It’s Saturday. I dare you not to laugh.

Mannerly Conversation.

Mama: “Willie, you have no manners.”

Willie: “Well, if I waste them now I won’t have any when company comes.”

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This needs much more work to be written as a real story – as it is now, it is raw material only. But sometimes that’s what you’re gonna get, when time is short and discoveries are made at the last minute. I wanted to post something about this today, since most of you won’t be reading Keepa on Halloween itself.

The church bought the Lion House – one of Brigham Young’s residences, where most of his smaller families and the wives without children generally had their apartments – from the Young family in 1900. The Lion House later served as a dormitory for the women of LDS University which stood on the same block, as the home economics department for the same institution, as a social center, as auxiliary offices, and as the home to other such organizations and services over the years. I have not yet discovered how it was being used in 1903, but since it was owned by the church this activity must have been sanctioned, perhaps sponsored, by a church organization.

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Not Mormon history related, but perhaps of interest if you are in the area. There are German POWs from both World War I and World War II buried at Fort Douglas.

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GERMAN NATIONAL DAY OF MOURNING
Sunday, 15th of November 2009
at the
Fort Douglas Military Cemetery

As many years in the past the German – American Community and the German Air Force will perform a common ceremony at the
Memorial Monument in Salt Lake City

In Germany this day is called “Volkstrauertag” and its meaning is partly similar to the “Memorial Day”
in the United States

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If you have to ask how to wear a wristwatch … or whether it’s okay to whisper during a musical evening … or why your telephone mouthpiece stinks … well, it’s a good thing you have the “Girl Query” column of the Young Woman’s Journal!

—oooOooo—

Is it considered good form to even whisper in a concert or musical entertainment? – Margaret.

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The Primary used to put on elaborate annual “festivals” on a stake basis — lots of singing and dancing, costumes, and speaking parts. I haven’t figured out how frogs, toadstools, Roman guards, and the Greek characters of Apollo, Persephone, and Ceres all fit together in 1937’s “blossom festival,” but apparently they did — because in several issues of the Children’s Friend early that year, photographs of children from the Grant Stake furnished models for other stakes to design their costumes.

I find the photograph of “Roman Guard” to be the most interesting. Or, rather, the name under the photograph:

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In honor of yesterday’s first snowfall of the season here –

Had you lived in Utah in the 19th century, you might have welcomed frost and snow with enthusiasm: When the ground froze, streets that had been churned inches deep in mud suddenly became hard enough to walk across. Even better, when the snow fell, the sleighs came out.

“Lots of sleighing now,” read an 1868 Salt Lake newspaper. “Big sleighs and little sleighs, cutters and bobs, one horse affairs, and from that up to Wells, Fargo & Co.’s eight horse institution. The streets are filled with the music of sleigh bells from morning till noon, and from noon till night.”

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In the pre-block-meeting days, the Church year began in September in the northern hemisphere, and in February in the southern hemisphere. Relief Society was held on a weekday morning, sometimes with an evening “second session” for sisters who worked outside the home.

The General Board provided, in addition to the visiting teacher messages, five courses of study for the sisters: Spiritual Living; Homemaking; Mother Education; Social Relations; and Cultural Refinement. Sisters could choose between Mother Education and Social Relations depending on which lesson they thought was most relevant to their needs; otherwise, all sisters attended all classes.

Classes were held only eight months of the year: In the summer months, the sisters met one day a month in a “work meeting” – sewing, quilting, canning, or the preparation of crafts for the annual fund-raising bazaar; a short homemaking message was presented during those summer work meetings, but otherwise no lessons were conducted.

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Hello. My name is Ardis. I am a research addict.

It all started on a fall evening in 1986, and it’s the fault of the gentleman whose picture you see here – John Saunders (1805-1860). Yeah, that’s him. Take a close look. He looks a little odd because his eyes were blue, and blue did not register in the photography of his day. At least he combed his hair before he sat for his portrait, which is more than you can say for his contemporary, Abraham Lincoln.

My father had been interested in family history, or at least the photographs of family members, from the time he was child in Rochester, New York. He collected family pictures beginning in the 1920s and ‘30s, when there were still aunts and uncles around who could identify the Civil War generation, and a few even older. When he joined the Church in 1964, he dabbled a bit in organizing data about his ancestors preparatory to temple ordinances, but his primary interest remained centered on his huge family photograph collection.

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Adapted from Leaves from My Journal, by Wilford Woodruff; artwork by Douglas Johnson.

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The Orchestra at Temple Square gave its Autumn Symphony tonight and last night in the Salt Lake Tabernacle, and my cousin (thanks, S.!) invited me to go with him:

Piano Concerto no. 1 in C Major, op. 15 – - – - – - – - – - Ludwig van Beethoven

Allegro con brio
Largo
Rondo Allegro

Vorspiel und Liebestod – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – - – Richard Wagner

from Tristan und Isolde

Symphony no. 4in A major, op. 90 (“Italian”) – - – - – - – - – - Felix Mendelssohn

Allegro vivace
Andante con moto
Con moto moderato
Saltarello: Presto

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Some humor from “The End of an Era,” the humor page at the back of the The Improvement Era, in 1970:

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“How is it you have not called me for my account?” the man asked his tailor.

