UTAH VALLEY UNIVERSITY Utah Valley University Library George Sutherland Archives & Special Collections Oral History Program
Utah Women’s Walk Oral Histories Directed by Michele Welch
Interview with Jaynann Payne by Denise Alexander & Janice Hymas April 17, 2013
Utah Women’s Walk TRANSCRIPTION COVER SHEET
Interviewee: Jaynann Payne
Interviewer: Denise Alexander Janice Hymas Place of Interview: George Sutherland Archives, UVU, Orem, Utah
Date of Interview: 17 April 2013
Recordist:
Recording Equipment: Zoom Recorder H4n
Panasonic HD Video Camera AG-HM C709
Transcription Equipment: Express Scribe
Transcribed by: Brenna McFarland and Liz Brocious
Audio Transcription Edit: Lisa McMullin
Reference: JP = Jaynann Payne (Interviewee) DA = Denise Alexander (Interviewer) JH = Janice Hymas (Jaynann’s Daughter and Interviewer) MW = Michele Welch (Director, Utah Women’s Walk)
Brief Description of Contents: Jaynann talks about her life’s triumphs and trials. She was raised in Provo, Utah, and is the mother of twelve children. Jaynann was involved in the Mrs. America organization as Mrs. Utah. She was also involved with the IWY Conference and several other political and writing ventures. Jaynann served others throughout her life including a two-year service mission to the Philippines. Her greatest joy and accomplishment is her children.
NOTE: Interjections during pauses or transitions in dialogue such as uh and false starts and starts and stops in conversations are not included in this transcript. Changes by interviewee are incorporated in text. All additions to transcript are noted with brackets. Please note that this is not a verbatim transcription of the oral interview as it has been extensively edited. Clarifications and additional information are footnoted. Audio Transcription
[05:54] Beginning of interview
DA: My name is Denise Alexander. Today is April 17, 2013, and I am at the library at the George Sutherland Archives on the campus of Utah Valley University.
Today, along with her daughter and my good friend Jan Hymas, we are interviewing Jaynann Payne as a nominee in the Utah Women’s Walk as a notable woman who has made a significant contribution to life in the state. And if I can just say just at the beginning, that I just admired you for many years. My first experience was listening to you give a talk at BYU Education Week many years ago, and it was so inspiring to me, and I have never forgotten it.1 And then I became such good friends with Jan up in Bountiful, and so I’ve admired you and your family for many years. I’m so happy that I can do this interview.
JP: Okay. I need to ask you to speak louder.
DA: Okay, I will do my best.
JP: Thank you.
JH: She has hearing aids.
DA: But I’m not a very loud person, but I will do my best. Okay. Can I call you Sister Payne, or who would you—what would you like me to call you?
JP: Call me Jaynann.
DA: Jaynann, okay. We’ll start with just some background information. Could you tell us where you were born and where you attended school and anything of that sort that you’d like to tell us about?
JP: I was born in Salt Lake City, October 16, 1928, and I lived there for the first year of my life while my father was finishing his J.D. degree at the University of Utah [law school]. My mother graduated from the University of Utah also, with a B.A. [degree] in English.
1. Education Week refers to a program where for one week each August, more than one thousand classes on education, religion, marriage, family relations, health, history, genealogy, science, youth interests, and many other areas are presented on the campus of Brigham Young University Provo. The program is designed primarily for adults.
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[A year after] I was born, we moved to Spanish Fork. So I spent my first six or seven years in Spanish Fork going to the Thurber Elementary School. [When I was five, my brother Alan was born—my only sibling.] I was my parents’ oldest or only daughter, and he’s their only son, and so we were a small family, but we had a wonderful childhood. We moved to Provo [when I was eight years old], and I went to the Brigham Young Elementary just right through the block from where we lived [at 531 North 200 East]. My education at that time was wonderful. I had three marvelous teachers that introduced me to science and astronomy and politics, and that was exciting for me.
DA: Would you like to name their names?
JP: Beg pardon?
DA: Would you like to name their names?
[08:42]
JP: Yes, I would. [Miss Gladys Kotter] was my fourth grade teacher [and taught me to love and appreciate science]. We did science experiments. [Miss Georgia Maeser, granddaughter of Karl G. Maeser, was my fifth-grade teacher. One night she took our whole class to the BYU Planetarium to see the stars and the craters on the moon, Jupiter, Mars, Venus and the rings around Saturn.] Ellwood Sandberg was my sixth grade teacher, and [engaged our minds in history, political debates and events of the world]. It was neat. This was just before World War II began. Then I went to the Farrer Junior High School, and I had some marvelous teachers there. Deb Tregeagle was one of them [and he] later became principal of the Provo High School. And then I went to Provo High School [and skipped my senior year because I had enough credits to graduate after taking summer school classes]. So I started college when I was sixteen, and went to Brigham Young University, and I turned seventeen shortly after that. But I loved school, and I loved learning.
I want to pay tribute to my mother because I love this little poem: “You may have wealth untold / caskets of jewels and silver and gold / but richer than I you can never be / I had a mother who read to me.”2 [My mother also had a beautiful singing voice and played the piano. My father was also very musical and played the trumpet. Together, they made beautiful music.] They played for [many] weddings and funerals and [other civic events.] They [bequeathed to] me [a great love for literature, music, and the arts.] These wonderful cultural things have been a highlight of my life actually. I think of “if there’s anything lovely or of good report or praiseworthy, we seek after these things.”3 That [has
2. Jaynann is quoting “The Reading Mother,” a poem by Strickland Gillilan.
3. Jaynann is quoting the 13th Article of Faith, a collection of Latter-day Saint doctrines.
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been a mantra] of my life. I’ve been privileged because they took me to concerts, [ballets, and] to wonderful plays and [gave me] a very rich cultural background. And anything else you want [me to talk] about my childhood?
DA: Do you have any important memories besides what you’ve talked about from childhood?
JH: Don’t you want to tell some of those cute stories that you’ve shared with your grandchildren?
JP: Oh, well, [this is] a little bit embarrassing. I guess my temper tantrum. [This is a story about a little four-year-old girl who hadn’t learned how to be like Jesus yet. One day her mother was serving lunch to ladies at her home. Little Ellenor went into the kitchen and saw her favorite raisin-filled lemon cookies. She said, “I want a cookie.” Her mother said, “If you can ask politely, and wait until I finish serving the ladies, I’ll give you one.” Little Ellenor said, “NO, I want one right NOW!” When her mother told her no again, she ran into the front room where the ladies were eating and threw herself on the floor, kicking and screaming. The ladies began to laugh. Her mother didn’t say a word but went back into the kitchen, got a glass of cold water and came up to her naughty little girl and dumped the cold water in her face! Ellenor, sputtered, and crying, said, “Wha. . .why. . .why did you do that?” Her mother calmly said, “Because you deserved it! Now tell the ladies you are sorry. Go upstairs and calm down, and when you can be polite you may come down and have a cookie.” Well, do you think Ellenor threw many more temper tantrums? Absolutely not! She needed to be polite, be patient, and remember the good manners her mother was trying to teach her. Who was the little girl? Did you guess it was your grandmother Jaynann? You are right! I was named Ellenor Jaynann Morgan. I learned the hard way that magic words like: please and thank you or I’m sorry win more friends and lemon cookies. Mothers and grandmas will tolerate most of their children’s mistakes, but they turn a very nasty shade of purple when it comes to bad manners.]4 Anyway, that was just one funny experience.
