, we did not have enough for the needed advertising. Jackie and I had money saved to replace our eight-year-old Dodge Caravan. I asked her how she would feel about spending our savings to fund the purchase of billboards and radio airtime for the three weeks before the convention. We talked at length about it. We were in good financial condition; we had no debt; our home was paid for. Although I was unwilling to take on debt to fund the campaign, I was willing to draw on our savings. I felt optimistic about getting through the convention. We reached the conclusion that if I could go into the primary election with a strong position in the polls, it would not only make it easier to get our savings back but also help finance the primary. During the second week of June, Jackie and I personally loaned $20,000 (the car money) to the campaign. In addition, $20,000 was borrowed from the Leavitt Group. We spent all of it on billboards and radio advertising. It was enough to sustain a noticeable showing for three weeks of advertising at a level we believed could break through. It was a big bet, and had I not survived the convention, it would have been a total loss.

Choosing a Running Mate

In Utah, the governor and lieutenant governor candidates run as a team, and the decision had to be made in advance of the convention.

I asked Nolan Karras to help assemble a list of names from which I would select my running mate. Several names were on the list, some more serious than others. During the second and third weeks of June, I developed a spreadsheet listing the names under consideration and the criteria I had developed. My first obligation was to choose somebody

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with adequate experience to be governor. Then, I wanted someone with whom I had good chemistry. I also didn’t want a lieutenant governor who would spend a lot of time worrying about his or her political future, and I wanted a person who could carry a share of the policy and social burden. Finally, it was important he or she be an asset in getting through the convention and primary. My initial list had people from each of the five biggest counties and a couple from rural Utah, as well as people from government and from business. Several people who later served in key roles in the administration were on the list. The subject of gender was not a formal part of the selection criteria, but it was on my mind. The state had never had a woman as governor or lieutenant governor, and it appealed to me to be elected with one. On June 17, Merrill Cook, though he would not have a convention as an Independent, announced he had selected Orrin Hatch’s sister Frances Merrill as his partner. The announcement came as a surprise and added some focus to the gender question. I assigned weighting to each criterion and scored each name as a way of giving the decision a discipline. The numerical score was not the basis of a decision but a way to create perspective. My first move was to eliminate names. In time, I decided that my top two candidates were Mike Stewart and Olene Walker. However, Mike Stewart was my preference only if he dropped out of the race and pledged his support for me prior to the convention. Otherwise, I was convinced that Olene Walker, who was a candidate for the 2nd Congressional District at the time, seemed best suited for my vision of the job. The practice of the governor and lieutenant governor running in tandem was relatively new, introduced only eight years earlier when Governor Bangerter and Val Oveson ran together. In that election, the candidates for lieutenant governor were named after the convention vote had been announced. There was no set rule on when to announce one’s choice, but it had to be made public before the convention could be adjourned.

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1 Olene Walker, running mate 2 State Republican Convention

3 Local caucus meeting

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This was a delicate problem. My top two choices were candidates for other offices. There was a strong possibility both would not be available, and I would need to reconsider. We developed a strategy requiring that I begin discussions with both independently.

Talking to Mike Stewart and Olene Walker

Nolan Karras had been a real booster for Olene. He had worked with her in the legislature, where she had served for eight years in the House of Representatives, including time as majority whip. Olene grew up in Ogden, graduated with a bachelor’s degree in political science from Brigham Young University, earned a master’s degree in political theory from Stanford and a PhD from the University of Utah. After her service in the legislature, she directed the state Division of Community Development and worked as vice president of Country Crisp Foods. She was regarded as a tough negotiator in the legislature, one who always seemed to get her way. I asked him to call her and introduce the idea of a discussion. The meeting had to be completely confidential, but getting our schedules to align, with both of us feeling we couldn’t waste a moment, made a meeting difficult. We were finally able to arrange a midafternoon meeting at the lunch bar of a ZCMI store. Olene was careful not to make any commitments; any word alluding that she was considering such a move would have been hurtful to her chances as a candidate. With little more than a week to go, I approached Mike Stewart at a meet-the-candidate event held at the Sandy City Library. I asked if he would be willing to talk with me privately after the event. After the meeting, there was no place to talk without being conspicuous, so we agreed to meet behind a service station a few blocks away, without staff. We stood beside a car wash talking for nearly an hour. Some of the meeting was spent talking about our observations of Rick Eyre; Mike Stewart made it clear to me he could not support him. Stewart was open to an agreement to support one another,

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but not willing to concede that he was going to be eliminated. We left with the subject on the table, but nothing else. While things were not dead with Mike Stewart, it did not seem promising, so I decided to pursue my conversations with Olene more seriously. I arranged for her to ride with me to a meeting in Wasatch County. We drove—just the two of us—and had great conversation. She dropped me off and picked me up an hour later, and we returned together. She disclosed to me that she was having discussions with Rick Eyre, though she didn’t know if she was interested. In my mind, I left the ride having made a direct and serious expression of interest but no invitation. As I found out the next day, in Olene’s mind, an invitation had been issued. I felt a need to finish the discussion with Mike Stewart. My memory is a little vague on the exact sequence of events, but in a second meeting, Mike told me he did not feel good about abandoning his supporters at that point. I then proposed an alternative. He could stay in the race, and I would simply announce that my pick was still a candidate, and the name would be made public after the convention. My logic on such an offer was that people would quickly deduce it was Mike Stewart, and it would make his delegates targets for us. Mike Stewart said he was inclined to accept but wanted to think about it overnight. It is uncertain to me if Nolan Karras and I had a miscommunication or if he just took it upon himself to call Olene and tell her I was going in a different direction, thinking she needed to know. But the outcome was that Olene, and her family, felt angry and frustrated. In her mind, I had made an offer. She had been through the emotionally-taxing exercise of deciding to pull out of the Congressional race, and I was reneging. I simply could not sleep that night; I remember waking Jackie to talk about it. It was clear to me

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that I had made an error. I decided I simply had to tell Mike Stewart it was a mistake and unfair to both of us. When I got to the office, there was a call from Mike Stewart. He told me he’d had a restless night and couldn’t live with the deal. I was not required to tell him my own feelings. I simply accepted his decision. By that time, I was aware of the miscommunication with Olene. I called her and told her there had been some sloppy communication on our part, and I was sorry; however, I did want to extend an invitation now. Still miffed, she asked, “Are you sure? I don’t want to go through this again.” Given her view of our conversation, she deserved to be irritated. I honestly felt I had been clear that I needed to think about things before I issued an invitation. She told me she would think about it for a little while and call me back. A few hours later, she called me back and accepted. I worked side-by-side with Olene for the next eleven-and-a-half years. That episode was the only conversation in that entire period I remember having any edge at all. My proposal was a little bumpy, but our partnership was as smooth as glass. On June 26, in a news conference in the governor’s boardroom at the state Capitol building, I announced Olene as my choice. Four days earlier, Mike Stewart announced Dixie Minson would be his partner. Rick Eyre made it clear he would wait until the convention. I suspected Rick and Mike had been talking but I also sensed how Mike felt toward him and didn’t think it would happen.

Final Days Before the Convention

In the final days before the state convention, everything felt like it was moving in our direction. The billboards we ordered were up; our radio campaign was running. Neither Eyre nor Stewart was doing anything with paid media.

The newspapers did their last coverage before the convention. The weekend before, Dan Jones had conducted a delegate poll, which showed we were ahead of Eyre, with just more than 40 percent of the delegates. The Deseret News ran a story about the first financial report, revealing we had raised $358,500 to Eyre’s $336,300 and Stewart’s $110,200. Each campaign had already spent most of what it had raised. Going into the convention, I had $17,400 in cash, Eyre had $1,000 and Stewart had $2,500.1

“

Are you sure? I don’t want to go through this again.

”

The Republican State Convention was held June 26–27. It was the biggest convention in years, and is best described as a political circus. In addition to the presidential race, there were four Republican candidates in an open U.S. Senate race and three in the open race for governor, as well as many candidates running in congressional races. Prior to the convention, Joe Cannon and Bob Bennett had spent nearly $4.5 million dollars combined. (Cannon had spent $3.7 million and Bennett had spent $725,000.)2 The convention can also be described as among the most difficult two days of my life.

Setting up for the Convention

The Republican Central Committee had decided to hold the convention outside Salt Lake City for the first time in memory. The site was the newly built county fair arena in Ogden. No one knew for sure if all the rural Utah delegates—whom I counted on as part of my support base—would travel there. On Friday morning at 6 a.m., campaign teams were literally lined up to begin a land rush for signage space. Since everything but the placement

1. Bob Bernick Jr. “Spending Tally Reaches $800,000 in GOP Gubernatorial Campaign.” Deseret News, 20 June 1992. 2. Bob Bernick Jr. “Cannon, Bennett Hold Huge Money Leads.” Deseret News, 18 June 1992

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of candidate booths was allocated on a first-comefirst-serve basis, things got rather competitive. The space was filled quickly.

office, and he was fuming. I had never seen LaVarr as angry as he was then. The party chair, Bruce Hough, declined to do anything about it.

Kirk Green had the responsibility to organize our efforts. We used the same idea I had used at my father’s 1976 governor’s race convention: our booth was set up like a living room to be inviting and welcoming. Our command center was a small travel trailer set up behind our booth.

Candidate Presentations

Dozens of floor workers had been recruited and trained by our campaign. Their job was to move around the convention looking for delegates who were undecided or with whom I had not visited. We used a system of colored dots, again a system similar to the one we used at the convention when my father was running for governor. When candidates were identified as Leavitt supporters at the convention, they were given a colored dot for their credentials. Likewise, those who had made up their minds for another candidate were given a different color and told they could wear it if they didn’t want Leavitt floor workers to keep contacting them.

Once the convention started, the members of our team worked the delegates relentlessly. I stood in our tent, and they brought people to meet me. It went on for hours.

While our delegate canvass and the Dan Jones delegate poll had both indicated we were doing well, my gut told me Eyre and I had topped out and Mike Stewart was starting to move.

Platform Committee Debate

Friday night is the platform committee debate, which always brings out the ideological extremists. It was especially true this year, with the most active of this group being Mills Crenshaw and a group called Grass Roots. In the early stages of the platform discussion, members of Grass Roots began circulating a tabloid aimed directly at me. It was mean, ugly, and intended to hurt me with the conservative and undecided delegates. It was nameless and didn’t have a single fact in it—just groundless assertions about my ideology, and speculations about why different groups supported me. For example, it labeled me as pro-abortion. It was just awful but shouldn’t have been surprising to us. Our campaign appealed to the party to stop its distribution. I remember seeing LaVarr standing in the doorway of a trailer the party was using as an

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The next morning, we hosted a delegate event featuring Jake Garn. We had made a big push to get delegates to stop by for breakfast and get a picture with him, and it turned out to be an excellent way to see delegates—we fed nearly a thousand people.

The candidate presentations started in the late morning. Just before noon, I went into the trailer to review my remarks. Each candidate had fifteen minutes to make a presentation, which included the nomination and seconding of the candidate, the candidate’s speech, and some type of demonstration to generate a feeling of excitement about his or her campaign. It is a silly tradition resembling a student body election where each candidate does a skit. In retrospect, I think my disdain for the tradition may have played a role in creating a serious disappointment. The only word that can accurately describe our presentation is lousy. We had a group of student performers from Southern Utah University who used imitation microphones to lip sync to music. The number was not well choreographed, nor had it been rehearsed sufficiently. Consequently, nothing worked, and we looked like amateurs putting on a high school assembly. In addition, I made a stupid mistake. I wrote a speech and tried to give it with inadequate rehearsal. My papers got messed up on the podium, and I ended by awkwardly lapsing into my normal stump speech. It was a bad speech. Eyre did a big production, choreographed by some professional friends of his. He walked around the audience like a talk show host. I didn’t see it, but I’m told it was effective. Joe Cannon ended with Lee Greenwood appearing magically in a spotlight singing his hit song, “God Bless the U.S.A.” It was a showstopper.

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Ted Stewart apparently gave the best speech of the convention. It allowed him to come out of nowhere and nearly win the second spot in the primary, despite having spent only $53,000. If he had garnered twenty-eight more votes, Bob Bennett wouldn’t have been elected senator. However, Bob was able to keep up with Joe’s spending in the primary and win. I’m sure Ted would not have been able to. When the presentations finished, the voting started. I was exhausted emotionally and physically, and I could feel things had moved against us during the two days of the convention. The negative flyer had made us defensive, and the people who were undecided had started breaking toward Mike Stewart.

Convention Results

I retreated to the small trailer behind our booth. People came in and out for a while, but they soon left for the arena to wait for the votes to be counted. I could feel disappointment in the air. I sat alone, with a feeling of sadness and a strange kind of loneliness. It was one of the most memorable moments of the entire process to me. I sensed I would come out of the convention, though given how badly I had performed, elimination seemed conceivable. Most of all, I just felt sad and let down by how badly we had done. Our workers had two-way radios, with the base unit in the trailer where I was. I could hear all the conversations between members of the team. I heard them report that Eyre was still trying to pick a lieutenant governor. He had met with Ted Stewart for some time and then Mike Stewart for nearly an hour. Then I heard a voice on the radio: “The Eyre people are celebrating.” A moment later, somebody else with a radio confirmed my suspicion: “Eyre took first place, and we are second.” The results were read. We had lost our lead by thirty-eight delegate votes and took second place. Enough to qualify for the ballot, but still a bitter disappointment. Those thirty-eight delegate votes gave Eyre standing, an argument that he was the frontrunner and party favorite. It was a hard moment.

