Mary, the mother of Jesus, seems to hold a tough position in Mormon iconography. We honor her for her role in bearing and raising Jesus, and we celebrate her in art of the Nativity and closely related stories (the Annunciation, the Flight into Egypt, the boy Jesus at the temple). We’re also comfortable with images of Mary at the crucifixion. We even use the idea of Mary to celebrate Mormon motherhood, as in the gallery of images in the December 2007 Ensign, A Mother and an Overflowing Heart.

But with the exception of the  “Jesus Praying with His Mother” picture in the Church’s new Gospel Art Book — which image strikes me as a little forced, for some reason; maybe a reader can explain why — our images of Mary are tied very closely to the Biblical narrative. In modern times, we don’t seem to see many portraits of Mary that celebrate Mary as a woman and/or a mother, apart from specific New Testament stories. Why is that? Are such portraits “too Catholic”? Too closely tied to crucifixes and statues? Did we perhaps pull away from Mary as Madonna as part of that whole hypersensitivity toward angels-with-wings and crosses-as-jewelry of the Joseph Fielding Smith era?

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If you’ve tried to get to Keepa anytime in the last 24 hours and got only an “internal server error,” try again. It looks like we’re back up.

Now I can go dry my eyes, blow my nose, and tend to my bald head — it hurts to pull that much hair out, ya know?

Kind friends, as here I stand to sing,
So very [strange] I feel,
That now I’ve made my bow, I fear
I don’t look quite genteel;
But, never mind, for I’m a boy
That’s always full of joy –
A rough and ready sort of chap –
An honest Mormon boy.

A Mormon boy, a Mormon boy,
I am a Mormon boy;
I might be envied by a king,
For I am a Mormon boy.

Scouts from Monroe, Utah, on the sumit of Mount Baldy, 1916

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Your weekly dose of funny from the old church magazines –

In the Restaurant

Diner – This ham’s bad!

Waitress – Rubbish, it was only cured last week.

Diner – Well, it must have had a relapse!

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This is a friendly little article written by one of my favorite people, Assistant Church Historian Andrew Jenson, while he was serving as a missionary in Scandinavia. We owe him so much in regard to the preservation of 19th and early 20th century Latter-day Saint history.

It should be a delightful little thing to read – a heart-warming topic, a toast to good feelings, a sweet photograph that rises far above the stiff, posed group shots that constitute most of our missionary photographic record of 1910.

So why does it irritate me so badly, to the point where I want to throw the volume of the Improvement Era in which it appears through the nearest plate glass window?

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This “Enigma” was written by Samuel Hammer. There are several men by that name in Utah at this period (1877); the most likely candidate is one born in Pennsylvania in 1862, and therefore still a teen when he submitted this to the Juvenile Instructor

As usual, please solve only one (not two, because this is short) letters and leave the rest for other readers to play along, too. Thanks for your consideration in that regard!

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I wrote a Christmas column this past December about the Salvation Army in Utah. The Salvation Army has been a charity I’ve respected since my long-ago Las Vegas ward partnered with the Salvation Army to provide Thanksgiving and Christmas baskets — they furnished a minimum list of items to include, the Latter-day Saints assembled the boxes (usually with added food items), and the Salvation Army picked them up and delivered them to families. They were so well organized and so efficient that the Relief Society could have taken lessons from them — and you know there aren’t many organizations I would say that about.

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Uintah, Utah Stake
Fathers and Sons Outing
1920

Child’s name unknown, alas

We return today to the “Girl Queries” column of the Young Woman’s Journal, wherein a wise sister answered the questions submitted by young girls and women concerning everything from manners to health to gospel doctrine:

Is it proper for a gentleman to smoke when in the company of a young lady? – Mamie.

A gentleman should never smoke when in the presence of ladies, without first receiving their permission. From a Latter-day Saint view-point you should not keep company with a boy who smokes.

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When the United States entered World War I in 1917, hundreds of Mormon boys hurried to enlist. The largest concentration of Mormons was to be found in the Utah National Guard, soon converted to the 145th Field Artillery as the Guard was called into federal service. The 145th, together with their beloved chaplain Brigham H. Roberts were sent to Camp Kearny, California, for training.

Camp Kearny, a sprawling tent camp established in July 1917, was named for Brigadier General Stephen Watts Kearny, leader of the Army of the West during the Mexican War of 1846-47 – the war in which the 500-member Mormon Battalion had enlisted to raise funds for moving their people westward, and which had marched from Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, to San Diego, California … not quite 12 miles from where the 145th found itself camped in 1917.