And several others—I don’t know how interesting and how long—you know, you could go on for five or six hours with this because I’m eighty-four years old. Well, I tell my children—I ask them, “How old do you think I am?” And they try to guess, and I say, “I’m thirty-nine with forty-five years experience.” Now if they can’t pass that math test, they’ve just flunked math.
But, anyway, I did have a delightful childhood, and we—it’s a very innocent childhood. We went riding our bikes all over town, we went swimming in the summertime, we’d go skiing up at Stewart’s Flats [today it is Sundance Resort] in the wintertime and ice
4. Jaynann substituted the bracketed portion for what she what she originally said in the interview.
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skating down at [Utah] Lake, and it was just a carefree, [safe, and] wonderful [childhood. They could] fix a peanut butter sandwich and take off, and they’d come home [for] dinner [and feel safe]. When we first moved up on the hill with all of our kids, it was safe. [The kids could] do the same thing: they’d go hiking up to the Easter Cross [or in the mountains for hours]. So um, I’m grateful for those wonderful, innocent, experiences that we had. [My daughter Shelly summed it up: “Mom, we had the best babysitter in the world—the mountains!”]
JH: Could you share that experience about wanting to go with your friends and your mother said no?
[13:43]
JP: Oh, yeah, that’s embarrassing, but that’s okay. I was fourteen, and I was not supposed to date. I was not supposed to go riding in a car with boys. And so, anyway, one night I was babysitting up [a few blocks away] and my friends came by. Bonnie and Meredith Hansen lived at the back of our place in an apartment, and the cute boy that used to cut our lawns and his two friends from the Dixon [Junior High], which was across town, came by in this little Model T Ford. They asked my mother, I guess, where I was, and she told them. So they came by and said, “Well, come and go with us.” And I said, “Well, I can’t. The people won’t be home for another half hour or so.” And so I sort of hoped and prayed they wouldn’t come back because I knew I wasn’t supposed to go in cars with boys. So anyway, the Davises came back, and I started to walk home. And they came by in the car as, you know, luck would have it and said, “Oh, well, hop in. We’ll take you home.” But they didn’t. They went up Provo Canyon to [Vivian Park], and we played on the bridge and had a lot of fun.
Then we started back home and [as we came out of] the mouth of Provo Canyon—I freaked out [when I learned that] Pat Curtis, who was sixteen, and his brother Bob [who] was fourteen that he had hotwired this car off of Pete Ashton’s used car lot. Well, I just freaked out [and yelled], “Slow down, slow down.” I had visions of our being arrested. My father was judge pro tem of the Provo city court at that time, and I had this horrible nightmare of being arrested and taken before my dad as a felon as being accessory to stealing a car, which was one to ten years in the state prison. I mean, I had all of these nightmares, and I thought, Oh my golly. Boy, I was in real hot water. Anyway, they finally got me home, and my folks were worried because it was 1:00 AM, and they had called Mrs. Hansen because they thought I was with her daughters. And I was, and they weren’t home yet. So my mom and dad waited a few more minutes, and they thought, We’ve got to call the police, maybe something has happened to those girls. And so they were looking out the front window when this Model T showed up.
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Meredith and Bonnie and I got out, and I tried to sneak around the back door. But, my dad and mom were waiting for me. And she said, “Where have you been?” And I said, “Babysitting.” And she said, “No, you left babysitting at eleven o’clock. Where have you been?” “With Meredith and Bonnie,” “Well, we know that, but where else have you been? Have you been riding in a car with boys?” “No.” And they said, “Oh, yes, you have.” That’s what my dad was so upset about is the fact that I had lied, that I said no. And they said, Well, we saw you get out of the car. Anyway, I was grounded [from] August until after Christmas. [I couldn’t go to any] fall dances, Halloween parties, or Christmas parties, and my folks made it stick. And I am grateful for parents that cared enough to say no to a rather rebellious, wayward daughter, at that point in time, anyway.
I worked [for my father in his law office in the summertime from] the time I was twelve [until I was married]. He had me start typing in seventh grade. They didn’t used to let you [learn to type] until eighth and ninth [grade], but he got special permission because he said, “My daughter is going to be my secretary in my law office.” So I got to take typing, and I got to take shorthand a little early, and I loved working for my dad. In the summertime, I went to summer school in the mornings and then [went] to work for my dad in the afternoons. I cherish that wonderful relationship because [I learned so much from him about the law, which proved very valuable all my life. Consequently, the theme] of my life is the hand of the Lord in my life because He prepared me [from] the time I was small: one step at a time, to do other things that were really important. [From] working in [my dad’s] law office and [even though] I wasn’t a paralegal, I had had a lot of experience [and training in the law].
When Orrin Hatch’s state director, Ron Madsen, called me after my husband had lost his job in Salt Lake—he called me and said, “We’d like you to take over the Provo office.” My husband and Orrin had worked together for a company in Salt Lake until Orrin went into politics and became a senator. And so I told Dean, “Oh I can’t do that.” And he said, “Sure you can; you worked in your dad’s law office.” And so anyway, each step led to something else that was significant and important in my life as far as my life experiences are concerned.
In the meantime, I graduated from BYU with an English major degree and a minor in Spanish and Music. [In 1948, I married my sweetheart, Dean Payne, shortly after he returned] from his mission.5 [I graduated that spring from BYU. We moved to Salt Lake where he entered law school at the University of Utah. I worked part-time for a firm of
5. A mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a geographical area to which Latter-day Saint missionaries are assigned. Missionaries of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are volunteer representatives who engage in proselyting, Church service, and humanitarian aid.
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attorneys while my husband Dean was in law school. In the evenings, Dean worked at ZCMI, wrapping and packing china. We] started our family, and he [later] graduated from law school. We had three babies before he got out of law school. I really have a testimony that the Lord provides when you do what is right and you do your best. I’m so grateful for my children. I never dreamed that I could have twelve children because I came from a small family of just two children. Anyway, I’m rattling on, but you ask some more questions that maybe more significant.
[20:00]
DA: Well Jaynann, you were talking about some of your father—what about other women in your life that you admired?
JP: About what?
DA: Other women.
JP: Oh yes, I need to tell you about mentors in my life. My mother, as I said, was my number one mentor. When I was in seventh grade, my mother started to take extension classes from Mrs. Julietta Bateman Jensen, who was a very wonderful literature teacher. She [also taught] older women, some of them who only had an eighth-grade education. [These classes] were marvelous, and I said, “Mom, you want me to go to school after school? Are you kidding?” [Then Mom] said, “They’re going to be [learning] Greek mythology.” Well, I love Greek mythology so I went with her and actually [continued to study with her for] four years after school [from age twelve to fifteen].
Mrs. Julietta Bateman Jensen was the wife of Christian Jensen, who was interim president of BYU before George McDonald came. [She taught us] Shakespeare, Browning, world literature, the Bible as literature, Greek myths, and English literature. I just had a whole new world open up to me. She was one of the most significant mentors and teachers. I was the only teenager in her class of all of these women my mother’s age, but they were my dear friends, and they were all mentors in a way because they made me feel like I was smart and here I was just a teenager. She was a wonderful mentor. She had great confidence and a love of learning. [She had taken many] trips around the world and showed us all of these pictures of Michelangelo’s paintings and the Taj Mahal. [This] put fire in my bones [for the arts and travelling. Later on in my life], I was able to go to some of those [fascinating places like] the Sistine Chapel and the Taj Mahal. [Mrs. Jensen told us her philosophy that it was better to have cobwebs on your ceiling than cobwebs on your brain.] Those childhood mentors of your life are so important.