I sat for a few more minutes in the trailer, needing to escape the moment. Then I decided to join the team and walked around to the rear of the building. A giant garage door was open, leading to a runway to the arena. My campaign team and Jackie were sitting on chairs at the end of the runway just inside the arena. I stood in the mouth of the giant doorway, listening. Moments later, Richard Eyre emerged and was recognized to announce his running mate. He said, “I’ve asked Steve Densley to be my running mate.” My team erupted in joy. We thought he was going to choose Colleen Densley, Steve’s wife. She was Utah Teacher of the Year, and an able person who would allow Eyre to claim support and legitimacy with mainstream educational thought. In one of the strangest reactions I can remember, I suddenly started jumping in the air, literally jumping up and down, yelling, “Yes! Yes! Yes!” The Eyre folks were clapping, and our team was exuberant. Our reaction was indicative of our need for something to turn out better than anticipated. Our optimism returned. For some insane reason, the Republican Party held a fundraising dinner in Salt Lake City just two hours after the convention ended. We were all just exhausted but felt we had to go, especially since I had finished second. I had to show the flag. Jackie went with me in a show of great support. Our analysis showed that we had indeed gone into the convention with a slight lead among the delegates. However, the negative flyer and the fight over it raised questions about both Eyre and me. Mike Stewart had been the beneficiary; during the convention he rose in support from the low teens to the low twenties. He had gotten a disproportionate share of the undecided voters. Without the ugly controversy and a better showing on my part in the speech and presentation, a lot of those would have gone to me. Eyre had a committed base. My erosion gave him a thirty-eight-vote margin. All in all, we had succeeded adequately, but it was a tough day.

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32 A Real and Right Campaign Chuck Sellier; "Real "Real and Right" Ad; Thirty Days Before the Primary Election; Republican National Convention The day after the June 28, 1992 Republican State Convention was a Sunday. I awoke long before anyone else in the house, feeling the presence of a familiar anxiety that often accompanied my sleep during the campaign. Knowing the day would soon be filled with the hectic bustle of getting five children ready for church, I went for a walk, choosing what Jackie and I called the McConkie route because it passed Oscar and Carol McConkie’s house.

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As I walked toward Sunnyside Avenue, the sun peaked over the Wasatch Mountains. I was tired and still feeling the contradiction of relief and disappointment. We had succeeded in qualifying for the primary election but let a decisive win at the convention slip through our hands. However, the smell of fresh morning air and the sense of grounding that comes by walking through a familiar neighborhood began to revive my sense of perspective and optimism. By the time I had arrived home my mind

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had cleared. Yesterday no longer mattered. I would be one of the two candidates seeking the Republican nomination for governor of Utah in a primary election that was only seventy-three days away, and I faced a well-known and skilled opponent, Richard Eyre. During the next week, the Eyre campaign did all the right things to advance its first-place convention finish. I could feel the chilling effect it had on my ability to raise money; people weren’t sure I was going to win, and what most people want to do in a campaign is back the winner. Twelve days after the Republican convention, our decision to put the family’s savings into early media buys began to pay off. The July 10, 1992, headline in the Deseret News was: “Leavitt Leads Contenders in Utah Governor’s Race.”1 I had the support of 21 percent of six hundred respondents, Cook had 19 percent, and Eyre had 15 percent. Thirty-one percent were undecided. The poll results boosted our confidence and momentum. It was exactly what we had hoped for when we made our risky media buy four weeks earlier.

Launching the Grassroots Campaign

My team and I collected ourselves and then held campaign events, most of which focused on fundraising. Although I was ahead in the polls and had good momentum, the campaign was out of money and we had payroll to meet. Payroll was a constant pressure. Every day we had to be raising money. Nobody just sends money in—every dollar, at that point in a campaign, had to be deliberately sought out and collected.

“

Leavitt Leads Contenders in Utah Governor's Race.

”

On July 15, we were ready to launch our grassroots campaign. Up to that point, our efforts had been focused on only 2,500 people. In the primary,

the target was a statewide population of hundreds of thousands. We kicked off this phase of the campaign with a statewide effort involving United States Senator Jake Garn. This was the first time Jake had publicly stated his support for me. The endorsement had tremendous news value—not only was a sitting U.S. senator taking sides in a primary election, but he was also choosing between two people who had each managed a campaign for him. Rick Eyre had been Jake’s campaign manager when Jake defeated Wayne Owens in 1974. Although Jake had won when Rick was the campaign manager, the experience was apparently not a happy one. Jake was always careful to make the point that his relationship with Rick had nothing to do with his endorsement of me. He would say he had encouraged me to run for the senate, but when I was not interested in that, he concluded he would do what he could to help me run for governor. We announced Jake’s support by going to several communities, pounding in a lawn sign for a photo op, and then moving to the next community. We started in Bountiful at Mayor Bob Linnell’s home; it was a logical spot because Davis County is such a Republican stronghold. We attracted several photographers and reporters from newspapers and some television stations. During the convention, it was nearly impossible to get reporters to cover campaign events. Now that the races had narrowed, they were willing to at least write and report on events like these.

Media Firepower

Shortly after the poll came out, I faced an unexpected decision and a turning point in the campaign. LaVarr Webb and I were feeling the need to have more media firepower at our disposal, so we hired Bob Henrie of R&R Partners to be our advertising agency. Bob Henrie was a talented person, and I had known Bob from earlier dealings we had when he worked at Savage Industries. He was the one who came up with the line, “Real and Right,” which we adopted as the tagline of our campaign.

1. Bob Bernick Jr. “Leavitt Leads Contenders in Utah Governor’s Race.” Deseret News, 10 July 1992

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We laid out a media budget for the primary election, which included $45,000 to produce a couple of television ads. The production costs made up more than 30 percent of our entire budget.

Chuck Sellier

One afternoon, Chuck Sellier came to see me. Chuck was a client and friend of Max Farbman. Chuck and I had first met, for maybe twenty minutes, in a small room at West High School after a campaign event. The purpose of the meeting was to get acquainted. Max thought Chuck might be willing to help the campaign. Sellier was, at heart, a writer, with a couple dozen bestselling books, but he also owned a movie production company and had more than a hundred movies and many television shows to his credit. He wrote the novel, The Life and Times of Grizzly Adams, which later became a successful series on NBC. In 1981, he was nominated for an Emmy. Chuck and I just talked for a while. He seemed prepared to help but there was nothing explicitly stated. This time when I saw Chuck, he told me he wanted to get involved in my campaign and felt he could help by producing our television spots. In campaigns, everybody wants to be a strategist and write television spots, so I explained to Chuck we already had an agency, and we were going to depend on it.

Chuck then essentially said, “I’ve devoted my entire career to moving people with film, and I can do this better than anybody in this town—and I’m willing to pay for the entire thing myself.” Chuck now had my attention. I knew little about him, but as we talked, I began to gain a better sense of his proposal. He was doing a weekly television show called Miracles and filming it in Salt Lake City, so his crews and equipment were already paid for. He also described the need to reach people at the level of their values with good storytelling, and then explained the strategies he used to connect to those values. All of this began to ring true to me. I really liked Chuck and understood what he was saying, so I told him I needed to think about it for a day or so. I went to see Bob Henrie and explained the offer. If Chuck paid for the production, it would

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mean we could spend the money on television time, I reasoned. To my surprise and dismay, Bob said, “Either we’re your agency or we’re not. We can’t work like that.”

“

Mike, I promise you, we’ll do this until we get it right. I won’t let you down.

”

I couldn’t understand why he would take such a position. It wasn’t costing him money, because the money would still be spent on advertising, and he was going to sub-contract the filming work anyways. But Bob would not budge. I spent a couple of days stewing about it. Finally, I called Chuck and asked him to come see me. I said, “Chuck, you’re making an incredibly generous offer. The problem is I don’t know you at all. My gut tells me you’re really good, and we need to do this, but I just need you to know, we’ve got to get this right.” Chuck said, “Mike, I promise you, we’ll do this until we get it right. I won’t let you down.” On the strength of my gut reaction, I called Bob Henrie and told him we’d like to have him do the rest of the work, but we were going to have Chuck do our spots. Bob declined, and we terminated our relationship. We called Greg Jarrard and asked if he’d like to continue doing our media buy and miscellaneous agency work. He had felt hurt when we went with R&R but was willing to rejoin us. Accepting Chuck’s offer turned out to be one of the most important decisions we made during the campaign.

Establishing the Campaign’s Tone

Another critical moment took place a short time after we made the decision to change advertising agencies. My campaign team and I had planned a

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1 Chuck Sellier, Tim Nelson, and Rick Larsen in a production meeting working over scripts. 2 Filming campaign commercials at Laird Park

3 Tim Nelson and Rick Larsen, producers of Real and Right Campaign with Jackie and Mike. 4 Education photo shoot at Hansen Planetarium

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retreat to outline our primary strategy at my family’s ranch in Loa. I had asked Eddie Mahe and LaDonna Lee to help us for a day. We gathered in a room in the basement of the Road Creek Inn, a former co-op building my family had converted into a small hotel and restaurant. Eddie led the discussion. We listed strengths and weaknesses in both our campaign and Eyre’s and then inventoried our messages and our opponent’s messages. At the conclusion of several hours, Eddie said, “You have nothing but raw name identification. You are extremely vulnerable right now. If Eyre or Cook defines you with a negative campaign, it will stick.” He went on to say Eyre was in the same situation. “You have a basic decision to make. The safe way is to brand him first.” I knew what he was saying, but I didn’t want to run a negative campaign, and I expressed that. Eddie said, “We need to take a break and come

back in an hour. During the break, Mike and Jackie need to go on a walk and make sure this is the way they feel. Starting a campaign without defining your opponent has substantial risks, and you need to decide if you’re willing to take them.” Jackie and I walked around Loa for about an hour. It frankly didn’t seem like a hard decision. I don’t think either of us was interested in running a negative campaign, and I wasn’t sure it was a good tactic even if I was inclined to do it. We proceeded with our planning sessions. A major component of the strategy was to get into the market fairly early with ads defining who I was and why I was running, so if—or when—Eyre or Merrill Cook started running negative ads, people would have at least some evidence that it was not true.2 The meeting in Loa was important in another way—it was the first time Eddie Mahe and Chuck worked together. They were a terrific team and really liked each other. In fact, they worked together on several other campaigns over the years.

2. LaVarr Webb, “Mike Leavitt’s memorable decision to not go negative.” Deseret News, 11 April 2014.

Filming our first commercial at Laird Park. We gathered friends from the neighborhood to serve as extras.

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The “Real and Right” Ad

As soon as we got back from Loa, Chuck and I started working to create the first ad that would define who I was to the public.

Because of his help, Chuck became one of the most important people involved in my political success. Not only did he produce commercials, he taught me the importance of reaching people with good storytelling. He would say, “It’s got to be guttural—people need to feel it and understand it inside.” I knew he was right. People often decide on the basis of instinct or how a candidate makes them feel. We need to move people inside, emotionally and intellectually. For this first ad, Chuck simply wouldn’t accept a political-sounding script. He wanted the first spot to communicate to people in a way where they would feel like they knew me. He just kept pushing and pushing to know what I believed. We spent hours trying to find the right angle. One day, I began to tell Chuck about my grandfather and the story he told me of a farmer down the road who had more land than he could afford. “That’s it!” Chuck said. We spent hours laboring over a twenty-eight-second script. I can still remember the lines: “When I was a boy, there was a farmer down the road from my grandfather who always had more land than he could afford and a new John Deere tractor. I said, ‘Grandpa, how can he do that?’ He said, ‘Mike, if we stick with what’s real and right, we’ll be farming long after he’s been repossessed.’ And you know what? He was right. A few years later, the tractor was gone and we were still farming. Real and right—it’s what I teach my children. It’s how I’ll govern this state.” Chuck hired Tim Nelson, a young moviemaker, to direct the commercials. We went to Laird Park at dusk, or what Chuck called “magic hour,” when the light was perfect and created the soft, warm feel he wanted. He insisted on film—not video—because it added texture and depth. We recruited neighbors to act as extras. The scene had kids running around the park, people talking, and my family sitting at a picnic table. I sat on the edge of the table and spoke right into the camera. It was as though the viewer had walked up

to the table, and I turned to greet him or her. We did thirty-one takes. Chuck then had original music composed to “sweeten” the spot. It was a remarkably beautiful piece of work, and it was brilliant as a way of introducing me. Without stating it blatantly, the ad spoke of my values, my family, and what was important to me. The ad underwent a series of focus groups, a process I came to know well over the years. Chuck had to know how people would react. The truth is, it saved us a couple of times. One ad in particular that I remember featured Jackie and me on a porch, talking about why I was running. I thought it was another great spot—but the focus groups thought it was lousy. Focus groups can’t pick a winner but it can warn of a loser. Two weeks before we started playing the Real and Right ad, I walked in a parade in Utah County. I had a banner and did my best to wave and seem personable. People would look at me out of a sense of curiosity, but with absolutely no sign of recognition. Once the “Real and Right” spot had run for a while, I walked in another parade in Utah County. I had never experienced more warmth. People reached out to me. They would shout things about tractors and say things about being “real and right.” It was a profound moment. I had been introduced to the public in a way that reached them viscerally. We had achieved the Sellier standard of “guttural.”