“Oh, I never ask a gentleman.”

“Indeed! How, then, do you get on if he doesn’t pay?”

“Why,” replied the tailor, “after a certain time I conclude he is not a gentleman and then I ask him.”

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1918 — the last year of the Great War, the first year of the flu pandemic. The Saints carried on, adapting to new conditions while maintaining as normal a life as possible. Here are a few of their snap-shots:

Student Army Training Corps, at BYU

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While I’m about ready to let it drop until something else really interesting turns up, I’ve just run across the Presiding Bishopric’s statement about pastel shirts that was mentioned in that recent post and might as well post it for the record. This comes from 1952:

Aaronic Priesthood Members to Dress Conservatively When Officiating in the Sacrament Service

We have observed, with growing concern, the wearing of loud-colored sport shirts and sweaters by our Aaronic Priesthood bearers while officiating in the sacrament service.

While it is recognized that we should stay away from a required uniform dress, yet it is felt that moderation in dress would be more in keeping with this sacred service.

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Wedding cakes, rats, and constipation. Not all at the same time, of course. From the “Girl Query” department of the Young Woman’s Journal.

—oooOooo—

“Inez.” – Have you tried going to bed early? Many girls who have experienced the same kind of nervousness, have discovered the cause was lack of sleep. You should get at least eight hours of undisturbed sleep in the 24, two hours of which should be before midnight generally. Many people through habit learn to go without sufficient sleep, but there is nothing more fruitful of nervous exhaustion than this tendency on the part of young people. Correct this habit and you will become more cheerful and happy each day. “Cheerfulness nourishes life” runs an Italian proverb.
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If we’re going to ask the deacons to wear white shirts, can we also have a rule against dressing as shower curtains? (What, she thought it was an early Halloween? Scarlett O’Hara took all the other curtains in the house already?)

From the Improvement Era of 1955:

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I could never have predicted that Aaronic Priesthood wardrobe would so preoccupy the Church throughout the 20th century (here and here for past posts). Yet here we are again, with a bulletin from the Presiding Bishop’s Office in 1954, with permutations of the issue that we haven’t seen before.

Proper Dress Emphasized When Passing Sacrament

We come again to the matter of proper dress on the part of those participating in the administration and passing of the sacrament.

When a young man receives the authority to participate at the sacrament table, he is old enough to recognize the essentials in proper dress for such a sacred service. For the most part, our priests are faultless in their dress when administering the sacrament. However, in a few instances, there is evidence that more attention to this detail is needed.

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After this morning’s appetizer ad, here’s the main course —

BYU was a major sponsor of The Improvement Era in 1963, purchasing the inside front cover of each issue that year. The landscapes, interiors, academic calendar, and fashions should make you nostalgic if you were there, or give you that familiar-but-not-quite-right disorientation if you’re younger.

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Well, not me, but one of our good friends:

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The  page in the record of burials in the churchyard of St. Thomas’s church in [New] Brampton, Derbyshire, England is unremarkable: There, on the third line, is recorded the burial of Sarah Wheatcroft, of Walton, Derbyshire, on 10 March 1850, age 20 years. Frederick Arnold, the curate, read the service in place of John Berridge Jebb, the second vicar of the then 18-year-old church (the “incumbent” mentioned in quotations below), but that was nothing unusual – the curate conducted many more burials than his superior.[1] Nothing about this ordinary record hints at the controversy over Sarah’s burial nor the role it played in cementing the religious freedoms of Mormons in this corner of old England.

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Adapted from Leaves from My Journal, by Wilford Woodruff; artwork by Douglas Johnson.

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Some of these funnies from the LDS magazines of 1944 are pretty good, in my warped opinion! The others? Well –

Blow

I bought a wooden whistle, and it wooden whistle. I bought a steel whistle, and it steel wooden whistle. And I bought a lead whistle, and it steel wooden lead me whistle. I bought a tin whistle. Now I tin whistle all the time.

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The coal districts and iron-manufacturing towns of Wales were fruitful fields for the early Latter-day Saint missionaries. When the Saints gathered in July 1852 for their annual conference in Newport, Monmouthshire, hundreds of members, their families, and curious neighbors attended their meetings. “To this gathering,” reported the Liverpool Mercury, “had assembled many of the ‘Elders’ of the fraternity, some of whom have held rank as ‘prophets’ on the banks of the Salt River (Lake). Great preparations were made to celebrate this Conference on an extensive scale.”