My dad was [also my mentor and hero. He loved music, history, art, and literature. One summer, my parents] took us back East to several conventions. [My dad planned to take
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us to] Appomattox and I was very upset [because] I just wanted to go to Radio City Music Hall and have a lobster dinner [and see the Rockettes] in New York City. Daddy said, “Well you can sit here in the car [and wait if you want, but] we’re going to go in.” But it was so hot there in Virginia and so after sweating a little bit I went in and after reading about the Civil War and the end of the Civil War and what a hero—
JH: Robert E. Lee
JP: —Robert E. Lee was, and I got fire in my bones too for history [and the men and women who made our country great. That is one of the experiences that inspired my writing the program] for Patriots in Petticoats. Those early experiences where you lived history on the spot, [have continued to influence me. We visited] Jamestown or Williamsburg, [and heard the] funny stories of this old black guide at Jamestown. [Then, we went] up to Boston and New York and visited all those cities with my parents. Their interest in history just gave me a life-long love of learning of literature and history and our country, I have fire in my bones for this country. Now, anything else for my—
[24:06]
DA: Well you talked about meeting and marrying your husband. Do you want to tell a little bit more detail about that?
JP: Yes, I met Dean while I was eating a shrimp salad at Keeley’s Café [on my lunch hour] while I was working [in] my dad’s law office. [Dean and his friend,] Phil Snelgrove, who I’d gone to school with, [walked by]. Well, I was going up and down [from campus] in the mornings to summer school and walking up and down that road there at BYU to go to my classes. Dean saw me, and he was going to summer school and finishing up his high school [classes at BY High School and was] living with his brother Kaye who had come down here from Seattle, Washington. So anyway, he used to tease me and said [jokingly], “Every [time] I see you coming up that hill I’d fall in the canal.” And I said, “Oh, come on.” But he was really cute about it so he had Phil Snelgrove introduce us, and then he asked me for a date to a fireside. He finished school here and [then] he went back to the University of Washington in Seattle so I didn’t see him for another year. But when he came back down to BYU, then I was a freshman at BYU, and so we sort of picked up our relationship, and we dated a number of times, and he went on his mission the next May.
DA: Where did he go?
JP: So he went to the Northern States Mission. His grandfather, German E. Ellsworth, was the president of the Northern States Mission for twenty-three years, twenty-three or twenty-four years. He was one of the longest [serving] mission presidents [in the
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Church]. He was a mission president then of the Northern California Mission and so when they came for conference, he just took Dean in and said, “Okay, I’m ordaining you an elder and you’re gonna go to the Northern States Mission.”6 You know in those days I guess he knew all the Brethren.7 [He knew] the General Authorities and the Twelve Apostles, so I guess you could do it in those days.8 So Dean left then the next May and went to the northern states for two years. And then when he came home we were married six weeks after, and it’s just been a happy, wonderful life ever since—high adventure with twelve children.
DA: That’s incredible. One of the stories that I wanted you to share was when your mother— you wanted to go skiing with your friends—
JP: Oh, okay.
DA: —if you felt like that was appropriate because it was about your grandfather.
JP: About my grandfather—I was my grandparents’ [only granddaughter] on both sides, my mother’s side and my father’s side. I was their only granddaughter and my brother was their only grandson. [My grandfather Edgar Roberts] was especially dear to me because he made little tables and chairs and things for me. They lived in Idaho, and he let me clerk in his groceteria, which was his food store. He told me the stories of their mission in Samoa [where] they had served as a young couple. [Luetta] was twenty and [Edgar] was twenty-one and [when] they [were] called on a mission. Elder B.H. Roberts went up to Star Valley where they lived and called them both on a mission [just] after they were married. They left and went to Samoa for three years, and Grandma bore two children on the islands, and they buried their firstborn son Loy there. He died of dysentery at the age of eighteen months. And so they had a lot of miraculous, marvelous, spiritually inspiring stories of their mission. [Edward J.] Wood was their mission president who later became president of the Cardston temple.9 [My grandparents] loved the Samoan people, but it was difficult for them to learn the language. They [were assigned to] be teachers and teach singing and teach the children over on Savaii. [For them, it] was a really wild,
6. An elder is an office in the priesthood in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
7. The term the Brethren is used to refer to the members of the First Presidency and the members of the Quorum of Twelve of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
8. General Authorities are men in leadership positions who serve at the highest levels of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
9. A temple is sacred building dedicated to the Lord.
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uncivilized [island], and they had to depend on the Saints—the Samoan Saints to feed them. [This] was difficult because they didn’t always have a lot of food.10 But anyway, Grandpa told me these wonderful stories.
When I was sixteen, I loved to ski. Junior Bounous and Earl Miller were our teachers at the Y, and we were going to go to Alta one day and try to run a slalom course. [I told] my mother the night before [that] I wanted to go skiing the next day. She said, “Jaynann, I’d rather you didn’t.” She was caring for my grandfather, who had been hit by a car and he had a heart condition, and she had brought him to our home after the hospital. She was caring for him night after night, and she’d have to sit him up in bed and give him his little nitro glycerin tablets under his tongue and take care of him, and she was just worn out. She said, “Jaynann, it would be so much help if you would not go skiing and come and bake a cake for us and clean the house for me for Sunday.” That was a Saturday. So anyway I heard that, but not really, because I wanted to go skiing so bad and I thought, This is the only chance. And I thought, Well I could come home early, and I can still vacuum and clean, and I can still make a cake. And I would do that. So I got up in the morning very rebellious, got my ski clothes on, put my skiis out on the porch, and then went in the kitchen to make myself a sandwich. My mother saw the light on; she came out [into the kitchen] and said, “Jaynann, what’s wrong? Where are you going?” And I said, “Oh Mom, I just didn’t tell you last night, but I’ve written you a note. I’ll come home early. I’ll do the vacuuming and clean the house. And I’ll do all the things you wanted me to do. I just have to go skiing. This is the only chance I’ll get to really learn how to run a slalom course.” And she said, “No Jaynann, I told you last night I didn’t want you to go.” Well I threw another royal temper tantrum [and] said, “You are the meanest mother in the whole wide world. You never want me to do anything and have any fun.” And I was so bad; she started to cry. And then finally my heart was softened, and I thought, Oh you’ve hurt your mother’s feelings. I started to cry when the horn honked, and I went out on the front porch, and the boys were there. I said, “I can’t go.” And they said, Why? And I said, “My mother won’t let me.” I mean it was dumb, but I was so embarrassed. I didn’t know what else to say. I should have been really cool and said, “Well because my mother needs my help, and I need to stay home. [I decided not to go.” I said, “Mom, I’m sorry.”] I went in and changed my clothes. I helped my mother fix breakfast; I went on my grandfather’s bed and gave him breakfast; and I spent the whole morning with my grandpa, hearing again those beautiful, faith-promoting stories of my grandparents’ mission in the Samoan Islands which has always been so inspiring to me.
In fact, I’m writing a book now. I’m writing a book of their footsteps of faith of their mission and their life on their mission. He wrote the most wonderful journal, and so
10. A Latter-day Saint is a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
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that’s what I’m doing now. But, I spent that day with my grandfather, and I’m so grateful I had a mean mother who wouldn’t let me go skiing because my grandpa died at three o’clock the next morning. I’ve thought through the years how I would feel if I had gone skiing and missed that wonderful relationship with my grandpa. I’ve had other experiences, since then, where I’ve felt his presence because my patriarchal blessing said, “The angels of your presence will draw near to you when you approach danger and will protect you and guide you.”11 I’ve had a number of experiences where that has really happened. So anyway, those are some of the unusual experiences of my life.