Several More Ads

As the summer of 1992 unfolded, we created several ads based on our needs at the time. For example, we needed to counter Eyre’s charge that I was captive to the Utah Education Association, so we needed a message with an edge. We produced an ad on rewarding good teachers and firing bad ones. The public loved it; teachers hated it. It created a little controversy, which actually helped me because it allowed me to demonstrate my independence. The teachers publicly called on me to take the ad off the air; I told them I wouldn’t. I knew the teachers weren’t going to vote for Rick, and I also believed the ad was right. (Later on in my administration, we passed legislation to make it easier to fire bad teachers, but even that was probably not bold enough.)

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6 3

1-6 On the campaign trail 7 Bob Linnell, Mike, and Jake Garn campaigning

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We also did an ad on quality jobs. I was filmed walking through an industrial site in western Salt Lake City, with sparks flying and machines whirring. The message was about providing quality jobs in Utah so our children wouldn’t have to look outside the state for work. It also tested well. Real and right; reward good teachers, fire bad ones; and quality jobs—those were the three messages we used for the primary election.

The Final Thirty Days before the Primary Election

I had been working for several weeks to get Mike Stewart to endorse me. Finally, on August 6, he did. The next day we got more good news. The Deseret News reported my lead over Eyre had increased slightly, 47 percent to Eyre’s 36 percent.3 We developed campaigns to specific constituencies. For example, Mike Stewart wrote letters to all public officials in the state. The letter began, “I wish I were in the governor’s race. I was beaten fairly and squarely. During the campaign, I had a chance to observe all the candidates . . . I’ve decided to support Mike Leavitt.” Our campaign formula was straightforward in August. I spent most of my time fundraising to pay for the advertising that carried our message, and then there was debate preparation and speeches to give. Each day we did a media-oriented event focused on a different group or issue. On August 17, we launched an effort targeting law enforcement officers. Two days later, we began a focused effort on home educators. There were more than a dozen of these targeted efforts to reach people on issues that were important to them.

saw it as a week out of state, away from our primary focus. I thought it would break our fundraising momentum. But as the date of the convention drew nearer, we decided I needed to do something to diminish any advantage Eyre could gain from it. I knew I couldn’t just show up in Houston, so we called Governor Bangerter and asked if he could arrange to get me invited to a Republican Governors Association (RGA) event. He obliged by calling Chris Henick, who was the executive director of the RGA. Governor Bangerter told Chris he wanted to help me, and he asked if Chris could arrange some kind of invitation. Chris called me, and we developed a plan whereby he would issue an invitation to an RGA reception. I stayed in Utah, participating in debates and fundraisers, until the second or third day of the convention. We arranged for Merrill Bean, an Ogden car dealer related to Dave Owen, a friend who worked for my campaign, to fly me to Houston aboard his private jet after a campaign event. We left about midnight. With the time change, it was about four in the morning when we started our descent into Houston, with the lights of the city

Republican National Convention

The 1992 Republican National Convention was held August 17 to August 20 in Houston, Texas. I made a deliberate decision to not seek election as a delegate, but Eyre had. He clearly saw the national convention as a time for him to gather a lot of attention from Utah media, raise money, and be at the center of the action. I

3. Bob Bernick Jr. “Shea now Leads Hanson; Leavitt Pulls Further Ahead.” Deseret News, 7 August 1992. https://www.deseret. com/1992/8/7/18998312/shea-now-leads-hanson-leavitt-pulls-further-ahead

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stretched out in front of us. It felt like we were on a secret mission, flying under the radar to catch our opponent by surprise—which is exactly what we did. We had arranged to stay at the hotel where the Utah delegation had rooms. We had time only to shower and clean up before a breakfast scheduled for the Utah delegation. The Utah delegates were gathering in the lobby when I walked in. People were completely taken by surprise to see me, especially the Eyre people, who were out en masse at the national convention. Within a couple of minutes, Richard and Linda appeared. When he saw me, I was talking to a couple of reporters. He couldn’t contain his displeasure at my presence and demanded to know why I was there. “I was invited to attend a Republican Governors Association event, and I thought I had better respond,” I said. Richard then walked right into it. “What event? I wasn’t invited to an RGA event.” The situation was becoming uncomfortable, so I just said, “I just know I was invited, and I plan to attend. It will be a chance for me to meet other governors.” As I walked out of the hotel, he complained aloud about my showing up. The media smelled a story. We gave them information about the event I would be attending and left.

“

It’s clear the RGA thinks Leavitt will win.

”

The event was a reception, and there were hundreds like it every day of the convention. However, this one was sponsored by the RGA and began at noon. When I arrived, a couple of Utah news crews were there to tape my entry. Just as I entered the reception, a fortuitous thing happened—Richard Eyre showed up. He walked right up to the reception table and with cameras rolling said, “I’m Richard Eyre, and I should have been invited to this reception.”

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The person at the reception table looked through all the name tags, and with cameras still rolling said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Eyre. I don’t have a name tag for you, but I could make one.” While they made a name tag for Richard, I went into the reception with Norm Bangerter to see if I could meet a few other governors. I think there may have been a couple, but not many. I didn’t stay long because I had arranged to go to the Astrodome for interviews with reporters from each of the television stations in Salt Lake City, who saw my unexpected arrival at the convention as an interesting story. Each of them asked me why I was there. I repeated the same story. The Republican Governors Association invited me to attend an event, and I felt it would be a good idea for me to attend. I added I could not stay long. They each asked me if Richard Eyre had been invited. I said, “You will need to check with RGA on that.” The interviews appeared on all three networks during the noon newscasts, and my visit led the news at six and ten. I was back in Salt Lake City by then for evening campaign events. The stories were spectacular from our point of view. I remember Charles Sherrill’s report for KSL-TV. He said, “It’s clear the RGA thinks Leavitt will win.” Then the report cut to the clip of the person at the reception desk saying to Richard, “I don’t have a name tag for you, but I could make one.” In addition to this story, Richard got some bad press about the fact he hogged the telephone in the Utah delegation area, preventing other delegates from using it. And then there were editorial cartoons in the Tribune depicting Richard jumping in front of the speaker’s rostrum to get attention. Rather than getting a boost from the convention, Richard’s personality had become an issue. It felt like a turning point in the election. Not only was I ahead in the polls, there was a growing expectation I could win. This fueled our fundraising and allowed us to increase our media buys.

33 Closing the Deal My status as the frontrunner was evident to Merrill Cook and Richard Eyre. Under the theory that “my opponent’s opponent is my friend,” the Eyre and Cook campaigns began collaborating; both saw themselves as the logical alternative. It became clear that Cook felt his Independent campaign had a better chance of capturing moderate Republicans if Eyre won the nomination, and for Eyre, any help he could get in winning the election was good. He would worry about Cook later. As candidates, we continued to define ourselves and our opponents. Eyre continued to portray himself as the substance candidate, referring to his book and the specific proposals it contained. He tried to build a contrasting image of me by arguing I hadn’t been specific on issues, but the attack never really got legs because of the volumes of issue papers and issue summaries I had produced that were sitting on reporters’ desks. We decided not to attack Eyre on any of the obvious places offered by his book. What Eyre needed most in the dog days of August was a fight, and I was resolved not to give it to him. We were ahead and needed to maintain a solid offense by staying on the issues we had carved out.

Increasing Momentum

A debate moderated by Rod Decker of KUTV became a flash point in the campaign. The three of us—Leavitt, Eyre, and Cook— appeared on Decker’s program, Take Two. At

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the time, it was the highest-profile public affairs show in the market, airing Sunday night after the 10 o’clock news. During the debate, Merrill Cook attacked me, with both barrels blazing, on a number of topics—whirling disease foremost among them. I remained calm and handled the questions well, I think. Cook, however, was defined by his attacks, not by me. He was even worse during the breaks—he got himself so worked up he started to perspire profusely. Richard Eyre tried to minimize me by saying, “Mike’s a nice young man, but he just does not have the experience to carry this off.” He did it in such a condescending way that it confirmed the instinct people had about his persona. For days people commented on that debate; I had people approach me on the street to comment on my composure and their amazement at both Cook and Eyre. My momentum was starting to increase. In the final week of August, Cook began running an aggressive series of negative ads against me, attempting to tie me to the insurance industry. He aggregated the contributions I had received from insurance-related businesses—mostly Leavitt Group businesses—and alleged I was beholden. He told the Deseret News, “Mike has so much insurance money financing his campaign. If Mike doesn’t make it through the primary, I just couldn’t let this opportunity go by without saying something about it. It’s run the (Leavitt) ad now or maybe lose that opportunity.”1

Governor Bangerter Endorsement

On August 28, during a news conference held in his office at the Capitol, Governor Bangerter officially announced his endorsement of me. The Tribune reported the governor as saying: “‘Mike Leavitt receives my unqualified endorsement as

the most informed and prepared candidate to lead the state of Utah in the future. “‘There’s no rule, against an incumbent endorsing a candidate before the primary,’ he said. ‘It’s a governor’s prerogative, as it is any other person’s.’”2 It was highly unusual for a sitting governor to take sides in a primary, and the endorsement was not without controversy. In the Deseret News, Eyre was quoted as saying, “I feel that Republicans deeply resent a governor who tries to anoint his own successor. I think the governor may have cost Mike Leavitt his chance to win today. I see it as kind of the last nail in the coffin.”3 The endorsement ignited a lot of antagonism among Eyre supporters. A letter written by Bruce Hough, the State Republican Party chairman, fueled the negative sentiment. “It has been hard for us to decide to speak out on this issue because we have supported Governor Bangerter through good times and bad,” he told the Deseret News. “But trying to handpick a successor prior to a primary is not what Republicans should do.” He went on to say such an action is “an insult to voters and destructive to the Republican Party.”4

“

Mike’s a nice young man, but he just does not have the experience to carry this off

”

I was surprised by Bruce Hough’s response to the endorsement. Just as Governor Bangerter said, there is no rule against an incumbent endorsing a candidate—public officials do not renounce their First Amendment rights when they take office. I think a combination of things contributed to Governor Bangerter’s willingness to publicly endorse me. First, many of Eyre’s supporters had

1. “Cook Plans to Campaign Despite Lack of Primary.” Deseret News, 25 August 1992 2. “It’s Official: Bangerter Endorses Leavitt—Or GOP Primary Winner.” Salt Lake Tribune, 29 August 1992 3. Lisa Riley Roche. “Bangerter Makes it Official – He’s Backing Leavitt.” Deseret News, 30 August 1992 4. “Bangerter Accused of Breaking Promise.” Deseret News, 6 September 1992. https://www.deseret.com/1992/9/6/19003489/bangerter-accused-of-breaking-promise

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become Bangerter’s critics, and it was a way to ensure they didn’t succeed, as well as a way for Bangerter to defiantly show his independence. I think Bangerter also felt betrayed by Rick Eyre’s defection to the short-lived campaign of Jon Huntsman Sr. in 1988, whereas I had been extremely loyal to Bangerter during the darkest of times. I also like to think he thought I’d make a good governor.

(Gov.) Norm Bangerter and (former Education Secretary) T.H. Bell have trust in me, endorse me. I’m glad people trust me so much they contribute.”5

It’s hard to know how much Governor Bangerter and Senator Garn’s endorsements affected the outcome of the race. They did have a significant effect on my confidence however, and I will always appreciated their willingness to do it.

My belief in federalism dominated my responses. It was an issue I felt instinctively drawn to, and I continued to address it during the campaign. It was generally raised in the context of human service or public land issues, where I spoke of Utah needing greater flexibility from the federal government in providing welfare and other services to its citizens. I also spoke of wanting to lead the nation’s governors in a crusade to restore the proper balance between state and federal governments. I expressed concern about the backseat role state governments were being forced into by the federal government.

Eyre’s Attempt at a Controversy

The Eyre campaign attempted to link the governor’s endorsement of me to the fact that we were raising a lot more money than they had. Eyre’s campaign tried to take two negatives and make a positive by defining Eyre as the underdog outsider against the less-qualified, anointed candidate of the status quo. We didn’t back down from the controversy. In fact, if we were going to have a fight in the last week of the campaign, this was a good one to have.

The Deseret News reported: “Eyre says a new issue emerged last week—Leavitt campaign contributions and spending. The latest campaign filings show that Leavitt has raised nearly twice as much money as Eyre. ‘And he’s raised it in large sums, $10,000 and $20,000,’ says Eyre. ‘The question I have, and I raise this with no malice, is whether Mike can be independent from the special interests, the lobbyists, and others who are so powerful in the current establishment. He sought their money, their endorsements. Will Mike fight for campaign reform, term limitation, reporting of gifts—all those things?’” My response was, “If you can’t raise the money, you criticize the one who can. Richard has tried to draw me into this debate from the first day of the race. I’m glad people like (U.S. Sen.) Jake Garn,

Candidates and the Issues

During the final days before the primary election, the media began running stories profiling the candidates and summarizing our positions on issues.

