The Closet Bluebird

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Reed Smoot had become a U. S. Senator, and the “Y” a university, when I began kindergarten at Brigham Young Academy, with Ida Dusenberry as my teacher. Ida Smoot Dusenberry was a younger sister of Reed Smoot. I wasn’t too fond of kindergarten because each day Miss Dusenberry would tie me up with a rope and lock me in a black closet. While I never complained, the curriculum did seem monotonous. Each day when my mother asked what I’d learned, I would say, truthfully, “To take little bites.” During the course of the year this was all there was time for outside the closet. 

Being of modest nature, I never told my mother that I was receiving special attention. She was baffled when I refused to continue my education at BYA, but she enrolled me in the first grade at the Parker school, where my teacher was Edith Young, granddaughter of Brigham. Miss Young had no rope or closet, but she did have the Robins and the Bluebirds. I found myself in the Bluebird ghetto until nearly Christmas when Miss Young promoted me to the Robins on the discovery that I had memorized the first grade reader and was bringing Black Beauty to school to while away the time. 

In the second grade, however, Miss Andelin consigned me again to the Bluebirds until she found the reason for my inattention. I had found Horatio Alger much more interesting than school, and was devouring a book a week in class. Then in the third grade Miss Bean cast me to the Bluebirds until the day I spelled the class down. She told me, at the end of the year, that if only one student could be promoted, it would be me. The next year when Jimmie Hickman consigned me to the Bluebirds I realized that the twig was permanently bent, and I accepted the fact that life consisted of Robins and Bluebirds and that I could never expect to get along with authority. 

Professional “wowsers” were touring Mormon country during my years at Provo High. As defined by H. L. Mencken, who was my ideal at that time, a wowser was a person haunted by the fear that somebody, somewhere, might be happy. These zealous lecturers dedicated their lives to terrifying me and my peers regarding what, in those simple days, were the two major threats to Zion’s youth, the cigarette habit and the solitary vice. 

The sex maniac, as the students called the sin-stomper who threatened debility, nervous collapse, loss of memory, pimples, rotting of the moral fiber, insanity, eternal damnation and hair in the palm, would point dramatically to the eastern mountains, where the Utah State Mental Asylum marked the end of Center street. There, he thundered, was the end of the line for the pitiful victims unable to conquer the pernicious habit. 

Fortunately, I had acquired a somewhat more scientific attitude at the age of eleven, when I became yard boy at the Provo General Hospital, and spent more time absorbing the medical library than watering the lawns. But the sex maniac also tilled stony soil among my high school peers, who explicitly detailed the joys of sexual fantasies in the bawdy verses they improvised for the songs of the glee club period. The words for “My Spanish Guitar” were actually rather good, though unprintable. 

At this time cigarettes were called coffin nails, and a standard attraction among the Freaks of Nature exhibited by carnival side-shows was the Cigarette Fiend. Thus the other “wowser” was also known as the cigarette fiend. He asked for four volunteers from the audience, then opened a cardboard box and took out an alley cat. As four huskies from the football squad each held a paw, the fiend injected a nicotine solution from a cigarette into the cat. My sympathies were all for the cat, which yowled, writhing and twisting in agony, subsiding as the poison took effect. I wasn’t impressed, knowing that various foreign substances—milk, for example—would have the same effect if injected. The lecture was wasted on me, anyway, because after smoking for seven years I quit at the age of twelve for fear it might stunt my growth (alas, too late; I remained the runt of the litter). I felt only outrage at the callous brutality of the cigarette fiend, who, as the four huskies held the comatose cat, thundered that cigarettes were the Devil’s kindling wood, leading to a life of dissipation—liquor, loose women, social disease, the gutter and early death. 

And then in the midst of this tirade, the cat began to revive. It yowled, tail stiff and hair on end. As it gained strength, the four huskies holding its paws were pulled about as they struggled to subdue it. One claw came free. It slashed at the other three hands. The cat dropped to the podium floor and bounced as if on springs as the four huskies and the cigarette fiend sought cover. The cat bounded onto the lectern, and then with a mighty leap sailed through the opening of a high window, while the auditorium rocked with cheers. 