[Now] I would like to talk more about my family and having [our twelve] children. [May] I say to all of the young women, that after having had several “careers” that homemaking and being a mother and a wife [has been] the most rewarding [to me in this life and] eternally. I’ve enjoyed the creativity. I’ve appreciated a mother who taught me to cook, can, and clean. Even if you don’t know those things, you can still have that wonderful creative experience of having a home and making a home. Even if you’re a single woman, you need to cook and clean, and you need to have an environment that is serene and that you can appreciate and do the things that will bring you happiness and joy. So, I just loved homemaking. I just loved having babies, and my husband was a wonderful support. I have to pay him tribute.
His theme was, “Lo, children are an heritage of the Lord and happy is the man that has his quiver full.”12 We put that on his funeral program because that was one of his wonderful themes. He bathed [the babies] at night when I was large with child and couldn’t bend over the bathtub. He did their fishy swims up and down [the tub]. He was just the dearest father and the most wonderful husband.
I might say that of all of my so called “careers,” like with the IWY or the Utah Association of Women or the Freemen Institute or Senator Hatch, they were all very exciting and glamorous, but in the long run, none were as rewarding and wonderful as having a family and just enjoying my children and teaching them skills and to work.
Like I said, we didn’t have a TV set for seventeen years. I’ll share one little experience with you. My son Tommy was in first grade, and when I went to parent teacher conferences, Mrs. Jernell said, “You know, I don’t think Tommy watches much television, does he?” And I said, “No, he doesn’t because we don’t have a television.” And she said, “Oh, that’s why he sits up and listens to me and looks at me in the eyes. I don’t have to entertain him.” And I said, “You know I was feeling guilty because we
11. Patriarchal blessings are individual blessings given to members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
12. Jaynann is quoting Psalms 127:3–5 from the Bible.
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didn’t have Sesame Street and all those things.” And she said, “Mrs. Payne, Sesame Street is for ghetto children. Your children are not ghetto children so just be happy that they want to learn, and you’ve given them a desire to learn and read and write.”
Anyway I guess it was rewarding for me. I felt at one time I hated the TV because it was like a giant vacuum. It would suck up all the living things, and you know they’d be fixed in front of that box, and we couldn’t get their attention, and we couldn’t get Saturday work done and things done, and so I actually threw it out. It was just a little tiny one. I just threw it out into the garage, and I think it broke. I’m sure it did. But my family got the message and maybe that was another temper tantrum that I shouldn’t admit to.
I am so grateful because our children were good students [and hard workers]. They learned to [care for] a garden. We had a garden in the summertime and one of our greatest joys was canning fruit in the summer. The kids would be washing cucumbers out on the lawn to make pickles. One summer, we made seven hundred quarts of everything! [All] the kids helped and it was just wonderful.
I remember one day when Ben was in junior high school, and he was playing football with Craig Garrick, Cary and Kyle Whittingham, who is the [head] coach at the University of Utah. They were his buddies, and they came by with their uniforms on to go get Ben to play [for football practice]. He hadn’t finished peeling his half-bushel of pears, and so the boys said, We’ll do it; you just go ahead and get changed, Ben; and we’ll peel the pears. I thought, Those great big football hands; they’ll smash those little pears. But they were so careful; they just got them all done before he even got his clothes changed.
I saw Kyle recently because his mother, Nancy Whittingham, lives up [the street and] is [my] neighbor. I asked him about that [incident], and he said, “Oh yes, I remember. I thought you were a wonderful mother to ya know, stick to, keep to the chores they had to do before they could go play ball.” So that was just another funny story.
I did love to do all of the things [at home]. I loved to do the washing. I even loved to do the dishes and mop floors. I don’t have floors to mop much anymore, but all of those things were a joy to me, and teaching children to work is very important. One other thing that I want to say here, [which has become] a mantra [of mine], is that you are very fortunate in the many ways [you have to serve each other] in a family, even in menial ways like changing diapers or taking out the garbage. “Such service is sacred to love and nothing is menial where there is love.” That was originally a letter from Pearl Buck to her daughter when she got married and her statement is, “You are fortunate in a marriage of the way you have to serve each other, to prepare his meals and so forth.” But I like to say in a family; because when your children serve each other, they learn to love each other, even changing diapers. You know, our kids were able to do some of those more menial
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chores, but it is a joy to serve each other and especially [to serve] their little brothers and sisters. My youngest twin [daughter] Rosie said, “You know Evie taught me how to make my bed right, and she taught me how to hang up my clothes.” The older siblings, sometimes help the younger ones. I know Janice was especially a wonderful babysitter because she would even bring treats home to the children. One year, she was the Easter bunny for what was that?
JH: The Angel Flight.13
[39:33]
JP: The Angel Flight. We have that picture of her as the Easter bunny, and she did a lot of fun things for the family. Being a homemaker has been such a joy to me. I’ve just loved it. I love my children. We had our bumps; we had some problems; we’ve had a couple of unhappy marriages; but they’ve turned out happy now. And so I’m grateful for that. You just sort of roll with the punches. And what else would you like me to answer?
DA: You’ve talked about some maxims. Is there any other maxims or mantras that you’d like to share?
JH: How about the one in the Philippines?
JP: Oh yes, on our mission in the Philippines. One of our friends, [a young woman of twenty- two] was not active in the Church. We’d take her and pick her up and go to church, and then we’d invite her home for Sunday dinner. Afterwards, I would get up to clear the table, and she said, “No Sister Payne, no, no, no, I will be the one to do it.” She wouldn’t let me do anything, “I will be the one to do it.” I heard that all over the Philippines, and it was so neat. We went on a trip one time on a ship, and my luggage was taken there and set on our level that we were supposed to be on. I went to pick up one of my small bags, and this little young man rushed over and said, “No, no, no, no, I will be the one to do it.” And I said, “You’re from the Philippines aren’t you?” And he said, “How did you know?” And I said, “I lived in the Philippines for two years, and that is one of the wonderful trademarks or the wonderful qualities of the Filipino people.” [In spite of] such poverty, they always want to give you something in return and they are always saying, I will be the one to do it. I’ve loved that very much. [It reminds me of the Savior who said, “Here am I, send me.”]14 Now, do you want to go on to how I got involved in the political arena? Or is it time for—
13. Angel Flight was the female arm of the Air Force ROTC. 14. Jaynann is quoting Isaiah 6:8 from the Bible.
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DA: Do you feel like you’ve covered the women you admire?
JP: Oh, the women I admire. Well, [my mother has always been my hero. I could not have had twelve children without her love and support.] Margaret Thatcher is [another] one. Phyllis Schlafly [and I have] been friends since 1973 when I went to speak at a women’s conference in Montana and the stake Relief Society president was involved in the Eagle Forum and with Phyllis Schlafly and gave me her handouts.15 My husband read it and he said, “Wow she is smart; she discusses these constitutional issues.” And so he was an admirer of hers and so he encouraged me to, when I was invited to go back to Washington, attend some of those Eagle Forum conferences that we had with high profile speakers [who] were talking about the Equal Rights Amendment and about family values, issues, abortion, and gay rights, and so forth. I sort of became involved in that as a result.