“Virtually all of the creative and effective programs addressing serious problems originate at the state and local levels,” I told the Deseret News. “But because of the failure of the national government’s policies, states are being forced to jettison critical programs and services.”6 (Within a year of being elected, I made good on my commitment to this issue. I began organizing efforts to revive federalism as a more prominent factor in American government.) On the issue of health care, my stance was: “The private sector, not the public sector, should provide health care. But governors should bring all players together to create a solution that provides health care access to all. Because of Utah’s healthy lifestyle and proportionately fewer citizens without health care, we can solve this at the state level.” In a question about light rail, I noted that at this point in time, I would vote against using tax dollars to fund light rail. However, the right-of-way needed

5. Bob Bernick Jr. “Cook Camp Could Affect GOP Primary.” Deseret News, 5 September 1992 6.“Leavitt Vows to Fight for States’ Rights.” Deseret News, 1 September 1992

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to be preserved. “Mass transit will, and must, come. But we need a cultural change before citizens accept it.” In contrast, Richard Eyre felt light rail was a “tax-and-spend solution,” and that “few would ride the train.” He said he was the “more conservative Republican” who would reunite the Party, “drawing back tens of thousands of people who otherwise would vote for (Independent Party candidate) Merrill Cook. Pat Shea will be the Democratic nominee; the general election will be decided on debates, and I can out-debate Pat, but he’d devour my GOP opponent.” He again lobbied aggressively for school vouchers, saying the Strategic Plan for Education would cost too much. When it came to the problems facing the Department of Human Services, Eyre’s solution was, “Not larger government bureaucracies but stronger families. A new volunteerism program to apply manpower rather than money to problems. A ‘time telethon’ where people would donate time. A ‘round-up’ program: when buying groceries, round up purchases to the nearest dollar, with the extra change going for need programs.”7

Primary Election Day and Night

Tuesday, September 8, finally came. It was the first time my name had ever appeared on a statewide election ballot. I had been through election day many times as a campaign manager, but never as a candidate. As the 8 p.m. closure of the polls approached, I felt the lack of confidence any candidate feels until the ballots are counted. Primaries are especially hard because you just don’t know for sure who will show up. I at least had the comfort of knowing we held a substantial lead on our tracking polls. The day was filled with the bizarre episodes that always seem to occur on election day. We received calls from supporters throughout the state who

reported having been phoned by someone saying I had nearly killed a man in a bar fight. Of course, the allegations were false, but the calls were being made, and when you get a half-dozen unsolicited calls from supporters reporting the same thing, it sets off alarms. I’m fairly sure I know what the calls were referring to. Another candidate in a different race had such an incident in his background, and I think the caller was simply misidentifying the person in the story. I cite this to only serve as an example of the kind of things that happen on election day.

“

To feel and see and touch Utah at its soul has been rewarding.

”

I voted with Jackie at Bonneville Elementary School, where we were met by reporters and television cameras. It’s likely after that I went to play nine holes of golf. Years ago, I established a round of golf on election day as a symbol of acquiescence to the will of the people. Our election-night headquarters was at the Little America hotel in one of the presidential suites on the seventeenth floor. The Republican Party was having a big party downstairs in the ballroom for all the candidates and party people. I arrived a little before 8 p.m. at the hotel and sat alone for a time in the giant suite. I don’t generally like solitude, but it seemed good for a few minutes that night. I could see the lights of the city arrayed across the valley, and I thought back to the night Dad and I crossed the Point of the Mountain on the way back from Cedar City after announcing his candidacy for governor. We had been overwhelmed by the task those lights represented. Now here I was, in the same position as my father was. I imagined the thousands of people who were casting their votes as I stood there. My future was truly being defined by them at that moment.

7. “Chart: Governor-Republican.” Deseret News, 29 August 1992 https://www.deseret.com/1992/8/29/19002099/chart-governor-republican

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Our suite overlooked the former Rick Warner car dealership, where Rick Eyre had his campaign headquarters. Rick had run a very good campaign. He truly understood campaigns, and despite the fact I had come to have the normal feelings of competitiveness toward him, I admired his skill. However, some members of my immediate and extended families had developed pretty serious issues with Eyre’s campaign, and I know with certainty things were the same at the Eyre house. They have a big family, and it’s impossible to go through a campaign where the stakes are so high and not have some resentment build up against the opposition. One nice thing about elections is the finality they bring. When the votes are counted, you either win or lose and then life goes on. We were all glad this one was about to end. As we overlooked the headquarters of the Eyre campaign, it was not hard to imagine what they were thinking. Later in the evening, my kids went over to the Eyre headquarters with their friends to do the kind of things kids do in a campaign— pranks. A civil war of sorts had developed between Leavitt supporters and Eyre supporters at East High because our children attended school together. All of that healed rather quickly, I think.

Republican Party Nominee

The election coverage had started as I stood looking at the lights. My family arrived; the kids ate food and got restless. The room began to fill up as the first returns came in about nine, giving me a comfortable lead of a couple hundred ballots. The trend continued through the course of the night.

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By 10 p.m., the outcome was clearly established. Olene and her family had joined us in the suite. We moved to the ballroom so we could be there when Dan Jones projected us the winners on the news—I had won the Republican Party nomination. While we hadn’t won the championship, we had advanced to the playoffs. As we entered the ballroom, the atmosphere was jubilant and exciting. It was a moment we had certainly earned during the previous sixteen months. When I gave my first speech as the Republican Party’s nominee for governor, I spoke of gratitude and resolve, being careful to weave in our five most important themes. But while my speech may have been the highlight of the evening for me, the fact Marie Osmond was there was more memorable for most everyone else. The rest of the night was a blur of interviews and embracing all the people who had helped us get to that point. About 11:15 p.m., Rick Eyre called me to concede. Concession calls are never comfortable, but it was an important milestone on the path. “To feel and see and touch Utah at its soul has been rewarding,” I told Dan Harrie of the Tribune that night.8

Election Percentages

The high number of races created enormous interest in the election. More than 46 percent of registered voters had cast a ballot—far more than in past election years. Olene and I garnered 56 percent of the vote to Eyre and Densley’s 44 percent. “Primary Election

Results.”9 Of the twenty-nine counties in Utah, we won twenty-one with at least 60 percent of the vote. Our closest race was in Utah County—Eyre’s strongest base of support. We won it by four percentage points: 52 to 48 percent. Our next closest race was in Salt Lake County where we won by six percentage points: 53 to 47 percent. Eyre’s second strongest base of support was in Davis County. However, our margin of victory there was significant: 57 to 43 percent. Our narrowest victories were in urban areas, but when it came to rural Utah, Olene and I won by significant margins. In Wayne County, home base of the Okerlund side of my family, and in neighboring Garfield County, we received 77 percent of the vote. In Iron County (my own home county), San Juan, and Emery counties, we received more than 70 percent of the vote. In Washington County, we won by 20 percentage points. In Piute County, 325 people voted, and we won 263–62. The population was small in Piute County, but I was heartened by the support of its citizens. Cache County was an area I worried about because of split loyalties to Jackie and her family and the Eyres. In addition to Jackie’s family being from Newton, two of her three sisters lived in Logan with their families, and they both played prominent roles in the community. Although the Eyres lived in Salt Lake, Rick grew up in Logan, attended Utah State, and had strong family ties there. He and Linda had established a Joy School in Logan, which was popular among families with young children. I knew some people felt torn between their loyalties, but we came out on top by a margin of 54 to 46 percent.

Rick Eyre

Rick Eyre had run a good campaign. He had developed a core group of supporters, but he had done so at the cost of distancing himself from the mainstream. Being behind in the polls he was forced to become aggressive.

8. Dan Harrie. “Governor: ‘Heir,’ Newcomer, Cook to Duke It Out.” Salt Lake Tribune, 9 September 1992 9. Deseret News, 9 September 1992. https://www.deseret.com/1992/9/9/19003824/primary-election-results

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Perhaps media commentaries provided the best summary. In an article titled, “What Lessons for Utah from the Primary Vote?” written the day after the election, the Deseret News editorial board summarized the race this way: It’s hard to know what conclusions, if any, to draw from the decisive victory of Mike Leavitt over Richard Eyre in the GOP race for governor. It was a race between two candidates without previous experience in elective office. Though Eyre enjoyed healthy leads in early opinion polls, his popularity quickly faded despite his buoyant personality and unique campaign style. Why? Was it because it was hard for Eyre to claim to be a political outsider after having served as a consultant to other candidates? Was his vision of Utah’s future couched in too many sweeping generalities? Were some of his specific proposals too unique? Or was personality the deciding factor? About all that’s certain is that the outcome of this race won’t inspire many other candidates to seek office on the basis of a book about Utah’s problems and prospects.10

In a more biased account, Kent Shearer, a former Utah Republican Party chairman, who wrote a weekly column for The Enterprise, expressed the feeling of the Party’s mainstream: “I tire of Eyre.”11

Race Surprises

I don’t think anybody was surprised by the outcome of the gubernatorial race, but the night had produced some serious upsets. For starters, Bob Bennett defeated Joe Cannon, who by that point had spent nearly $6 million of his own money on his campaign. Bob had also spent his own money heavily, but frankly ran a more skillful campaign, peaking at just the right moment. Joe peaked at the convention when Lee Greenwood sang, “God Bless the U.S.A.”

In an even bigger surprise, Stewart Hanson Jr. beat Pat Shea for the Democrat nomination for governor. Though Hanson was behind in the polls, the pro-choice community had turned out in massive numbers and took everybody by surprise. The field for the 1992 general election was cast. As the Republican candidate for governor, I would face off with Merrill Cook, of the Independent Party, and Stewart Hanson Jr., the Democrat nominee.

10. “What Lessons for Utah from the Primary Vote?” Deseret News, 9 September 1992 11. Kent Shearer. “A Political Poem.” The Enterprise, 24 August 1992

Debate at the University of Utah. From left: Merrill Cook, Mike Leavitt, the moderator, and Stewart Hansen Jr.

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34 The General Election

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The celebration of primary election night was short-lived. We were exhilarated but also exhausted. I gathered with my campaign staff the morning after our win to begin charting our next steps. It was September 9, 1992. In just fifty-four days, the general election would be held.

Stewart Hanson Jr., a pro-choice Democrat, won by appealing strongly to a base of abortion-rights voters. I felt Pat Shea would have had a chance at attracting some people in the middle, but now he was out of the race. For the first time, I began to see Merrill Cook, the Independent candidate, as my most significant opponent.

The primary election had produced some surprises. I had expected Pat Shea to win the Democrat Party nomination. Instead,

My win in the Republican primary election over Richard Eyre made me the leading candidate. A Deseret News poll taken just before the primary,

THE GENERAL ELECTION

but not released until September 13, added to our fundraising momentum. It forecast the race at Leavitt—44 percent; Merrill Cook—26 percent; and Stewart Hanson Jr.—17 percent.1 Utah is a Republican state, and people intuitively concluded I would likely win. With just fifty-three days to go, our campaign resembled a football team entering the fourth quarter of a championship game with a comfortable lead. But that didn’t mean we could let our defenses down; my opponents were behind and running out of time, and it was clear that both would train the focus of their attacks on me. Our strategy committee arrived at four imperatives. First, we needed to consolidate the Republican party. We needed Richard Eyre and his supporters to vote for Mike Leavitt, because if we began losing Eyre supporters to Merrill Cook, victory was not automatic. Our second imperative was to raise the money required to fuel a solid campaign. There was no mileage in preserving money in a close primary election, and therefore our bank account was empty. Third, because our opponents had every reason to gang up on me, we had to control the agenda by raising new issues and ideas. Finally, we had to avoid mistakes. Bad decisions on how we responded to their attacks could put us on our heels. Likewise, becoming too aggressive could backfire as well. We had to remain forward-leaning in measured ways.

The Independent Party

The governor’s race was directly impacted by the campaign for the United States presidency. Ross Perot, a wealthy businessman from Texas, had formed an Independent Party, qualifying on the ballot in all fifty states. This gave a big boost to Merrill Cook’s run as an Independent. Perot announced his candidacy in February 1992 on Larry King Live. Soon he was polling almost even with President George H. W. Bush and former

Governor Bill Clinton. Perot’s politics bridged the gap between Republican and Democratic ideologies; he was opposed to gun control, but pro-choice. He supported the Environmental Protection Agency and sought to balance the federal budget, while also taking a protectionist stance on trade, being firmly against the outsourcing of jobs. Perot appealed to the conservatives and moderates who were skeptical of the establishment. Merrill Cook had a template if he could imitate Perot. In June 1992, Perot was the frontrunner in the polls with 39 percent to Bush’s 31 percent and Clinton’s 25 percent. There were other similarities between Cook and Perot. Both used personal wealth to finance their campaigns; both were critical of traditional political parties. Each had edgy personalities and populist platforms. The existence of Perot’s campaign allowed Cook to harness the energy of the national effort, using many of the same volunteers. It was the perfect atmosphere for a third-party effort.

Debates

My overriding themes during the general election campaign remained the same as those I advanced in the primary election. In every speech or appearance, I continued to hammer the same messages: Quality jobs, quality education, quality of life, fostering self-reliance, and limiting government growth.