Growing up in Provo, I never questioned exhortations from the pulpit to remain unspotted from the wicked outside world, to be in but not part of its iniquities and abominations. I was fully aware of the insidious lure of evil, because from earliest memory I was tantalized by the exquisite bouquet of coffee in the kitchen, as my mother prepared this poison for her Gentile boarders. I never drank it at home, of course, and when, my moral fibre undermined, I ordered it in a cafe, I drank the poison with my left hand. Inasmuch as most Gentiles were right-handed, this put my lips on the cup rim at a place uncontaminated by the ungodly. 

I accepted the official premise that all was always well in Zion until I became night clerk at the Roberts Hotel while attending College at BYU. Though gaining a liberal education in the humanities at school, I received a liberal course in human nature at the hotel. Even among the fairest flowers of Zion, I discovered, love would find a way, generally via the back stairs. The noble experiment of prohibition had made drinking fashionable and smart until the bootlegger was a quasi-respectable fixture of society. As night clerk, I quickly learned that some enterprising BYU students were working their way through school as bootleggers, which seemed interesting enough to mention in a column I was writing for the college paper. This proved to be a quick lesson in the power of the press, for the ink was hardly dry on the “Y News” when I was on the carpet. When I refused to name names, I was suspended. When back in school, the next column picked off the scab, and I was out again. The pattern repeated itself until after the sixth suspension, I had been tied in the closet once too often. Being a sensitive soul, I dropped out. 

I then followed a girl to California, where to my vast surprise I found that, by and large, Gentiles were remarkably like Mormons—mostly good people with human foibles and conceits, with an occasional rotten apple in the barrel. Here, I was no longer a member of the dominant ethnic group. Though I married the girl and built a home, I felt rootless. I didn’t know the people across the street; I was a stranger in a land of sundowners. I was, at this time, an “eating” Mormon. Whenever a badly mimeographed postcard arrived announcing a ward dinner, I attended because the food was good, the price cheap, and it was always for some worthy cause. At the dinner a stranger would introduce himself as bishop. In this way I kept aware of what was going on. 

I got no closer for very good reason. My mother had commissioned me at a tender age to prepare myself to write “the biography”, which, to her, assumed the importance of the Standard Works. The biography was the story of my father, a member of the Twelve and a polygamist, who resigned from the Quorum so that Reed Smoot could retain his seat in the Senate. The Smoot Investigation was the downfall of John W. Taylor, who subsequently was cut off for taking three of his six wives after the Manifesto. 

Well, it took no gift of prophecy to realize that there would be no whooping, hollering and dancing in the streets of Salt Lake when I began research for the biography. During the thirteen years I gathered material, I remained strictly an eating Mormon, for if I in turn was consigned to the buffetings of Satan for doing such a New York book, I didn’t want to have far to fall. Some hint of the official attitude was the fact that in the entire archives of the Church Historian’s Office the only information available to me was one 3X5 card, containing the information that John W. Taylor had been excommunicated. 

After Family Kingdom was published, and nothing happened, and after enough time had elapsed to indicate nothing would, I walked into the Redwood City ward meeting house one Sunday morning and asked, “Where do the gray-haired, hump-backed and beat-up deacons go?” 

Here I made the remarkable discovery that the Wasatch Front wasn’t confined to Utah. It was not a matter of geography but of people. The Redwood City ward was exactly like my Fourth ward at Provo, the people in it as interchangeable as Ford parts. A member could move from Provo to Redwood City on Monday, be visited by the bishop, assigned a job, and be a functioning part of the intricate mechanism by the following Sunday. 

Utah was as near as the local meeting house, anywhere I might be. Here could be found my own kind. And, I realized, like it or lump it, I was one of the Peculiar People, home again.