What really led to all of this was I guess a friend that entered my name in the Mrs. Utah/ Mrs. America contest when I was thirty-eight years old and had ten children. I went in to get a wedding gift and Bernetta Camp had been my counselor when I was Young Women’s president.16 And she said “Oh by the way Jaynann, I’ve just entered your name into Mrs. Utah/Mrs. America contest.” And I said, “Bernetta, you’re nuts. I’m thirty- eight; I’m not a beauty queen.” And she said, “It’s not a beauty contest; it’s a homemaking contest.” And I said, “Well that doesn’t matter. I’ve got ten kids you know” And she said, “Don’t give me any guff. I’ve filled out as much as I can; now you take this home, bring me back a snapshot.” My husband was in Mexico on a business trip. That night I filled it out, took it back to her and totally forgot about it. Then in another week and a half, my kids heard on the radio that Mrs. Dean Payne had been named Mrs. Utah County, and you get to go to the Utah pageant next week, and I said, “What?” And Dean said, “You didn’t tell me about this.” And I said, “You didn’t ask me.” He wasn’t there to ask anyway. He was very supportive, and he just said, “Do your best,” so I had to throw things together. Fortunately, I had just sort of perfected I guess what you’d call my my —oh—
DA: Résumé?
JP: No, my best recipe. My gourmet recipe called “Pearls of the Sea” [that] has crab, shrimp, [scallops], and halibut in it [with] cream of shrimp soup. It’s over minute rice, and it has a secret ingredient, which is Angostura bitters, in it. It is really easy and fast to make and it just wowed the judges, even if I do say so. Most of [the] other ladies had bean
15. The Relief Society is the official women's organization of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
16. The Young Women is a youth organization in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter- day Saints.
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[casseroles]. This “Pearls of the Sea” [had an exotic] name [that] was fun, [and] my kids have always loved it. It’s just been a wonderful recipe, and it’s one of their favorites.
I said that was the biggest April Fools’ joke. April first I woke up Mrs. Utah on my way the next month to the Mrs. America pageant. [There is] just one thing that I was happy about; I won a [prize] from Gladys Smith. I didn’t know [she] was an international hair stylist [living] in Provo. She cut my hair and styled it and lightened it just a little bit, and she said, “I want you more blonde.” She doctored me all up and anyway, I had compliments on my hair [even though] I’ve always [thought I was] short and fat. It was not a beauty contest, so I was very surprised to go to the Mrs. America pageant.
I had a bunch of adventures there, but it was fourteen grueling events in ten days. Fortunately, [there was not a] bathing suit [competition]. Hooray—but you did have to pick out a wardrobe. You did [a] driving [test, an event on] child communication, parties for adults, teens and children, cooking. [There was an] Aunt Jemima pancake [cooking] contest, [and] high finances. There were fourteen events that we had to compete in, so we had about two a day, and we chased all over San Diego. The firemen were our chauffeurs, and so they got to take us around to all these different places because, you know, they had fifty contestants.
Well in the beginning, I had forgotten and left my banner and crown home, if you could believe it. I got to the Los Angeles airport, and Miss Adams, [the manager in charge of checking in the contestants], said, “Run over there and get your banner and crown,” and she pointed to where some were hanging. A couple of crowns were for the ladies that didn’t have a pageant in their state, and so like a dummy I walked over, and then I walked back and said, “I can’t see Mrs. Utah.” And she said, “But you had a pageant in your state; you received one.” And I said, “Oh.” [She asked], “Didn’t you bring it with you? Didn’t you remember who you were?” Oh, I wanted to crawl under the table, and so she said, “Oh you have to have some identification to get on that plane; you just can’t be in a blue suit.” And so she said, “Have a bite of lunch.” So we took that time—it was an hour and a half until plane time, and so my husband hired a taxi for me. We chased all over Los Angeles to try to find a department store with some wide ribbon that I could print Mrs. Utah on, and so luckily, interestingly enough, my good friend Mrs. Texas, had [been] given a Lonestar state crown, so she gave me hers. I was glad that I had that. We did finally find some wide ribbon. I rushed back to the airport and [discovered that] ballpoint pen didn’t work. I ended up [using] black lead pencil. This guy had a big, wide, black lead he was writing on boxes, so I printed Mrs. Utah on my banner and we got on the plane; then we had to check all of our hand luggage and put the tags on it to the different hotels where we were staying.
So then I did that and Mrs. Texas was next to me, and so as I stood over and bent over and was tagging all this luggage, this black lead pencil rubbed off all over my suit and
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under my arms. And I got up and I didn’t notice the big black smudge here from the banner where I bent over or was it here? Anyway, when I bent over [there were] smudges under my arms, and Mrs. Texas said, “Good heavens honey child whatever happened to [y’all]? You look like you’ve been servicing this plane instead of riding on it.” And I said, “Oh Dory, oh my golly.” Anyway, so I sort of had to go through the [parade like I was]. After we had presented our gift to the mayor of San Diego, I had white gloves on, so I could sort of cover it up a little bit. [My gift to the mayor of San Diego was a beautiful copper plate from Kennecott Copper.] We presented that and then we got in open air convertibles, and we rode all the way through downtown San Diego. I went all day in my dirty blue suit. Fortunately, [only] one or two people noticed, so you know, you just roll with the punches. It was an adventure [that] I really loved.
In fact, I [had a reunion with] Mrs. Texas just at Thanksgiving, [in 2012]. She [lives] only a little ways from my daughter who lives in Houston, and she invited us to come out to her Long Horn steer ranch and we had a ball. She had a big Texas barbeque for us so she’s still a good friend. [In the pageant], she [had] lent me her pancake griddle because mine didn’t work in the Mrs. Aunt Jemima pancake contest.
We had all these adventures at the pageant, and I was sure I wouldn’t even be one of the ten finalists. My interview with the judges was 11:30 at night, and I was absolutely spaced out. I could hardly think. I got through that somehow. I remember one question that the judges asked me, and I think this was the team of insurance and finance [judges. They] asked me, You have ten children? And I said, “Yes.” [They asked], How are you going to educate your children? And I said, “Well the same way my husband and I got our education. We worked our way through college; we worked part-time; and you know, we were able to make it through.” And they said, Oh that’s interesting. And I said, “Well and our children all help; they help us.” Oh and another thing I said is, “We have a year’s supply of food on hand in our basement because I bottle fruit. We can things, and we buy [things] on sale,” I told them some of the things that we did as a family, so that we could afford to have a family and afford to have them go to school and teach them to work.
One other thing that Janice wanted me to mention is a mantra that we sort of have and that is: “You children don’t have to work, you get to.” My daughter one night had been talking on the phone all afternoon, and it was her turn to do the dishes, and she said, “Oh Mom, I’ve got so much homework; do I have to do the dishes?” And I said, “No Nancy, you don’t have to; you get to. And you have a choice. You can leave the dishes dirty, and we’ll eat on them for breakfast, and they’ll know who didn’t do their dishes last night or you can do the dishes quick.” And so she said, “Oh dear.” Well she did the dishes and [showed a] good attitude for me. “You don’t have to, you get to.” You get to serve your family and to have the satisfaction of helping each other, of teaching each other. Janice taught—who was it that you taught to read? She taught one of the children to read when they were only three or four. Was it Suzie?
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JH: Probably Julie.
JP: Was it Julie? Well did Suzie teach you before you went to school too?
JH: Yeah, she did.