My opponents and I debated many times over the final weeks, with the first debate on September 19 and the final one a week out from the election. The television debates were, of course, the highest stakes. At each one, I highlighted a message theme as a means of controlling the agenda. The September 19 debate, for example, was on taxes. I highlighted $10 million of surplus money that the legislature had allocated, in the final hours of the 1992 session, to fund a new tax commission building. I told the crowd I would have vetoed that action. This raised eyebrows because Governor Bangerter, who had endorsed me, had been a strong proponent of it.2

1. Bob Bernick Jr. “Republicans Hold Healthy Leads over Major Foes.” Deseret News, 13 September 1992. https://www.deseret. com/1992/9/13/19004487/republicans-hold-healthy-leads-over-major-foes 2. I had actually told Governor Bangerter beforehand that I was going to take this position. He understood my position and my need politically to differentiate myself from him.

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I committed in the primary that if there was a surplus while I was governor, it would go toward putting computers in schools, and that we would find another way to fund the tax commission building. Another example was the following week when the Utah Education Association endorsed me. There is a saying among people in the media that when “dog bites man,” it is not news, but when “man bites dog,” it is news. This was “man bites dog” news— the Deseret News reported the UEA’s endorsement was “the first time in anyone’s memory” the UEA endorsed “the Republican candidate for governor and not the Democratic candidate—even though the Democrat, Stewart Hanson Jr., says he’d consider a tax increase for education while the Republican, Mike Leavitt, says he won’t.”3

Emergence of Health Care as an Issue

Health care emerged as a significant issue in the presidential election, which naturally seeped into the race for governor. When presidential candidate Bill Clinton introduced health care reform as a topic for debate in the presidential race, it had not been an issue in the Republican or Democratic primaries in Utah up to that point. Frankly, it wasn’t something I had spent much time thinking about. Merrill Cook saw the opportunity and made it an issue in the gubernatorial race. I remember well when health care reform first emerged at a debate—I felt unprepared to address the issue and was unresponsive to Cook’s attacks. Not only did he attack me for being part of the insurance industry, and hence unable to be part of the solution, but he had a plan of his own. He proposed using the state’s worker compensation fund as a pooling mechanism for health insurance for the states uninsured, which was not a bad idea. But then he also proposed a pay-or-play system where small businesses could either buy private health insurance for employees or pay up to five percent of pay-

roll into the state fund for employee insurance. I knew this part of Cook’s solution was problematic, but I didn’t have a solution of my own to offer. Over the next few days, I dug into the issue, asking for assistance from several health policy people I had access to. The position we carved out acknowledged the problem and listed a series of policy reforms I favored. I committed to initiate a process to look at the big picture. Many of the reforms were enacted as part of Utah Healthprint, which I initiated during my first two years in office.4

Whirling disease

Briefly in early in October, we were thrown off message when whirling disease, an ailment that causes fish to swim in a circle and ultimately die, was found in our aquaculture facilities at Road Creek Ranch. It created a controversy among fisherman and the media. With my emergence as the leading candidate, the issue continued to receive more attention in the media. The discussion revolved around the Division of Wildlife Resources and its employees, who were divided over how the division had handled the discovery of whirling disease on the ranch. When Tim Provan, the executive director, made the decision to keep the Road Creek fish operation running, some of his employees vehemently disagreed with him. They began leaking information to the wildlife media and colluding with my political opponents. They believed Provan had failed to take strong action because my father was a state senator and I was the leading candidate for governor. Tim was in an extremely difficult position. That the controversy would become part of the campaign was inevitable; there is little question the matter gained traction because of my public prominence. I had done all I could to separate myself from Road Creek Ranch—not only to

3. Bob Bernick, Jr. “UEA Strays from Long Political Tradition in Giving Leavitt its Sole Endorsement.” Deseret News, 10 October 1992. 4. The reforms included health insurance portability, which enabled employees to take their health insurance with them when they moved to a new job; increasing the age to twenty-six for optional coverage for dependents; tax deductions for health insurance costs; malpractice immunity for health professionals who provide charity care; uniform insurance forms; and processing and mandatory disclosure by doctors who have a financial interest in referral facilities. Years later, as secretary of health and human services, I was still working on many of the same issues. Given what I know now about health care, it was a responsible position to take. It got me through the campaign. Until that point, I hadn’t realized the prominent role health care would play during the first few years of my administration.

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1 Mike, Stewart Hanson Jr., and Merrill Cook being interviewed by KSL News. 2 Mike on election night

3 Dixie with Paul Henning, a family friend and supporter 4 Mike and family celebrating the announcement that he won the race.

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protect my campaign but to give my family a break. But it still followed me and my family for years. It was a painful episode for the entire family, especially my brother Mark who ran the fish operation. He took the brunt of the abuse.

Attacks from Merrill

During the first week of October, Merrill Cook ran ads saying I couldn’t fund my education reform package without raising taxes, that I was beholden to the health insurance industry because of campaign donations, and that I was a political crony who had been selected by the Republican Party to stop his tax-cutting initiative in 1988. LaVarr Webb, in his comments to reporters, deftly countered each accusation, then characterized Cook’s ads as “a last-ditch attempt by a desperate candidate who knows he is destined for another big loss . . .” In response, our campaign ran an ad saying that despite the attacks, we would not go negative, but we would continue highlighting our “real and right” initiatives. However, in the days following those ads, we would have reason to believe Cook could win the race.

An Odd Hiccup

In early October, we hired Dan Jones to conduct tracking polls. Each night, 150 people were surveyed. The results were rolled together with the results from the previous two nights for a total of 450 interviews, which was a large enough sample size to produce a plus or minus six percent, ninety-five out of one hundred times. The race had been steady with little variance from the primary onward. The media polls were consistent with our internal polls as well. Each night, Dan called me with the raw numbers. The next day, he would input the surveys into his computer and weight the results to approximate a perfect demographic distribution. For example, if there were more women than men surveyed, he would give the men who were surveyed slightly

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more mathematical weight in order to get a truer picture of what the overall electorate was thinking.

“

A last-ditch attempt by a desperate candidate who knows he is destined for another big loss . . .

”

Without explanation, a little more than three weeks from the election, my support on the Dan Jones nightly tracking surveys began to track downward and the support for Merrill Cook began to trend upward. Within a week or so, our lead had shrunk from more than a dozen points to five or six percentage points. Cook had been using negative ads, and until that point, there was no indication they were having much effect. The first couple of nights, we assumed the less favorable numbers were a function of small sample sizes. But then the trend continued. Dan Jones and I had a great friendship, which had developed during our many campaigns together. I had confidence in him and his methodology. His nightly call during the final weeks of the campaign had become a ritual between us. I used to joke with him and others about how dramatic he was when he called; it was like a spy reporting to headquarters. If the raw numbers were down, he would sound alarmed. If they were up, he was optimistic. The next day, after he had weighted the numbers, his demeanor would be different. When the numbers started moving south on us during this race, I saw no humor in his calls. My campaign faced an important strategic decision—should we counterattack Cook? On one hand, it would be crazy to know we were sinking without doing something to plug the hole. Discovering slippage early is exactly the reason a campaign does tracking polls. However, others who were also tracking the race were not seeing the slippage. Bob Bennett, for example, had been doing nine hundred interviews a night and found that I was still

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1-6 Election night victory celebration

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ahead. His polling, however, although conducted by a trained pollster, was not independent and therefore suspicious.

“

I think we could lose this race.

”

Normally, if a campaign begins to slide, there is an evident reason—an issue or controversy, maybe a big imbalance in the amount of media coverage one candidate has over another. However, those variables were not present. The numbers were falling, and we simply could not figure out why. For a couple of days we had emergency meetings. Eddie Mahe and Chuck Sellier were involved, as well as some people from the Republican National Committee. Not only was there no logical explanation, there was a difference of opinion on how to deal with it. Some felt strongly we should respond with aggressive counterattacks; others believed the Bennett numbers and felt nothing had changed. They argued that a sharp and aggressive approach against Cook would suddenly introduce a series of risks we didn’t need to take. About a week into this drama, I experienced what was clearly the lowest point of the entire campaign. I was exhausted physically and mentally. Dan Jones had called to tell me the numbers had fallen yet again. I went to bed but couldn’t sleep. It felt to me as if the atmosphere of discontent Cook had tried to foster with his Independent candidacy was taking root in the last three weeks of the campaign, and we were slipping uncontrollably toward a loss. The memory of the initiative campaign I had run for nonprofit hospitals guaranteeing tax-exempt status—where we lost a twenty-five-point lead in the last ten days—was with me. I had seen races make wild moves and it seemed evident to me that night that the same thing was happening here. Lying there in bed, I was despondent. I said to Jackie, “I think we could lose this race.” Part of the reason we felt so insecure during this period, I think, was the campaign had begun to feel stagnant. We had run the same ads for a couple of weeks, and while I was not falling, it was clear Merrill Cook was gaining more traction than

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Stewart Hanson Jr., who had no money and was quickly losing relevance. Finally, I was able to fall asleep. In the morning when I woke up, some of my despair was gone but not my worry. I called Dan Jones and said, “Dan, I have always trusted your numbers and made decisions by them, but the difference in results we’re getting from the Bennett campaign simply cannot be reconciled.” Dan was beside himself as well. “I’ve checked my samples, and I just can’t explain this. I think you need to get somebody else to do a brushfire survey to find out where you are,” he said. I was relieved Dan suggested a third measure. Nobody knows Utah demographic research like Dan Jones, but we both knew we needed another measure. I called a friend of mine, Todd Remington, who had a polling company in California. We had worked together in Washington, D.C., on the Reagan-Bush reelection campaign in 1984. I explained the situation, and he agreed to act immediately. He said he could be in the field that night and could turn it out in two nights. We decided to defer any change of course until we had the third survey, but began developing the Cook counterattack, hoping we wouldn’t need it. Two days later, Todd Remington called with good news. His poll was consistent with the Bennett tracking poll. We were able to continue with our original strategy and avoid the counterattacks. To this day, Dan Jones and I have no clue what went wrong during that ten-day period. Polling is not an exact science, and at times, there are unexplainable anomalies. I think we experienced one, and fortunately, we responded with caution. Despite this odd hiccup and Cook’s growing popularity, I was still able to stay ahead. In mid-October, the Deseret News asked, “Is Cook’s populism finally catching on?” By the time Cook declared his candidacy for governor in 1992, he had run unsuccessfully for seven state and local government offices. Support for his proposal for a staterun health care fund was gaining momentum. His approval/disapproval ratings were on par with President Bush’s, which meant his disapproval ratings were lower than those for Bill Clinton and Ross Perot.

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Political editor Bob Bernick thought he could eventually be a force to be reckoned with, but Ted Wilson, former mayor of Salt Lake City and the director of the Hinckley Institute of Politics, who ran against Cook in the 1988 governor’s race, said, “No matter how you look at it, Merrill can’t win. He can be a spoiler, costing someone else the race. But he can’t win. Utahns won’t elect an Independent or third-party candidate governor.”5 Two days from the election, the Deseret News/ KSL-TV poll showed me nine percentage points ahead of Cook.6

Fundraising and Spending

Thankfully, with each progressive step in the process, the money flowed a little easier. Campaign fundraising is a close cousin to venture capital in the business world—capital anticipates victory. Many people waited to see how the race developed before they committed their contributions; many of the trade associations and businesses with significant legislative interests fell into that category. However, raising money doesn’t happen automatically, and there were many days when we simply didn’t know how we were going to make payroll or a media payment.

Cook had spent nearly $700,000. Eighty-two percent of that, or $574,000, came from the candidate himself. The rest was made up of smaller donations ranging from $5 to $100. Hanson had spent nearly $400,000. He had received the financial support of labor unions.7

Endorsements

I continued to collect endorsements as election day neared, including the Utah Restaurant Association, the National Vietnam Veterans Coalition,

COUNTY RESULTS Leavitt: Cook: Hanson:

During the eighteen months of the campaign, we raised $1.7 million. I can attest that a candidate does not forget those who help them early. I can still remember the circumstances involved in many of the donations. Thankfully, we received a boost just after the primary. A lot of “smart money” came in the last week of the campaign. On October 28, finance reports indicated that our campaign had spent only $1.3 million on the race. Of that amount, I loaned $60,000 to my campaign. Additional donations came from private donors, the UEA, the Utah Public Employees Association, the National Republican Party, Franklin Quest, and Blue Cross and Blue Shield. 5. Bernick, Jr., Bob. “Is Cook’s Populism Finally Catching On?” Deseret News, 17 October 1992. 6. Bob Bernick Jr. “Leavitt, Bennett Leading; Pari-Mutuel Falls Behind.” Deseret News, 1 November 1992. 7. Bob Bernick Jr. “Leavitt has Outspent both Cook, Hanson.” Deseret News, 28 October 1992.

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60-70% 50-60% 40-50% 30-40% 30-40% 40-50% 30-40%

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United Families of Utah, the Coalition for Religious Liberty, the Utah Right to Life, Feminists for Life of Utah, and the Utah Home Education Association.8 Finally, On October 22, Richard Eyre publicly announced his support of me. He had held off because he wanted me to raise money for him to retire his debts. I agreed, so long as we could also raise money for Mike Stewart, who also had remaining debt. Then, on November 1, sixteen Democrats, including Kem Gardner, Oscar McConkie III, Lowell Bennion, Grethe Peterson, Dale Zabriskie, Rich McKeown, St. George Mayor Karl Brooks, and Cedar City Mayor Harold Shirley, announced their endorsement of me.9.