On Sunday, July 15, 1852, the conference concluded with a reception and “a tea festival on a grand scale” in Sunderland Hall, a large building of several stories which the Saints had used as their meeting place for two or three years. Almost four hundred people met in a large room on an upper floor. A heavy wooden beam supporting the floor above divided the room into two distinct parts: The visiting elders and guests of honor were seated at the head table at one end of the room, other tables crowded with the Saints and their friends – men, women, and children – occupied the other end of the room. The hall was “filled to overflowing by the members of the sect, and their families, who reside in Newport, together with considerable numbers of the people from the hills, the colliery, ironworks, &c.”

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The inaugural issue of a new online journal, “designed to promote the academic study of religion at the graduate and undergraduate levels,” and sponsored by Utah State University, has been published, here. Articles are written by graduate and undergraduate students, with peer review provided by specialists in religion and related fields at universities throughout the United States, according to the journal’s introductory statement.

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The Davis Bitton Papers are now (or momentarily will be) available for research at L. Tom Perry Special Collections, Harold B. Lee Library, Brigham Young University.

Call number: MSS 7441.

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The name for the Primary class for 9-year-old girls, from 1959 to 1968 was – you know it – “Gaynotes.” As with all Primary classes in those pre-Correlation days, the class plan included far more than a lesson manual.There were class officers, class songs, class parties, the first year awards for the wonderful bandlo, a New Testament printed especially for this class, red pencils for scripture marking, and a sense that the girls were growing up, entering, as they were, their first girls’-only church class, maturing, as they thought, from mere childhood when they had mingled with the little boys.

This post outlines the lessons for the Gaynote year, together with some of the frills that made Primary so much fun.

The Gaynote Code

“I will bring the light of the gospel into my home by greeting the day with a song.”

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A recurring advertisement from the Juvenile Instructor of 1915:

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At least 1,500 men gathered around the 20×20-foot temporary stage built at the hot springs north of Salt Lake City on June 1, 1886. One man entered the square wearing a face mask and armor over ordinary street clothes. The other was even more conspicuous, his protective gear worn over white tights and blue trunks. Both men carried fencing foils.

They advanced to the center of the square, saluted each other courteously, then drew back and raised their swords as referee Gen. Patrick Edward Connor, former commander of Camp Douglas, shouted his call to begin. The pair circled, parried, and lunged. The man in the blue trunks scored the first strike on the other’s chest as the crowd roared, “Ross! Ross!” to be answered by men betting on the other side, “Agramonte! Agramonte!”

Ross, the man in the blue trunks, was Duncan C. Ross, nationally known athlete and martial arts champion – which in 1886 meant boxing and swordplay. He had come to Salt Lake looking for challengers and betting men, and found them in Clarence Horace Montgomery y Agramonte and his supporters.

Agramonte, the man in street clothes, was …

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More advice from the “Confidental Chats” in the Young Woman’s Journal, including a response to Willmia’s letter in our first installment –

—oooOooo—

I give a letter first that has stirred my own heart very deeply, and I hope it will move all who read it with similar emotions. Misery is so hard to bear, even when it is sent to us; but when we seek it ourselves, it is a gnawing worm that never dies nor ever loses its sting. neither time nor forgetfulness affect it, and it is the veritable fiery lake within our own bosoms, which burns with everlasting pains and torments.

Your talks with the girls, I believe will do a great deal of good. The letters on the subject of round dancing, which appeared in the Journal for this month, and a circumstance connected with the reading of them, have opened my eyes to things I had never thought of.

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Adapted from Leaves from My Journal, by Wilford Woodruff; artwork by Douglas Johnson.

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The Improvement Era asked its readers to submit Mormon-flavored jokes this year, mixed with the magazine’s usual brand of humor. Illustrations were provided by the Era’s in-house artist, Fielding K. (“Smat”) Smith.

Installment a la Utopia

Salesman: “And how would you like to arrange the deferred payments?”

Customer: “Permanently.”

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It is not surprising that we published newspapers in the various centers of Mormon population during the 19th century – the Evening and the Morning Star in Independence, the Messenger and Advocate and Elders’ Journal in Kirtland, the Times and Seasons, Wasp, and Nauvoo Neighbor, in Nauvoo, the Frontier Guardian at Kanesville and Oracle at Crescent City, Iowa, and the Deseret News and others in the Great Basin.

More surprising, perhaps, are the great many newspapers published in regions where there was not a built-in audience: except for the Millennial Star, serving chiefly the British Mission where there were significant numbers of Latter-day Saints, and reaching a (thin) world-wide audience as well, other mission-based papers had very small local patronage: there’s the Etoile du Deseret at Paris, the Skandinaviens Stjerne and Nordstjernan at Copenhagen, Zion’s Panier and the later Der Stern at Hamburg, Le Reflecteur in Geneva, Die Reform and Der Darsteller der Heiligen der Letzten Tage elsewhere in Switzerland, Prophwyd y Juvili and Udgorn Seion in Wales, Zion’s Watchman in Sydney, Australia – what others am I missing?

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