[52:22]
JP: So, you know when our kids started to go to school, they learned all these little things, and they taught each other, and that was a wonderful experience. After the Mrs. America pageant, my life [started] on a rollercoaster because I was asked to speak at Relief Societies, at Young Women and all kinds of things. I didn’t want to be Mrs. America because she had to leave her home and family for a whole month and go on a countrywide tour of county fairs, flipping pancakes for Aunt Jemima and advertising them. I discovered that this whole pageant was owned by a man, and it was a business venture. [In any case], if we did anything, we were supposed to send him money for appearing on anything, even a float in a parade, and so I was grateful that I only got to be second runner up, and that was just as close as I wanted to get. But we had some wonderful adventures there [towards] the last. As I said, [when] you’ve got ten kids at home you have to flip pancakes for [you don’t need to leave your home for a month flipping pancakes for Aunt Jemima.] It got close and I was one of the five finalists.
[I had to do a role-play with the star of I Dream of Jeannie. His name was Jim or something.]17 [We were given a] role-playing situation. He was my husband, and he had just bought me a new dress. I took a look at it and the announcer said, “It’s the ugliest thing you’ve ever seen it’s not your color or style. Now what are you going to say to him?” Well, he came waltzing out, and he said, “Oh just look at this beautiful dress. Don’t you just love it?” And then it was my turn to answer, and I thought, You know something? I said, “Aren’t you a dear? Not many husbands would spend the afternoon shopping for a dress for their wives. Thank you so much, you’re a sweetheart; I’d be happy to wear it.” Then I didn’t have to lie and say I liked it or anything else and I thought, Thank you. That was a good answer. It was a perfect answer, and he was so cute. I’ve got this picture there and he came up and grabbed me by both arms, and he tried to kiss me right on the mouth. And I thought, Oh my husband’s off stage, Anyway, and then he tried it again, and I learned that good maxim “turn the other cheek,” which I did. But he was shaking; he was scared. I whispered in his ear and said, “You’re on television every week how [come you] are shaking as bad as I am?” And he just laughed and walked off. So it was fun.
17. Jaynann later added that it was Bill Daily who played Roger Healey.
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Then they called out the [names], and I thought Mrs. Oregon would win. She had won the most brownie points. Mrs. New Hampshire won the interior design contest, and I thought they would be, maybe first and second. Mrs. New Hampshire was fourth, and Mrs. Oregon was third runner-up, and then I was second runner-up. I was [so] relieved, and my husband was too. He rushed out on the stage, and we jumped up and down, so happy we didn’t win. He had his wife back, and my kids had their mother back. Since it was such a commercial venture, I just was really, really happy that that was as close as I wanted to get. Mrs. Kansas won that year [and] was Mrs. America, and her husband was an attorney, and she was a really lovely lady. She had two little boys, [and] her mother lived down the street. [It was a piece] of cake for her to be gone and do all the commercial things, the advertising and everything that they wanted her to do. It worked out just beautifully, but like I said, that launched me into a lot of other things, and one of the most important things in my life was [that] they invited me to teach Education Weeks at BYU in the summertime, and that was a real thrill for me because I love the family. I love to talk about the family, but I studied and I branched out into a lot of different things. Can you excuse me a minute?
[56:32]
MW: What year was the [pageant]?
JP: In May 1967.
MW: That was when you were Mrs. Utah?
JP: Utah.
DA: So this was before you got involved in the Utah Women’s Association and the [IWY]?
JP: Yes, yes.
DA: And Jaynann, going back, what year did you get married?
JP: The pageant was 1967.
DA: And what year did you get married?
JH: You got married [in] 1948.
JP: Oh, I got married in 1948. June 29, on Dean’s grandparents’ fiftieth wedding anniversary, and then Janice was married on June 29, and Curtis was married on June 29 and Rachelle was married on June 29.
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DA: Oh wow, that’s a wonderful tradition.
JP: It is. So anyway, [back to] Education Week. I think that Mrs. Jensen [Julieta Bateman Jensen] as I told you, [was] my original mentor. [She] taught me to have a thirst for learning, and so we just sort of branched out [in the things I read]. I read a lot in between snatches of nursing babies. I studied and learned and [presented a class on] treasures to give to your family. That was one of my best programs at Education Week. I [also] did “Queens of Faith.” I had read Lucy Mack Smith’s book on the Prophet Joseph Smith, and that just set me on fire. I loved that book and then I read about Mary Fielding Smith and Eliza R. Snow and [Louisa] Bingham [Lee]. I was invited to do articles for the Ensign.18 I did Lucy Mack Smith first; then I did Eliza R. Snow; then I did Mary Fielding Smith, then I did [Louisa] Bingham Lee, and then Dean’s grandmother, [Mary Smith] Ellsworth. [She] was a mission president’s wife for many years. That was “Queens of Faith.” Then I did “Patriots and Petticoats” and that was during 1987 [and] was the [bi-]centennial of the Constitution. During that year, I had read a lot of different things about our centennial and patriotism. I read [many] articles about [women] patriots. [One article was entitled “Patriots in Petticoats.”] I just loved that [idea], so I made myself costumes for the “Queens of Faith” and [“Patriots in Petticoats”]. I had a girl at BYU that was a seamstress. She helped me make an exact copy of the dress that Eliza R. Snow is wearing in that famous picture with the redingote over it and her little pocket watch. She made me a copy of that dress, and I had some that were the pioneer women, and so that was sort of fun too. To portray those women and the “Patriots in Petticoats,” I had slides. I’d gotten slides out of books of American history of some of these women like Abigail Adams and Mercy Otis Warren and—
JH: Martha [Custis] Washington.
JP: Yes, Martha Washington and Deborah Sampson, the first woman that masqueraded as a man in the Revolutionary War and actually cut her hair. She was a tall farm girl and made herself a man’s uniform and served for—was it two or three years in the Revolutionary War—and was wounded a couple of times. Finally, she was discovered to be a woman, and the doctor sent her off to George Washington because it was a crime for a woman to masquerade as a man in those days. He just said, “She’s been wounded, but she’s fought a valiant fight so please don’t punish her.”
[These are] all such neat stories I could go on forever. I’ve got to cut it short so, Education Week was a wonderful experience because I had to study and learn. I usually did it at night after the kids were in bed or sometimes on Saturdays or sometimes I’d go
18. The Ensign of The Church of Latter-day Saints is the monthly magazine for the English-speaking adult members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
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to the library. That was an exciting adventure because we got to travel all over the country.
Dean and I did a class called, “In God We Trust” on the Founding Fathers and the Constitution. I guess that is one of the things [that prompted Doctor Skousen to invite me] to be with the [Freemen] Institute. Doctor Skousen is another wonderful mentor of mine. He taught me so much about the Constitution. He asked me to be the National Director for the Center of Family Studies. I did that for three years, and then I was invited to work for Senator Hatch. Dean had just lost his job in Salt Lake, and so we needed the money. We didn’t have any income, so I said, “Oh I can’t do that.” And he said, “Sure you can.” I guess being a secretary for my dad and having some knowledge of the law and so forth, I was able to do that. That was a very glamorous job because I got to travel all over thirteen counties in southern and eastern Utah and meet with the mayors and the county commissioners. During the Wilberg Mine Disaster, I spent Christmas Eve down in Castledale with the families whose members, fathers, sons, or husbands were trapped in the Wilberg mine. [I represented] the senator. It was a very heart wrenching, but wonderful experience to represent the senator and his concern for those people.
DA: Which year was that?