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KwaZulu-Natal is a province of South Africa lying along the Indian Ocean, encompassing the traditional Zulu homelands. Early in the 19th century, the Zulu people consisted of only a few thousand people. By about 1820, ten years into the reign of their greatest leader and military genius Shaka Zulu, other tribes and lands had been conquered and brought into the Zulu nation, and Shaka could field an army of 100,000 warriors. Shaka was slain in 1828 by his brother Dingaan, just as the Zulus were coming into contact with European colonizers. Dingaan’s way of dealing with some of the Dutch invaders of his realm in 1837 was to invite them to a feast and massacre them.

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Lesson 13: “This Generation Shall Have My Word through You”

Articles, talks, and lessons about the life and mission of the Prophet Joseph Smith have been consistently published throughout the 20th century and are easily located at lds.org, so only a small taste of past lessons are offered here. The one from 1910 is especially relevant to the 2009 lesson.

My ward’s schedule for the next quarter’s lessons has not yet been set, so I don’t know whether I’ll be teaching this lesson or not – I so hope it will be my turn that week. [It was!]
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In 1916, the Beehive Girls were Latter-day Saint young women ages 14 and 15 (the 12- and 13-year-olds were still in Primary). Older teens, and even the mothers of Beehive Girls, could learn the same skills and earn the same badges of honor, if they chose to.

In those days, the Beehive program mirrored many of the activities and trappings of the Boy Scouts: as the girls completed requirements for various skills, called “filling cells” (as if with honey) in their lingo, they won hexagonal-shaped badges to sew onto a sash. Those activities included spiritual goals, homemaking skills, camping, competency with tools, development of physical strength and health, animal care, etc. Their range of activities was easily equivalent to the Boy Scout program — with art needlework and childcare added, and with their hikes made in bloomers or skirts.

Beehive Girls from Thatcher, Arizona

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From the joke pages of the LDS magazines of 1945:

Satisfied

Judge (to prisoner): “What, you here again?”

Prisoner: “Yes, sir.”

“Aren’t you ashamed to be seen here?”

“No, sir! What’s good enough for you is good enough for me!”

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From the Improvement Era, 1942:

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A favorite magazine cover from the Church’s past: The Instructor, July 1958.

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Jensine was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1837, her parents’ youngest child. Her father died when she was 4, her mother when she was 12; she probably spent her youth in the household of one of her much older brothers. In1857 Jensine was married to Frants Christian Grundvig, a young joiner who had come to Copenhagen a few years earlier to learn his trade.

A year later their son Severine was born. Although Jensine was to bear to at least three more children in the next few years, Severine was her only child to live past birth, and she devoted herself to his care.

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Two of these answers to questions are explicitly signed Joseph F. Smith; the others are presumably the work of George Q. Cannon. They appeared in the Juvenile Instructor of 1905.

Should the little children of the kindergarten [in Sunday School] be taught the events leading up to and culminating in the death of our Savior?

It is a principle widely accepted that it is not desirable to teach these little ones those things that are horrifying to childish nature. And what may be said of children is equally true in all stages of student life. But death is not an unmixed horror. with it are associated some of the profoundest and most important truths of human life. Although painful in the extreme to those who must suffer the departure of dear ones, death is one of the grandest blessings in divine economy; and we think children should be taught something of its true meaning as early in life as possible. …

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Ei Nachie (1892-1982) was the niece, raised as the daughter, of Tsune Nachie, the pioneer Japanese sister whose missionary work played such a major role in opening the Japanese Mission in Hawaii. The parents whom she mentions are Akakichi Asano and Fude Ishida; while Akakichi died before meeting the missionaries, Fude was a convert, having been introduced to the Church by her sister Tsune Nachie. At the time she wrote this, Ei was living with her aunt/mother in the mission home in Tokyo, where Tsune kept house for the elders. Presumably Ei’s testimony was written in Japanese and translated into English by a missionary.

(Photograph: Tokyo MIA Presidency: Ei Nachie in center, flanked by Otofumi Horikiri and Tomigoro Takagi.)

I, the same as the rest of you who will be apt to read this little article, am a member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and from time to time have pleasure in listening to some of the life improving selections of the Church’s publications.

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Here’s another look at our grandparents as children, engaged in the Primary activities of 1940. (I wish the reproduction quality were better, but this was the best I could do.)

Pima, Arizona
Trail Builders performing a stunt for May Day party

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The world of our great-grandparents in the first quarter of the 20th century was a dirtier, smellier place than we often realize:

Outhouses were vastly more common than sewers in rural areas. Even though Salt Lake City had built its first sewers in 1890, those systems served only a small part of the city, leaving outhouses in use throughout the Valley. South Salt Lake City didn’t vote to raise funds for building its first sewer system until late in 1938. And even the few sewers in operation were not sanitary in any sense – the early ones drained sewage into open canals that emptied into the Great Salt Lake.