Closing Arguments

Campaigns bear a resemblance to arguing a case in court. There are opening arguments, cross examinations, and—as the final step before a decision by a jury (voters)—closing arguments. I concluded my closing argument by launching a weeklong communication campaign called “The First

100 Days.” I wanted voters to feel a sense of action as the campaign finished. To deliver our argument, we held events in every region of the state, and came out with a fresh set of television, radio, and newspaper ads, as well as a final Gubernatorial Express, our monthly campaign publication.

Transition Planning

During the early part of October, I concluded it was finally time to begin thinking about a transition plan. Olene and I met with Nolan Karras and asked him to form a small team to begin the planning. I asked Olene to represent us both in dealing with Nolan day to day, since I needed to remain focused on the election. A couple of weeks later, Nolan came back with a remarkably detailed recommendation that laid out—step by step—the decisions we needed to make and the actions requiring attention. His first recommendation was the early selection of a chief of staff. We spent time laying out criteria, and several days later, Nolan came back with some names to consider. The one I responded to immediately was

8. “Leavitt Gains Bevy of Endorsements.”Deseret News, 20 October 1992. 9. “16 Democrats Endorse Leavitt.” Deseret News, 1 November 1992

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Charlie Johnson—Governor Bangerter’s budget officer. I had known Charlie casually for several years and had admired him for spending time in government after his retirement. I had considered Charlie as a candidate for lieutenant governor but concluded taking somebody directly from the Bangerter administration would have some downsides. There were other talented people I considered. LaVarr Webb, for example, was a logical candidate; he had demonstrated extraordinary capability and complete loyalty throughout the campaign. However, I decided that the administration needed LaVarr in a different role. He is good with ideas, words, and strategy—more big-picture thinking. We had developed the unique capacity as a team to organize policies and put them on paper, and I wanted to make sure that capacity wasn’t lost. I had developed a pretty good understanding of the policy issues but had less experience with the actual budget and operational issues. Charlie had experience with both of those. After discussion and several days to think about it, I settled on Charlie, but only after having a candid and somewhat sensitive conversation about it with LaVarr; I could tell it had been on his mind. A couple of days after our conversation however, he raised the subject with me, saying he felt my instincts were reasonable. On Halloween night I called Charlie on the phone and asked if he would come to my house. When he arrived, I told him that I needed to prepare for the possibility that I might be elected, and that I had asked advisers to create a transition plan. Their recommendation was that I select a chief of staff before the election. Without requiring a commitment from him or me, I asked him to explore his interest in serving in the administration in that role. We talked for about an hour, discussing the various challenges the new governor would face. I really didn’t know Charlie all that well, so as much as anything, our visit was a time to get better acquainted. We agreed to talk more over the next couple of days. Before he left, I was comfortable he would be my first choice. I suppose the conversation stands out in my mind, because it was the first time I had reached beyond the tight confines of the campaign organization to discuss the formation of an administration.

Election Day Reflections

As I dressed for the day on the morning of November 3, 1992, I recounted for Jackie an experience from my childhood. On Christmas Eve, when I was only four or five years old, my dad had taken me shopping. As we were standing outside Cowley Drug on Cedar City’s Main Street, Christmas songs were playing through a loudspeaker, snow was falling, and people were rushing in and out of stores. “Tonight’s the night, isn’t it? I asked my dad. Election morning felt the same way—it had finally come. I had worked and worried for more than eighteen months, and it had finally come. I met the media at Bonneville Elementary School around 10 a.m. to cast my vote; the presence of reporters and cameras created an unusual sense of excitement. I also saw many neighbors there, casting their votes. Students watched as I did oneon-one interviews. Then I walked home. The cake was mixed and in the oven; all that was left was to see how it would turn out. We had done all that we could to ensure success in the election. The weekend before, my campaign distributed literature to 400,000 households. We had the phone lines running hot with calls encouraging people to vote. We had increased our media buy in the final two weeks.

I did my best to stay away from campaign headquarters, because I knew I wouldn’t be much help. Instead, I made calls to key supporters, thanking them and inviting them to join us in the evening.

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I could not help but reflect on the experience of the previous eighteen months. When I started the campaign, my supporters were family and a few close friends. There were more than a dozen prospective candidates for governor and most of them were much better known than I was. At the outset, the polls showed me at two percent—essentially dead last. The circumstances felt surreal. After months and months of hard work, we had done sufficiently well at the party caucuses, the convention, and primary election phases of the campaign to emerge the leading candidate in the general election. It had been long and difficult, but also empowering. The experience of listening to, and really hearing, all sorts of Utahns in thousands of visits and meetings in cities and towns across the state had refined me, taught me. I felt like a different person than the one that started down the path eighteen months before. I chuckled to myself thinking about what Jackie had told the Deseret News a few days earlier. “Either Mike will win and go on with his plans for the state, or our lives will return to normal. Either way, we’ll win.”10 Around 7 p.m., Jackie and I got the children ready. We had a little meeting in our living room. I told them the chances were good we would win, but not certain. If we lost, it was important to do it in a dignified and graceful way. I explained we would go to the Little America Hotel and watch the election returns upstairs, where we had been the last time. We loaded our 1984 Dodge minivan and drove to Little America to head to a large suite on the seventeenth floor, where nearly all the members of the campaign staff and committee were gathering. The feeling was festive. Three big television sets had been set up so we could watch the returns on the major networks. This was a big night in American politics, and one of the most memorable nights of

my life. A new president would be elected, as well as a new U.S. senator from Utah and twelve other governors from other states. When the election returns started coming in, we were ahead. Every time a new total was announced on television, the entire group cheered wildly. About 9:45 p.m., using exit polls, Dan Jones declared I would win the race. The results were Leavitt—42 percent, Cook—34 percent, and Hanson—23 percent. The local stations had asked that I make an appearance at the ballroom celebration during their 10 p.m. news program. I asked everyone to be quiet before I went downstairs because I had something to say. I told my family, closest supporters, and staff—who had made my cause their own, worked without restraint, and believed in me—of the feeling of overwhelming gratitude I had for them. Once I had concluded my remarks, what seemed like an army of law enforcement officers entered the room, each wearing their formal uniforms with the signature Utah Highway Patrol, rounded, Smoky Bear hat. They surrounded Jackie and me as we moved toward the elevator. People were cheering, video lights glared, cameras flashed. It was as though we had fallen into the current of a mighty river, and it was sweeping us away. I reached to grasp my mother’s outstretched hand as we passed but we lost our grip as the parade of patrolmen moved us along. It was a tender moment for both of us. A mother and her oldest son had communicated without words, both knowing from that moment on, our lives would never be the same. The second moment was in the ballroom of hotel. It was a madhouse; people were packed shoulder to shoulder, and each television channel had a temporary studio set up in the room. I moved to the podium, with my family and Olene’s family gathered around me. Bruce Hough, the Republican state chair, introduced me as the next governor of the state of Utah.

10. Joe Costanzo. “Utah has 3 Strong Choices for First Lady: Jackie Leavitt.” Deseret News, 31 October 1992.

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I remember nothing of what I said from the podium. If it was a planned victory speech, it has long been forgotten by me and everybody else—but the memory of the moment will linger forever. Taylor had organized our children and their friends to dump a large quantity of confetti on my head, like players dousing the coach with Gatorade after a championship game. It was their way of celebrating the victory, punctuating a moment we will never forget. I did a half-dozen media interviews and then moved toward the door, stopping every few feet to greet a friend or well-wisher. We moved through the hotel’s kitchen and, using a freight elevator, retreated to the suite where the crowd had finally dwindled to a small gathering of campaign staff and family members. It had been a perfect night. Not even Merrill Cook’s ungracious concession speech and his declaration that, “Leavitt may have won round one, but I’ll be back for round two,” could diminish the night. Stewart Hanson Jr. called, and we had a nice talk. He was a gentleman throughout the entire race. Merrill Cook never called. The third memory of election night came at the end. A little after midnight, Jackie and I decided to go home. (We had sent the children home earlier with my parents.) Jackie and I walked to the front door of the hotel, accompanied by our new friends from the highway patrol. Our 1984 Dodge Caravan was parked in the garage. Doug Bodrero, the commissioner of Public Safety, said, “We’ll take care of the car. You need to ride with us now.” We walked out the front door and stepped into a new, silver-blue Lincoln Town Car. Jackie and I looked at each other and began to laugh. We rolled down the window as we pulled away, waving to those who stood on the curb. It was our first ride in the big car.

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364

INDEX A Abbott, Mary Luella. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Abdul-Jabbar, Kareem. . . . . . . . . . . . . 231 Adair, Elder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166, 167 Adams, Bobby. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 94 Adams, Dave . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 306 Adams, Frank . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72, 73, 77 Adams, Mike . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136 Adams, Norm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 Ainge, Danny. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 Ainge, David . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 Ainge, Don. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 Ainge, Doug. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169 Åkerlund, Bengta. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Åkerlund, Ole . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Alexander, Jeff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 306 Alexander, Lamar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269 Alley, Steve . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240 Alvin, Thomas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Anderson, Curtis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89, 92 Anderson, Don . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67 Anderson, Gary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 Anderson, Matt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 312, 325 Anderson, Megan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1, 6 Anderson, Tim . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213, 307 Andrus, Phil . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Anker, Cliff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 Archibald, Alan . . . . 169, 170, 178, 213 Averett, Alan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119, 138

B Bach, Elder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158 Bailey, Chuck . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218, 234 Baker, Howard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269 Ball, Fred . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287 Bangerter, Norm . . . . . . . . . . . 261, 262, 270, 272, 277-279, 281–283, 287, 294-296, 305, 308, 315, 327, 340, 341, 343, 344, 350, 360 Banks, Gary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Barker, Des . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210 Barlow, Haven . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 306, 307 Barnum, Lillie May . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Baron, Annette . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Barrett, Bob . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266 Barrett, Kent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 Barrett, Laurie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266 Barrett, Ted . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172 Baucum, Sid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 288 Bauer, Levan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74, 75 Bauer, Penny . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177 Bean, Ben . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182

365

Bean, Merrill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 340 Beckham, Ray . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259 Beck, Tom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 Bell, Barbara . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 Belnap, Austin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216 Bennett, Bob . . . . . . . 324, 330, 332, 348 Bennett, Todd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138 Bennett, Wallace F. . . . . . . . . . . . 98, 299 Bennion, Lowell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 358 Benson, Dee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 298 Bentley, Mary Anne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 Berbert, Alan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166 Berdick, Alan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165 Bergener, Roxanne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1, 6 Berman, Dan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234, 291 Bernick Jr., Bob . . . . . . . . . 263, 296, 357 Berrett, Craig . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Bess, Cindy . . . . . . . . . . . 126, 129, 130, 142, 150 Bess, Stephanie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 129 Betenson, Blaine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88, 89 Betenson, Tom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 Bethers, Pratt. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 121 Bingham, Jeff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234, 235 Bishop, Kent. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 131, 141 Bishop, Mason. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325 Blackner, Brent . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134, 138 Blackner, Bruce. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 132 Blake, Jim . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 172 Boam, Marita. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233 Bodrero, Doug . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 362 Bohne, Larry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 101 Bonzo, Doug . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213 Bowman, Diane . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 Boyce, Harold . . . . . . . . . . . . 75, 110, 139 Boyter, Scott . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175 Bradford, James . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Bradford, Richard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305 Bradshaw, Teri . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Braithwaite, Bob. . . . . . 83, 85, 116, 234 Braithwaite, Doug . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 116 Braithwaite, Elaine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 Bratton, Alan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 Breglio, Vince . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 280 Brinkerhoff, Charles . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138 Briscoe, Ray. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217 Britton, Bruce . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171 Broadbent, L.V. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93, 124, 206, 221, 208 Broder, David . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238 Brooks, Karl . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 358 Brough, Joy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190

Brough, Larry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178, 190 Brown, Glen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 314 Brown, Joanna . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38, 39 Buhler, Dave . . . . . . 216, 217, 280, 282 Bulloch, Kevin . . . . . . . . . . . . 27, 72, 142, 143–150, 152, 194 Bulloch, Steven . . . . . . . . . . . . 35, 41, 72, 73, 142, 143 Burdette, Lew . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Burnett, Curt. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235 Bush, George H. W. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240, 283, 294, 350 Bush, George W. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 Buxton, Elder. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158

C Cache Valley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144, 178, 179, 184, 186, 190 Cahoon, Paul. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 97, 138 Cahoon, Steve. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 Cannon, Joe. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297, 324, 330, 331, 348 Cannon, Wayne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 231 Card, Andy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 260 Cardon, Tom . . . . . . . . . 88, 91, 92, 134, 138, 203, 204 Carlson, Jack . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210 Carlsson, Bengta . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Carpenter, Dale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 296 Carraco, Jim . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217 Castagno, Carolee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 Challis, Paul . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 Chamberlain, LaVell . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 Chandler, Alan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211 Cheney, Dick . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 295 Childs, Steven . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Christensen, Alphonso . . . . . . . . . . . 179 Christensen, Arnold . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317 Christensen, Boyd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252 Christensen, Chad . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Christensen, Frank . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138 Christensen, Steve . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138 Christiansen, Howard . . . . . . . . . . . . 138 Chugg, Elder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 Clarke, Jack . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 107 Clarke, John . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175 Clark, Jolene. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Clark, Lorraine. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39, 72 Clinton, Bill . . . . . . . . . . . . 350, 351, 355 Clove, Randy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 Clyde, George Dewey . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Coach Hobbs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 136 Con, Lee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235