JP: That was in 1983, ‘82, ‘83. I think it was ‘82—
JH: It seemed like you worked on the Central Utah Water—
JP: Yeah I did, the Central Utah Water Project. Oh, there were a lot of things that we did for the senator that were exciting and wonderful to help the common person. For instance, many of them—
[01:03:04]
[01:03:42]
JP: [I have seen the hand of the Lord in my life.] The Mrs. America [pageant] launched me [from] one thing to another. Working for my dad in his law office helped me all the way through my life with those skills. My mother’s interest in literature and Sister Jensen’s interest helped round [me] out and give me a thirst for knowledge and understanding and helped me write. I’m just so grateful for all of those experiences because if you look at your own life, you look back and one thing went to another, went to another, went to another, and the culmination was our mission in the Philippines.
All of these things, and I’ll talk about that in a minute, but let’s go back chronologically to the Mrs. America pageant [in] 1967. [Lecturing about those experiences] went on for a
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couple of years, and then in 1970, I guess because I was quite notable with the Relief Society, they had the IWY conference in Utah, in Salt Lake. They had the largest attendance of any of the state conferences; there were fourteen thousand women.
DA: And tell us what IWY is.
JP: International Women’s Year. It was in [Houston, Texas], on November 22, 1977. They elected fourteen delegates and about four or five alternates. I was very surprised to be one of the delegates because Belle Spafford, Elaine Cannon, Ruth Funk, and Georgia Peterson, [a state senator, were the other delegates]—
JH: [And] Gloria [Firmage]?
JP: —Gloria [Firmage was an alternate delegate]. Georgia Peterson, a state senator, [was chairman of our delegation. We] had a lot of these really VIP people, and so I was very surprised [to be included], but I appreciated that opportunity. My husband was my [mentor]. I have to tell you this funny thing because I said, “Oh I can’t do all of those things.” And he said, “Sure you can.” He said [facetiously], “I’m the brains, and you’re the visual aid, and this is a woman’s issue.” That’s what he kept saying with [regards to] the ERA and abortion—[that] these things are women’s issues and so men can’t address them like a woman can. He taught me about the constitutional issues [and how] to address them from that standpoint and not [only as] emotional issues. After I was elected in June, we spent from then until November in Salt Lake once a month giving each other lessons on each one of the twenty-six [resolutions. The IWY] had twenty-six [resolutions], and we felt in all honesty [that] we need to be credible, and we can support ten of these twenty-six proposals. [Other conservative women rejected all of the 26 resolutions and the whole convention.] We couldn’t support abortion, [and] we couldn’t support gay rights or the [ERA—Equal Rights Amendment]. And I don’t remember the others, but we could support minority [rights, and we] could support laws against child abuse and things like this. We taught each other, and we felt that we were pretty well informed to go there. And so when we went to the conference—
DA: To go where?
JP: Houston. It was in Houston, Texas, on November 22, 23, 24, 25, 1977. To me, as I look back, this was very providential in a way because of what happened there. We had—we sat in the middle. We sat on one side, but we were alphabetically, so Texas was in front of us, and North or South Carolina was in back of us, T, U, yeah—
JH: Vermont.
JP: Vermont, well no. It was the black group in back of us [and the Hispanics in front].
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JH: Virginia?
JP: Virginia, [no]. Anyway, so, no it was South Carolina; for some reason it was South Carolina. We got along pretty [well]. They just wanted you to yea or nay [our vote, but] Georgia Peterson—our delegate chairman was very smart, [and] she proposed that the delegates stand up so that people could see who [voted for or against each resolution. It passed as a rule. That way votes could be counted without railroading a resolution through.]
JH: [You could] tell what you were voting on.
JP: Okay, but wait a minute. The headlines that greeted us, when we got to Houston were: “The Mormon Church, a New Enemy.” Bella Abzug printed that out of the offices of the U.S. State Department, and that made Georgia so upset. She said, “The State Department would say ‘A New Enemy, the Mormon Church?’” Anyway, that was sort of scary, and we were told to carry cans of hairspray in case somebody attacked us. And so it was [also] scary because the [committee] in Utah that were more feminist, tried to prevent us from being seated [as delegates] because they felt that we were mostly Mormons.19 [They wanted their liberal delegates seated and not our group that had already been elected by fourteen thousand women.] We had a Catholic and Hispanic and one other one that were fairly good representatives [and] not just all “Mormon women.” We had a cloak and dagger [episode] before we got on [the plane] because they had the ACLU serve our delegates with a subpoena and a restriction preventing us from being seated [as delegates]. The only two that hadn’t been served were myself and Belle Spafford. She was back East at a convention, and I was at Idaho finishing up [Education] Week, so we were not served. The minute we got back to Provo and Salt Lake, her son, Earl Spafford who was an attorney, called us and said, “I want you to come to the airport. I want you to come to the certain place. Do not [speak to anyone or allow anyone to hand you papers]. I’ll show you where to go. You’re going to be ushered into the captain’s quarters, and you stay there until [your] plane [departure], so you won’t get served with these papers. They could prevent us from being seated [as delegates if they were able to serve all of the delegates]. So we stayed there, and then they took us out to the plane in a special car. Belle Spafford and I got on the plane, and we were able to be seated, so it was interesting [to see] all the tactics that [they] were trying to [use to] prevent us from being seated. When we got there, it was a little scary because they said you might be attacked. We didn’t know why, and it was sort of a rowdy convention too. [Three] first ladies were there: Lady Bird Johnson, [Rosalyn] Carter, and [Betty Ford].
19. The Mormon Church is the unofficial, but common name for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Its adherents are often called Mormons.
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[01:10:23]
[01:11:06]
JP: Yeah, anyway, well I have a copy of a letter I wrote to them because I was really upset that they would give their approval to some of the things that went on in that conference. The exhibition hall was just obscene with gay rights, kind of lesbian toys and books that were pornographic. I was in charge of our display, which was on the family. Evans [Advertising created] a beautiful display—a [huge] pictorial display on the family. It was just lovely and had a lovely saying, you know, about the family on it. We asked for a booth and we [spent] fifty dollars for a booth. They said, Well, we only have them next to the lesbians and the National Gay Task Force. And I said, “That’ll be just fine.” [Instead of allowing us to be out in the middle, they put us] off in a corner and with very few people coming by to see it, but the people that did [see it] said it was beautiful. [Because I was in charge of the display on the family], I had to go in and see all of those other [sickening displays]. They had Our Bodies, Ourselves, [a book for children teaching masturbation and information on] what lesbians do. All this kind of stuff I thought was [crude and inappropriate for an international conference]. The letter I wrote to the first ladies just said, “Did you walk through the exhibition hall and see what was there?” I said, “Where were the quilts [or other items that represented home and family values?]” And I said, “Even if you’re a single woman you have to keep up an apartment; you have to learn to cook; you have to do some of these things that are wonderful homemaking arts; and it’s a joy whether you’re single or whether you’re married or whatever your situation.” [I was offended to see the antagonism against men with signs such as “A woman needs a man like a fish needs a bicycle” and cracking the glass ceiling. While I am for the advancement and empowerment of women to have equal opportunities of education and make a contribution to society whether it be in the home or in the workplace, I don’t believe we have to denigrate men to do so. I still believe that one of the greatest contributions a woman makes to society is to her family.]
[01:13:07]
[01:13:28]
JH: Did you want to talk about what you were voting?
JP: Yes, that’s one other thing because that was our singular high water mark of the convention. We had planned to vote for the minority resolution, [which was in support of more consideration for the rights of Native American Hispanics, Black and Asian women]. But, at the last minute, they changed [the one minority resolution to] four different [resolutions, one for each group]. Well the noise in the hall was so bad, we
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couldn’t hear anything from the stand when each of those women read their proposal and so I was [concerned about government funding for abortion in one of their resolutions.