Horses were still in use as motive power. This meant quantities of manure deposited on city streets, and even larger piles of manure in the stabling areas of businesses and private homes. And horses died – there were laws for the proper removal of carcasses, laws which were not entirely effective.

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Lesson 12: “The Gathering of My People”

Today’s lessons on gathering emphasize the gathering of the Saints into stakes, while the earlier lessons discussed the physical gathering, first to Kirtland, then to Missouri, Nauvoo, and Deseret. Even in these early lessons focusing on the physical gathering, though, we find the stated purpose to be a concentration of Saints who could serve each other and, especially, build temples.

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Keepa’ninny Steve C. writes:

“This past week in Family Home Evening I did a lesson on kindness and being kind to others. As part of the lesson, I copied the coloring pictures from the 1923 Children’s Friend you posted on Keepapitchinin and put them into a PowerPoint presentation.

“I asked my children it they could tell me what acts of kindness were being shown in each picture. They had a lot of fun analyzing the pictures.

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The Primary theme for April, 1923, was “Amusements,” with the goal of teaching children that “Wholesome Recreation Gives Strength to the Body and Joy to the Soul.”

It may be difficult today to see how such a theme fits into the Church History course the Primary was following that year, but that’s because we’ve left behind so much of the communal nature of our history. In 1923, as well as in 1883 or 1853, almost everything we did — including our amusements — was anchored in the community rather than in the private sphere. Thus, “amusements” fits well within the secondary theme for the Primary’s first quarter of 1923, “The Latter-day Saints, a United People.”

You’ll notice that all of these coloring pages from the Children’s Friend for April 1923 involve groups of Latter-day Saints finding their fun in groups. Nothing in the pictures or verses draws attention to the fact that these amusements are communal rather than solitary — community was such a bedrock trait that I wonder if 1923 readers were even conscious of its pervasiveness.

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None of the church magazines had a joke page as early as this — these come from fillers tucked into odd corners and columns. Enjoy!

“What did the children of Israel do after they came through the Red Sea?” asked a Boston Sunday school teacher.

“Dried their clothes, I s’pose,” replied Tommy Bakebean.

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john f posted on the Canonization of Kitsch earlier this week, discussing “the way Mormon art invents, and then canonizes, certain images” – in the case of that post, the repetition of elements of Arnold Friberg’s Book of Mormon illustrations in more recent depictions.

While I have little to offer about the how and why such apparent canonization occurs, I can offer an illustration showing how quickly it happens:

The same morning john f posted about canonization, I posted some paintings by C.C.A. Christensen illustrating George Reynolds’s stories on lessons from the life of Nephi in the 1891 Juvenile Instructor.

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This “Dialogue” by Susa Young Gates is posted as an accompaniment to today’s post on the Canonization of Image.

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I am on an Avard T. Fairbanks kick today, apparently. Please share my enjoyment this afternoon of one of his most ephemeral creations, sculpted in 1942:
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While uncounted thousands of visual artists have contributed their skills to building Zion, the Fairbanks dynasty holds a special place in the world of Mormon art history: John B. Fairbanks (1855-1940) was one of the art missionaries sent to Paris by the Church, who came home to paint murals for the temples. His sons J. Leo (1878-1946) and Avard T. (1898-1987) have a catalog that must amount to a hundred or more Mormon-themed works: Leo is chiefly responsible for the friezes decorating the Hawaiian Temple; Avard assisted him there, and later did the frieze decorating the Harold B. Lee Library at BYU. Avard sculpted the Angel Moroni appearing on the Washington, Jordan River, and other temples. Many of our most familiar images are Fairbanks creations, and their works dot the continent. Avard’s son Jonathan Leo (1933- ) and other younger members of the family continue the artistic tradition.

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Girls and young women could receive personal advice on just about any subject by writing to the Question Box of the Young Woman’s Journal. Some queries were answered in the pages of the Journal while others received personal answers by mail – as long as the questioner provided a stamped, self-addressed envelope. Sometimes the most intriguing responses were the ones to queries that were not themselves printed. Here’s a sample of what was on the minds of young Mormon women in 1912:

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When traveling lately I met a man friend. We took dinner together in the dining car. Should I have allowed him to pay my bill with his? – Gertrude.

Certainly not. he was not your escort. You met him by chance. You should have paid for your own dinner.

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Huntsville, Weber Co., Utah.
February 12th, 1897.

Editor Juvenile Instructor:

Having see a number of sketches in the Juvenile Instructor I thought I would write a short sketch of my life.

I was born at Huntsville, Weber County, Utah, December 23rd, 1881, which was the date that the Prophet Joseph Smith was born. I was baptized the day I became eight years of age. That day I will never forget, as it was a special fast day for all the Saints of God.

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