INDEX Cooke, Peter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226 Cook, Garfield . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279 Cook, Merrill . . . . . . 279, 281–283, 285, 296, 313, 315, 322, 327, 334, 337, 342, 343, 345, 348–353, 357, 362 Cooley, Mrs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38 Coos Bay, Oregon . . . . . . 153, 166, 168 Corradini, Deedee . . . . . . . . . . 287, 288 Cowan, Carolee . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184, 190 Cowan, Dee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 Cowan, Roger . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 184, 190 Craig, Cliff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 Creer, John . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218 Creer, John Preston . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 218 Crenshaw, Mills . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279, 331 Cundick, Robert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 110

D Dabb, Delbert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 Dalton, Delos . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72, 94 Dam, Paul Van . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 296 Darby, Alan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 Darby, Dale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 Daugherty, Sharon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213 Davies, Jeff . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 163 Davies, Richard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 236 Davis, Avy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72, 88 Davis, Jim . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 296 Davis, Myrtle . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Decker, Rod . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 342 Densley, Colleen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 332 DePaulis, Palmer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 296 Dobson, Ron . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 82 Dole, Bob . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227, 228 Dover, Mrs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Doxey, Gary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Dudley, Dorothy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Dudley, Samuel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Dudley, Thomas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Duncan, Gail . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178

E Eastman, Claudette . . . . . . . . . 189, 224 Eastman, Dan . . . . . . . . . . 189, 224, 308 Eccles, David . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186 Eccles, Spence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287 Edgley, Richard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291 Edwards, Ralph . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 Ellsworth, Jim . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212 Embry, Jenette . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213 Emo, John . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 221 Endsley, Billy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19, 22 Eskelson, Lily . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 320

Esplin, Wayne. . . . . . . . . 130, 131, 134, 136, 137 Eugene, Oregon. . . . . . . . . . . . . 153, 167 Evans, David . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212 Evans, Elmer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138 Eyre, Richard . . . . . . . . . 281, 287, 296, 297, 307, 313, 315, 317, 319, 320, 321, 322, 324, 325, 329, 330, 332, 334, 337, 338, 340, 341, 342, 343, 344, 345, 346, 348, 349, 350, 358

F Farbman, Max . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335 Farnsworth, Philo T. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Fife, Auto . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 Fife, Gilman . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72, 74 Fife, Ryan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 Fife, Stewart. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 Firley, Art . . . . . 198, 202, 203, 204, 311 Firley, Joan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 202, 203 Firmage, Ed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226, 227 Flake, Mrs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 Ford, Ardella . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157 Ford, Gerald . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 227, 228 Forsyth, Diane . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 Fotheringham, David . . . 39, 119, 142, 155, 156, 158, 165,170, 171, 200 Fowler, John . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 252 Foxley, Doug . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 276, 280 Frame, Mrs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112

G Gage, Earl . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166 Gale, Mike . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74, 131 Gallivan, Jack . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Gardiner, Eric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 Gardiner, Reid . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244 Gardner, Kem . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315, 358 Gardner, Kumen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Gardner, Naida . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Garff, Bob . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 314, 315 Garfield, Charles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 Garn, Jake . . . . . . . 230, 232, 233, 234, 235, 238, 241, 243, 250, 261, 263, 267, 268, 280, 282, 293–296, 298, 299, 302, 305, 331, 334, 339, 344 Garn, Kevin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325 Garrick, Robert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 Gartner, Jim . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238 Getz, Guy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39, 72, 73 Gibb, LaVon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255, 292 Giles, Gary. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182 Gilliam, Jim . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 87 Gilman, Sarah. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8

Glazier, Rob . . . . . . . . . . . . 312, 314, 324 Glines, Skip . . . . . . . . . . . 234, 235, 298 Godfrey, Jaydene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 Gong, Gerrit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 260 Green, Kirk . . . . . . . . . . . . 308, 325, 331 Greenwood, Elder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 Greenwood, John . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165 Greenwood, Lee . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331, 348 Grimshaw, Carol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 Grimshaw, Connie . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73, 74 Grimshaw, Doug . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178 Grinceri, Therese Anderson . . . . . . 1, 5 Gunn, Dick . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 Gunn, Steven . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138

H Haddow, Mac . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 237 Haight, Barry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 76, 77 Haight, Robin . . . . . . . . . . 134, 136, 138 Hales, Robert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275 Hallman, Boyd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 Hamblin, Jacob . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Hansen, Ann . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173 Hansen, Bill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216 Hansen, Don . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204 Hansen, Erna. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187 Hansen, Faun . . . . . . . 56, 157, 178, 216 Hansen, George. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187 Hansen, Jim . . . . . . . . . . 234, 296, 305, 307, 308, 309 Hansen, Kelly . . . . . . . . . . 115, 117–121, 124, 126, 127, 129, 138, 175, 184 Hansen, Lissa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 Hansen, Ruth Anne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 Hanson, Stewart Jr. . . . . . . . . . 313, 315, 317, 348–352, 355, 362 Harrie, Dan. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 347 Harward, Byron . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 306 Harward, Ronnie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63 Harward, Royal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 63, 65 Hatch, Brent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 307 Hatch, Dale . . . . . 78, 79, 110, 131, 137 Hatch, Orrin . . . . . . . . . . 211, 218, 237, 238, 240–243, 250, 255, 261, 267, 279, 281, 285, 298, 305, 315, 327 Hathaway, Stan . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291, 301 Heap, Russell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 Hegewald, Mario . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 259 Held, Betty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 Held, Dick . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 83 Henning, Paul . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 352 Henrie, Bob . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 334, 335 Henroid, Joel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245

366

INDEX Heppler, Galen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 264 Heyborne, Lynn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Hillsboro, Oregon . . . . . . 153, 165, 166 Hinton, Wayne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 Hirshi, Loren. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 Hiskey, Harold . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182, 229 Hixson, Ryan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195 Hobbs, Dick . . . . . . . . . . . 133, 134, 137 Holbrook, Don . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275 Holt, Patrice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 38, 177 Holyfield, Evander . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 Hoole, Daryl . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 189, 230 Hoole, Hank . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230, 236 Horiuchi, Randy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226 Horlocker, Donel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 270 Hough, Bruce . . . . . . . . . . 331, 343, 361 Howe, Alan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211, 217 Hoyt, Kent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 Hoyt, Randy . . . . . . 117, 118, 130, 138 Huff, Frank Ray Jr. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Hughes, Jay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211 Hulet, Kent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 Humphrey, Ernie. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 90 Hunt, Ammon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Hunt, Eliza . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Hunter, Antone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216 Hunter, Forrest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25, 213 Hunter, Jon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72, 74 Hunter, Pam . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Hunter, Vanna . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Hunt, Ron. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 Huntsman, Blaine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201 Huntsman, Jon Sr. . . . . . . . . . . 201, 280, 281, 283 Huntsman, Karen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 276 Hurst, Mark . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 239 Hutson, Don . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204, 220

I Imlay, Annette . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Isom, Mr. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 40 Isom, Wynn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22, 26

J Jackson, Lance. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 Jardine, Jim . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287 Jarrard, Greg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213, 335 Jenkins, Joe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 296, 307 Jensen, Blaine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 265 Jensen, Davey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89, 92 Jensen, Wayne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 Johansen, Marie Inger Sofie . . . . . . . 15 Johnson, Blaine . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75, 130

367

Johnson, Charlie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 360 Johnson, Loa . . . . . . . . . . . . 75, 110, 139 Johnson, Nancy Clare. . . . . . . . . . . . 139 Johnson, Steve . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213 Jolley, Ruth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226 Jones, Alan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 284 Jones, Dan . . . . . . . 239, 271, 296, 300, 330, 331, 347, 353, 355, 361 Jones, Elder. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 Jones, Garth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206 Jones, Karl . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 133, 138 Jones, Kerry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287 Jones, Lynn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72–74, 99 Jones, Rick . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166 Jones, Willard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203 Jordan, Dave . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 314 Jordan, Holly . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 314 Judd, Doris Okerlund . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 56

K Karras, Nolan . . . . . . . . . 272, 296, 297, 301, 312–314, 321, 327, 329, 358 Kaslier, B.Z. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212 Kennedy, John Paul . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226 Kennedy, Robert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238 Kennedy, Ted . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238 Kenny, Mark . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 249 Kerr, Rolfe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275 Kimball, Camilla . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225 Kimball, Spencer L. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253 Kimball, Spencer W. . . . . 157, 224, 225 Kingsford, Tom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182 Kissinger, Henry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 257 Knell, Wayne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 Knight, Kay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 215 Knight, Rodney . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39, 74 Koty, Lloyd. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266 Kunz, Steve . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138

L Laffer, Art . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267 Lagerberg, Karl . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 77 Lalli, Lee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 200 Lamoreaux, Peggy Lee . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Langford, Bert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 19 Larsen, Eliza Ann . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 Lavanger, David . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 Leavitt, Anne . . . . . . . . 1, 5, 10, 16, 17, 20, 26, 29, 31, 33, 36, 52, 56, 99, 143, 157, 170, 191, 215 Leavitt, Anne Marie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 244, 245, 247, 254, 257, 259, 260, 292 Leavitt, Bert. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46, 48, 203 Leavitt, Betsy Jane . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

Leavitt, Chase. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155, 254, 255, 257, 299, 324 Leavitt, Cindy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191 Leavitt, Dane . . . . . . 31, 34, 41, 52, 56, 61, 66, 76, 79, 82, 90, 99, 103, 107, 111, 122, 125, 143, 156, 170, 184, 187, 215, 227, 238, 249, 253, 256, 258, 264, 265, 297, 298, 300, 301 Leavitt, David . . . . . . . . . . . . 52, 56, 122, 126, 156, 170 Leavitt, Dixie . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10, 17, 20, 21, 26, 31, 36, 45, 46, 48, 52, 58, 79, 80, 82, 111, 114, 156, 170, 191, 198, 207, 210, 211, 212, 215, 249, 254, 256, 272, 279, 282, 283, 317, 352 Leavitt, Dudley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Leavitt, Eric . . . . . . . . 52, 58, 73, 81, 82, 99, 111, 122, 156, 170, 209, 215, 224 Leavitt, Erma . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10, 45, 46, 47, 49, 51, 52 Leavitt, Jackie . . . . . . . . . . . 52, 172–192, 206–209, 215, 218, 219, 203, 221, 222, 223, 225, 228, 229, 231, 243– 248, 254–257, 260, 264, 291–293, 295, 297–299, 301, 312, 322, 327, 329, 332, 333, 336, 337, 355, 345, 360, 361 Leavitt, Jeremiah . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9, 10 Leavitt, Jeremiah II . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Leavitt, Jilene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 47 Leavitt, John . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Leavitt, Joseph. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Leavitt, Joyce . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203 Leavitt, Lemuel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Leavitt, Mark. . . 41, 45, 52, 56, 66, 76, 79, 82, 99, 107, 111, 122, 126, 143, 156, 170, 187, 213–215, 316, 353 Leavitt, Mary Amelia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Leavitt, Mary Luella Abbott . . . . . . . . 48 Leavitt, Matthew . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52 Leavitt, Mike . . . . . . . . 1, 10, 20, 26, 29, 31, 33, 39, 41, 50, 52, 56, 58, 66, 72–74, 76, 79, 82, 84, 86, 88, 97, 99, 106, 111, 122, 126, 128, 135, 137, 138, 143, 147, 152, 156, 159, 165, 168, 170, 181, 183, 191, 209, 215, 219, 223, 228, 235, 239, 240, 247, 249, 254, 257, 263, 270, 286, 294 Leavitt, Mike S. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191, 205, 207, 208, 215, 218, 219, 221, 223, 225, 231, 244, 245, 247, 256–258 Leavitt, Moses . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Leavitt, Rod . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 191, 203 Leavitt, Ryan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 293 Leavitt, Sarah Priscilla . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10

INDEX Leavitt, Sarah Sturtevant . . . . . . . . 5, 10 Leavitt, Taylor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 219, 221, 223, 225, 226, 230 231, 244-247, 254, 258, 260-362 Leavitt, Terry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203, 266 Leavitt, Tom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 46, 48 Leavitt, Vincen . . . . . . . . . 10, 45, 46,–50, 52, 79, 181 Leavitt, Wade . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 203 Leavitt, Weare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10, 46 Leavitt, Westin . . . . . . . . . . 291–293, 299 LeBaron, Don . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 306 Lee, Evelyn B. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275 Lee, Harold B. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157, 169 Lee, LaDonna . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 308, 337 LeFever, Mr.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 Leigh, William . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72, 74 Levanger, David . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Levett, Christopher . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Lewis, Alan . . . . . . . . . . . 74, 93, 94, 138 Lewis, Evan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39, 72, 73 Lindsey, Grant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 109 Linford, Bobette . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 113 Linnell, Bob . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 334, 339 Livermore, Fred . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 Lloyd, Donald . . . . . . . . . . 224, 225, 249 Lloyd, Helen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224, 249 Lloyd, Sherm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210 Loveland, KayLin . . . . . . 312, 314, 325 Lovett, Mary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 8 Lowe, Verlann. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 Lowe, Walter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Lund, Scott . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 Lunt, Carma. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Lunt, Jimmy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33 Lunt, Ned . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 93, 133, 137 Lunt, Scott . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72, 73, 107

