Yesterday the Wardhouse

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When I was a girl our Wardhouse appeared in booklets showing architectural oddities of Salt Lake City. We were proud that it looked so little like a Church. It was squat and white with a round, tower like appurtenance on the front. It was once mistaken for a dairy, but I think now it may have been a true community center. 

There was always a wedding reception, and I was always a bridesmaid. I was always appearing in some play or other, or serving at a dinner, or waiting around hoping (or fearing) to be danced with. I recited scriptures of my own choosing, by heart, every Sunday morning for three months straight-running. Standing just in front of the choir seats, I recited “The Waltz” by Dorothy Parker. I sang Elijah with a crowd of other monotones at Stake Conference. I was thrilled one day when David O. McKay himself put his arm around me as he stood there in a silver tie that matched his hair. I won first place in “Untrained Scripture Readings” at the speech festival. I wore a drop-shoulder dress in the Roadshow. As Secretary of the Sunday School I sat in front of the whole congregation, taking illegible notes and car ing for my little sister, who always sat beside me. Once I wound a maypole in a Queen Contest. At the end of one lucky streamer was a box holding the crown. I didn’t win the crown, but I did learn to waltz. 

I recall that ward carnivals, held outdoors on the parking lot, were gambling affairs. We pitched pennies and paid to vote for royalty. In Fast Meeting I stood and thanked God for saving my mother’s life in direct answer to my personal prayers. The bishops in those days were always uncles or cousins of mine and suitably benign and distant. 

My fantasy life was bounded by the “Ward Show.” In our neighborhood I col lected for the “budget,” which meant that with each contribution each family received a white card entitling it to free movies every Friday and Saturday night. I myself always arrived a half-hour early and saved the front row. If the show was especially good, I saw it both nights. High up in the back of the Amusement Hall (as it was unashamedly called in those days) were three little holes atop a painted built-in ladder. I envied the brother who climbed that ladder every weekend and disappeared through a ridiculously small trap door. 

Although the Ward Shows were family outings, they were not “family” movies. They were often horrendous affairs which scared me for years. I don’t recall those characters so stylish today—Laurel and Hardy, W. C. Fields, Charlie Chaplin – but if Louis Hayward, Robert Donat, and Tyrone Power ever come in again, I shall be much in demand. How I ached for Louis Hayward whose beautiful face was shut up in that terrible iron mask simply because his nefarious brother (also played by Louis Hayward) had tricked him. I cried my own canal over the sufferings of Power as he built the Suez Canal, despite the death of his faithful Annabella. My throat choked up over Beau Geste and the Four Feathers, which somehow run together in my mind as a double bill. My loyalties seemed equally divided between the prisons of France and the sands of Arabia. And nobody ever thought to tell me that the sufferings of Monte Cristo would disturb my dreams. I remember walking home after the Ward Shows, watching the shadows, listening for stealthy foot steps, running the last cowardly steps to my door. 

Primary was primarily arts and crafts and singing. After school I always stopped in at home, cut a lemon, divided with a cousin, and strolled on to Primary where we sucked the lemons and flipped the seeds under the benches. One day when our teacher, for some obscure reason, asked us to make faces, we just took an extra slurp. 

We were larks and bluebirds and sea gulls, which names seem to me less dated and more soaring than Top Pilots and C.T.R. Pilots. I learned to bake bread, to embroider (I put a lily on my dish towel), and to babysit (at 25 cents for the evening). I don’t recall lesson material except as it touched on the Lost Tribes. We decided they were on the North Star. Given today’s urban blight, I think that a felicitous idea. 

M.I.A. seemed mainly social. I’m sure we had lessons there too, but the only one I remember was given by a young woman who later had nine children. She told us it was better to be born into the world without any shoes than not be born at all. 

Arriving early has always been one of my vices. Often I arrived early at M.I.A. where I would perch on a step reading a nitty gritty tome by Joseph Fielding Smith or Oscar McConkie. One of the boys in the Ward, an older and wiser man of fifteen, grew alarmed at my fanaticism. One day he presented me with his personal copies of Lad, A Dog, and Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo. I read them dutifully, never thinking to ask why, if he was that concerned over my potential spinsterhood, he hadn’t chosen something racier. 