M Maddox, Laurie Sullivan . . . . . . . . . . 1, 6 Madsen, Jim . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 80 Mahe, Eddie . . . . . . . . . . 218, 291, 308, 314, 337, 355 Major, Pat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119, 124, 127 Marchant, Elloyd . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 25 Marchant, Eric . . . 25, 26, 27, 83, 134, 137, 138 Marler, Wayne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 144 Marriott, Dan . . . . . . . . . 211, 218, 222, 224, 226–228, 243, 261, 262, 305 Marriott, Marilynn . . . . . . . . . . 228, 261 Marshall, Harold . . . . . . . . . . . . 134, 137 Marsh, Scott . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 233

Matheson, Kim . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92, 137 Matheson, Scott. . . . . . . . . . . . . 218, 234, 241, 253, 295, 296 Matheson, Scott Jr. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 296 Maxwell, Darwin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 Maxwell, Neal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 299 Maxwell, Sandra . . . . . . . . . . . 173, 199, 200, 203, 212, 224, 252, 256, 265 McAllister, LeRay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 306 McClellan, Scott . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 McConkie, Carol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 333 McConkie, Judy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225 McConkie, Oscar III . . . . . . . . 225, 358 McConkie, Oscar Jr. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 225 McDonald, Diane . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 124 McDougal, Wilburn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234 McIff, K. L. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 275 McKay, Gunn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226, 234 McKeown, Rich . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 358 McManus, Mike . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165 McShane, Doug . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17 Meeks, Phyllis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 Memmott, Jon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 308 Memmott, Sue . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213 Merrill, Frances . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327 Middleton, Ken. . . . . . . . . . 173, 199, 222 Miles, L.C. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211 Millburn, Mark. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 195 Miller, Gary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 196 Miller, Jim . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73, 74, 141 Miller, Ross . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138, 150 Milne, Anne. . . . . . . . . . . . 32, 33, 73, 74 Minard, Steve . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266 Minson, Dixie . . . . . . . . . . 315, 317, 319 Mitchell, Craig . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 164, 165 Mitchell, Louis . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 Monsen, Jay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95 Monson, David . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261 Monson, Jay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91 Moore, Bob . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182 Morris, Clair . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 88, 137 Moss, Frank . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210 Murie, Hazel Dawn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .72

N Naylor, Preston . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 230 Needham, Christie Smith . . . . . . . . 174, 180, 181, 183, 190 Needham, Gene . . . . . . . . . . . . . 181, 190 Nelson, Carol . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177 Nelson, Chad . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 Nelson, Gary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 204 Nelson, John . . . . . . . . . . . 245, 254, 293

Nelson, Merrill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 325 Nelson, Russell M. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 69 Nelson, Scott . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27, 39, 123 Nelson, Tim. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 336, 338 Neumann, Joanne Snow . . . . . . . . . 298 Newton, Utah. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178, 179, 182, 190, 287, 293 Nielsen, Norm . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 306 Nielson, Barry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211, 222 Nuesmeyer, Gina . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183

O Ogan, Flora . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 308 Okerlund, Bengta . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Okerlund, Clare . . . . . . . . . 14, 15, 68, 69 Okerlund, Clint . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 Okerlund, David . . . . . . . 16, 29, 34, 36, 45, 53, 55, 56, 58, 59, 60, 61, 65, 69, 103, 106 Okerlund, Doris Jean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Okerlund, George . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12, 65 Okerlund, Kathleen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 68 Okerlund, Mary Jane . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 16 Okerlund, Melvin . . . . . . . . . . 14, 15, 16, 54, 56–58, 61, 64–67, 79, 121, 129, 155, 181, 184 Okerlund, Phyllis . . . . . . 15, 42, 53–58, 64, 66, 69, 82, 99, 181, 184 Okerlund, Rhea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 48 Olds, Robert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138 Olene Walker . . . . . . . . . . 327–330, 347, 358, 361 Oliver, Craig . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 268 Olsen, Dave . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 264 Olsson, Jeppa . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Orchard, Brent . . . . . . . . . 117, 124, 127 Orton, Bill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 157, 158 Osborne, Bruce . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 96 Osborne, Wally . . . . . . . . 108, 112, 113 Oswald, Bill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224 Ott, Gary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 119 Oveson, Val . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 296, 297, 305–309, 327 Owen, Dave . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 340 Owens, Wayne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 334

P Pace, Steve . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269 PacifiCorp . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 291, 301 Palmer, Carl . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287 Palmer, Vivian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112 Paris, Jack . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 Parker, Scott . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269 Parks, Randy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73

368

INDEX Parry, Milton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 Pedigo, Keith . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 Perot, Ross . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 350, 355 Perry, L. Tom. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 256 Perry, Milton . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 Peterson, Cary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317 Peterson, Chase . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255, 287 Peterson, Chuck . . . . . . . . . . . . 306, 308 Peterson, Grethe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 358 Peterson, Russ . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138 Petty, Cleo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 95, 138 Petty, Janet . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 33, 39 Piercey, Jane Okerlund . . . . . . . . . . . . 56 Piercey, John . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 253 Piercey, Kristen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 Pionton, Thomas . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 13 Platt, Steve. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22, 26 Powers, Charlene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266 Pratt, Mike . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 Proctor, Mrs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 42 Proctor, Paul . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138 Provan, Tim . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351 Pugh, Warren . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 186

R Rampton, Byron . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 210 Rampton, Cal . . . . . . . . . . 197, 210, 291 Ramsey, Kevin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 160 Randall, Clarence . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 178 Rasmussen, Creta . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177 Rath, Tom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269 Reagan, Ronald . . . . . . . 115, 210, 227, 228, 234, 240, 250, 255, 256, 258261, 264, 269, 280, 283, 298 Remington, Todd . . . . . . . . . . . 260, 355 Richards, Dick . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 216 Richards, Dub . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317 Richardson, Lon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213 Richards, Richard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212 Riddlebach, Ernie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 182 Roberts, Bee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 43 Roberts, Cokie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238 Roberts, John . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 264 Roberts, Lester . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89 Roberts, Paul. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 92 Roberts, Wade . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 89, 137 Robins, Jolene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177 Robinson, Rick . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138 Robison, Jennilyn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 183 Rollo, Steve . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 130 Romney, Vern . . . . . . . . . 211, 212, 214, 216, 218 Ronnow, Bill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138

369

Roper, Alan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138 Rosenblatt, Joseph . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212 Rove, Karl . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 280 Rowel, Thomas. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Rowley, Kris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Rusk, Pat. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 320 Russell, Kelly . . . . . . . . . . 249, 252, 256

S Sadlier, Bill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226 Sadlier, Deanne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 226 Samuel A. Woolley Company . . . . . . 11 Sanborn, Lydia . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Sandberg, Colleen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 Sawyer, Jack . . . . . . 116, 125, 131, 138 Sawyer, Jackie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 125 Schmutz, Eldon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 Scholes, Alan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 166 Schoppman, Donna . . . . . . . . . . . . 72, 73 Scott, Bert . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 161 Scruggs, Bud . . . . . . . . . . 238, 239, 241, 257, 260, 263, 267–269, 286, 287, 294, 296, 307, 311, 312, 314, 323 Scruggs, Shirley . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 314 Scully, Vin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Seaman, Gaylene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190 Seaman, Grant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 103 Seaman, Mitch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190 Sechrest, Nancy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321 Self, Drake . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 165 Sellier, Chuck . . . . . . . . . 333, 335, 336, 338, 355 Shannon, Sarah . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Shea, Pat . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279, 313, 315, 317, 320, 345, 348 Shearer, Alice . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240 Shearer, Kent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 348 Sherratt, Gerald . . . . . . . . . . 72, 270, 272 Sherritt, Bill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72, 138 Sherrill, Charles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 341 Shirley, Harold . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 358 Shirts, Morris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78 Shirts, Randy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 79, 137 Shumate, Jim . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138 Silvester, Bill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 139 Simmons, Dave . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 315 Simmons, Randy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 214 Simmons, Roy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212 Slack, Denny . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 108 Smith, Cleo Christensen. . . . . . . . . . 176, 179, 180, 190, 191 Smith, Dixie Lou . . . . . . . . 174, 180, 183 Smith, Joseph Fielding. . . . . . . . . . . . 157

Smith, Larry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39, 73, 74 Smith, Lewis . . . . . . . . . . . 179, 176, 180, 181, 190, 191, 247 Smith, Robert . . . . . . . . . . . . . 91, 96, 108 Smoot, Stan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 212, 214 Snelgrove, Richard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 322 Snow, Eric . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 Snow, Karl . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 211 Snow, Lori . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 235 Snow, Steve . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 98 Snyder, Jean . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 187 Snyder, Nick . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 169, 187 Sorenson, Jolene . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 Sorenson, Marianna. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 Sorenson, Mr. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123 Spahn, Warren . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 Spevak, Johnny . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32 Spevak, Layne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32, 71 Stephens, Marty . . . . . . . . . . . . 306, 308 Stevenson, Bill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234 Stewart, Chuck . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 159 Stewart, Mike . . . . . . . . . . 315, 317–322, 324, 327, 329–332, 340 Stewart, Ted . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 316, 332 Stockman, David . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240 Stoker, Michael . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245 Stone, Roger . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 258, 259 Stucki, Candy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171 Stucki, Grant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158, 162, 163, 166, 168, 169, 170, 171 Stucki, Randy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 171 Stucki, Sherry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168, 171 Stucki, Sharon . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 168 Studdert, Steve . . . . . . . . . . . . . 240, 296 Sturtevant, Jeremiah II . . . . . . . . . . . 10 Sturtevant, Lemuel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Sudbury, Sonny . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 78, 108 Summerfield, Peggy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 266 Sylvester, Althea . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 17

T Taylor, Arval . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 64 Taylor, Charles. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39 Taylor, Jim . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 288 Taylor, Patria . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 Taylor, Thayne . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 66 Tenet, George . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 106 Terry, John . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 158, 160 Thompson, Paula . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 177 Thompson, Ralph . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 70 Thomson, Priscilla . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Thorley, Bernell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39, 73 Thorley, Bob . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 104

INDEX Thorley, Burnell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 134 Thorley, Scott . . . . . . . . . . 104, 134, 138 Thurber, A.K. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Tippetts, Twain . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23, 25 Tollestrup, Wanda . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27 Topham, Kathy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73, 74 Torgenson, Wayne . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55, 67 Tower, John . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 294 Trueblood, L’Deane . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Truman, Mr. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 112, 114 Tucker, Grant . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Tullis, Kurt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138 Tyson, Mike. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 52

U Updegraff, Craig . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 194 Urie, Dale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72

V Valentine, John . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 306 Varela, Vicki . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 279, 287

W Wadleigh, Hannah . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Wadleigh, Johnathan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Wadleigh, Mary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Walker, Bud . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 198 Walker, Joe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213 Wall, Janie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22, 26 Warby, Clint . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217 Warren, Joe . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190 Warren, Kathie Smith . . . . . . . . . . . . 174, 180, 183, 190 Weaver, Lou . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 213 Webb, Gary . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 138 Webb, LaVarr . . . . . . . . . . 312–314, 318, 320, 324, 331, 334, 353, 360 Welch, Tom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287 Whatcott, Elu . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Wheeler, Don . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287, 291 Whetten, Lance. . . . . . . . . . . . . .107, 117, 118, 138 White, Barbara . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 72 Whittekiend, Brent . . . . . . . . . . . . 39, 73, 85, 94, 138 Wightman, John . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 224 Wilcox, Layne. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201, 233 Wilkenson, Jay . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 74 Wilkins, Diane . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 314 Wilkins, Mike . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 308, 314 William, George . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 11 Williams, Merrill . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 39, 72 Williams, Rymal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 Williams, Tom . . . . . . . . . 175, 178, 182

Williams, Tracy . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99 Wilson, Ted . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 238, 241, 242, 280, 282, 283, 357 Wirthlin, Dick . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 255, 257, 259, 260 Wolfe, Ron . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 Wood, Brian . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114 Woodbury, Christine . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190 Woodbury, Larry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 190 Wood, David . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 73 Wood, Howard . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114 Wood, Marilyn . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Wood, Morris . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114 Wood, Orma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 114 Woodruff, Wilford . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12 Woolf, Ronnie . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 137 Wright, Bob . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 234 Wright, Kevin . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 245

Y Yates, Darrel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 206 Yergensen, Danny . . . . . . . . . . . . 32, 35, 72–77, 82, 104, 107, 109, 113, 137 Yergensen, Glen . . . . . . . . . . . . 104, 105 Yergensen, Mrs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 32

Z Zabriskie, Dale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 276, 358 Zitzelberger, Larry . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 Zubal, Joan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 75, 104

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