Some of us used to meet at M.I.A. in order to ride to the Tabernacle where we sang in the All Church Music Festival. As we waited, we danced in the streets, while some turned cartwheels and bayed at the sky. When dating days arrived, I dated boys in the Ward. I remember that when one of them left for his mission, I gave a memorized scripture. I told the audience quite sincerely that as the spirit without the body is dead, so are works without faith. 

All my cousins either married members of the Ward or brought their husbands to live there. They built houses in vacant lots retained for the purpose by their par ents. My parents still have their vacant lots, for none of us settled them. 

It seems to me that the Wardhouse saw me lovingly into womanhood, turning me graciously over to the Institute of Religion, which took up where the Wardhouse left off. 

Our Wardhouse today is treated with more respect, beginning with its name. We usually call it The Church, and we are warned to keep our kids from tearing the phones off the walls. My children sit with folded arms learning “reverence.” I don’t recall hearing much about reverence in our Wardhouse, but I think I felt it, even while the little ones munched goodies in the aisles during Sacrament Meeting. Nowadays, after Sacrament meeting, we march out, row by row, with an usher to guide our steps. The foyer is always jammed with members loath to leave until the strain of being reverent has worn off. 

The Amusement Hall (see Recreation) is now the Cultural Hall. We have “Programs” there, candlelight dinners, and art festivals. This year the Primary children gave the Christmas program instead of the teachers, and it showed considerable polish. We had a Ward Show once, and I sat on the front row just for old times’ sake. The panavision nearly ruined my eyes, and our children found the Brothers Grimm pretty grim. 

The doors to our church are usually locked against the marauding hordes, and, of course, my children can’t walk there. I must deliver them and then must hover about waiting to sweep down and rescue them from the dark parking lot and swerving street. The urge to run through the Cultural Hall is as strong as ever, and sometimes spills over into the Chapel, which is separated by a folding door. 

My Wardhouse was mine, as much a part of me as my home and family, and I gave it as little thought when I was young. That joy and comradeship is with us today, and yet, it seems the nuclear family must build a nuclear shelter out of home evenings and family outings. What will my children remember with nostalgia? A day in Amish country where bearded gentlemen ride by in closed carriages, laughing, al ways laughing, while buses and cars snort behind them, unable to pass. A weekend in New York City where a man rushes two blocks through the Christmas rush to catch a bus because an elderly black lady left her purse. Perhaps they will remember the courage of New Yorkers, the old, the lame, the cab drivers who face those streets. 

They may remember waking up in Williamsburg to find a light snow all over the Yule log and fresh greens in all the windows. A boat ride to Nantucket where sea gulls greeted us from another time. And a day in Nauvoo where the children were less impressed with Joseph Smith’s house than with the noble expanse of river and the real wheat growing in the fields. 

A few Sundays ago our Sacrament Meeting program was presented by the Youth: youth bishopric, youth speakers, youth musicians. One of the speakers, a fluent, golden-haired lad of seventeen, described the world as, he said, Satan would have it: a world in which white and black hate each other, a world which fights senseless wars for obscure reasons, and a world which persecutes people for the length of their hair. I was struck by this thought: Those of us who grew up in my Wardhouse seldom concerned themselves with such matters. Ours was an enclosure, perhaps an incestuous one. We were part of the Silent Generation. And then another thought: Though we were quite provincial, we had not been crippled by the World War nor by the Depression. We were allowed to grow in peace. Because our parents had been leveled by the Depression, we were also equally affluent. Perhaps that soil can make a bridge between the old and the new. Perhaps the lessons of the old Wardhouse may yet strengthen the young of today’s church. 

Meanwhile, I should like to design a building to house us all. It will be round and surrounded by trees or mountains, prairie or desert. It will be made of glass and of materials which show our love of this earth. Its doors will stand open to strangers, its windows open to light. It will begin with a round, soundproof foyer, large enough that Mormons may greet each other — as they must — but without chairs, lest they linger too long. The Recreation Hall will be suitably separate from the Chapel, and the Chapel will be semi-circular because I love to look into the faces of my brothers and sisters. Because our leaders are lay leaders and unpaid, they will not sit over us, but with us. The class rooms will be semi-circular too, and warmly painted and carpeted for comfort and communication. 

Yes, joy and laughter, worship and reverence will be in the building, and in us.