The group behind us from South Carolina was largely black, and I asked Elaine, a young woman sitting behind me if she could get a copy of their resolution. I told her we were prepared to vote for their resolution, but we couldn’t hear what was in their resolution]. So she ran out and she did get it and brought it back and the only thing they were asking that our delegates much questioned was government funding for college or for university education, and I asked her, “Is this important?” and she said, “Oh very important. We just don’t get a fair shake in the South at all to get scholarships or to get what we need, you know, to get our university educations.” And I said, “Okay, I’m for you.” And I passed it up to Georgia [Peterson], and I said, “You know,” well first of all, she was out. I had prayed really, really hard, and I said, “Oh what should I do?” Just sort of a silent prayer and like [the Times Square sign] in New York City, [I saw the words in 2 Nephi 26:33: “And he inviteth all to come unto him, and partake of his goodness; and he denieth none to come unto him, black and white, bond and free, male and female.”]20 And I thought, Yes, that is so neat. Anyway, I just felt so good about it, so I told Georgia. I didn’t tell her that I’d prayed or anything I just said, “I’ve looked this over.” I think all the others were probably the same that we’ve already read through and decided to vote on. I said, “I’m gonna vote for this.” [I had] talked to Elaine Cannon in the front, and she had looked at it and then passed it down, and so Elaine said, “Yes I’m gonna support this, [too].” And Ruth Funk down on the end also said she would support it. So, gradually they call for a stand up vote and what we didn’t know was that all the television cameras were centered on the Utah delegation, you know, the “Mormons the New Enemy”. We had about three cameramen all rush down the aisle, but we stood up and voted for it.
Only one of our delegates didn’t vote for that and so these television cameramen rushed down and started to interview Georgia [Peterson]. Right across the aisle was Coretta Scott King. She had been with the Pennsylvania delegates because their attorney general was a beautiful black woman, very lovely, very sharp. [Coretta Scott King] came over to me [because I was on the] end near the aisle. She came over to me and looked at my badge and said, “Oh Mrs. Payne, are you a Mormon?” And I said, “Yes I am.” And she said, “Oh, I always thought Mormons were racists.” And then I said, “No.” And she said, “Well perhaps I was mistaken, thank you very much for voting for us.” And I thought, Oh my golly, that just sends goosebumps up my spine to think what if we hadn’t voted for that? That was just before the 1978 revelation on priesthood, not that we had anything to do with that, but it was a movement that was coming.21
20. Jaynann is quoting from the Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon is part of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint’s scriptural canon.
21. Jaynann is referring to the 1978 Revelation on Priesthood for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints that enabled all worthy males to receive the priesthood.
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[When I attended an African-American conference a number of years ago, the student body vice-president at BYU was a young black man who impressed us all when he stated] that the revelation on the Blacks could never have come before the Civil Rights Movement. And he said, “I was always content to wait until the Civil Rights Movement was over because then I felt you know, that the Lord would do something.” He was a very good, LDS person. So things just all fit together. It’s so exciting to live [during those momentous times].
The Texas delegation, mostly Hispanics, turned around and hugged the front row, and Elaine and [I hugged] our new friends in the back row. We all turned around and jumped and cried. It was just wonderful, and [bedlam] broke loose after Corretta Scott King came over and talked to Georgia [and me]. I think she came to BYU a few years later and was honored as one of the principal speakers there at a devotional, and it was really lovely. She’s one of my heroes. [I admire her] for sticking with her husband [through the difficult times of the Civil Rights Movement].
We had a young black couple come that were [both] principals of schools that were in [the Los Angeles area in] California. BYU was the only school that would give them an opportunity to get their Ph.D.’s here during the summer terms, and then [BYU] sent professors back [to California during the winter]. Grace and Jim Tisdale were their names and BYU gave them their doctorate degrees. I went to their graduation and they were just the most wonderful, delightful people.
Anyway, so, getting back to the IWY—that launched us into the Utah Association of Women. And Nyla Palmer and Georgia Peterson and most of our delegates were people that began the Utah Association of Women. We all banded together and learned parliamentary rules and started the Utah Association of Women. And I was the publications director at that time. We published a number of papers on all different subjects: the ERA, abortion, homosexuality, child abuse, childcare—
JH: Teenage pregnancy, [pornography].
[01:20:13]
JP: —teenage pregnancy, oh yeah, that was one I was in charge of and um—
JH: Abstinence-based sex education.
JP: Abstinence based education. And anyway, we started that. We had a number of conferences, and we had a lot of wonderful people come and address those conferences, [Elder] Bruce Hafen was one of them. Our Provo Police chief Swen Nielson, who is one
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of my heroes, came and addressed about obedience to law. As a teenager, he was a twelve-year-old Danish young man with his father that blew up Nazi bridges; he knew what it meant to have freedom. And you know, laid his life on the line even as a teenager; he was brilliant, just wonderful. And so we had these national conferences.
Then I published a number of publications. We put them together and other people helped me write them, and we published them in booklet forms and passed them out at the different meetings that we had.
JH: What was the name of the woman that you worked with from Texas that had implemented the abstinence-based sex education in Texas?
JP: Well, Mel and Norma Gabler were textbook reviewers in Texas, and they were very upset because one of the history textbooks had one paragraph on George Washington and seven pages on Marilyn Monroe and the social issues. They were all centered in humanistic education, social issues, and so forth. And she came across this wonderful abstinence- based curriculum for schools and gave me a copy. And I brought it up to Provo where Deanne Francis, my neighbor, who was a nurse and Paul Warner [at UVU, and Laurie Updike from Eagle Forum]. They were implementing and writing an abstinence-based curriculum for the schools, for the high schools [and] junior high schools.
So, as I’ve traveled around, we’ve networked with a lot of wonderful people. [After the Utah Association of Women], I was asked to be the National Director for the Center for Family Studies, [by Dr. Cleon Skousen, another one of my heroes. The Center for Family Studies] was a new center that the Freemen Institute opened up. They had the National Center for Constitutional Studies. They traveled all over the country giving seminars on the Constitution, and then he asked me to open up the new National Center for Family Studies. And we had a wonderful group of educators that helped write symposiums and curriculum. We had a national conference on education. Terrence Bell, who was the secretary of education at that time, came and addressed us. We had a lot of wonderful VIP’s come and address us at that conference, and that’s where I met Eldridge Cleaver.
That was another major event, in a way, in my life. He was a former Black Panther, but he became interested in the Constitution when he was in Oakland, and he attended a seminar by Doctor Skousen. Doctor Skousen laughingly said, “I was giving this seminar on the Constitution and there sat Public Enemy Number 1.” You know, Eldridge [Cleaver was a] former Black Panther who had been arrested [because of his activities in the Oakland shootout]. And he had an amazing story too. I won’t tell you his story, but it is fabulous, and he actually joined the Church later. But we had the opportunity to entertain him and his wife and his two children in our home when he was invited to speak at the BYU Law School. And so they were with us for two days, and our son Tom took the kids
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skiing up at Sundance, and he and his wife sat and talked with us. We were talking one evening about the Doctrine and Covenants.22 And Dean mentioned that Joseph Smith was martyred while he was a candidate for the president of the United States. And Eldridge said, “No way, you are kidding.” And Dean said, “No, it’s right there in print.” And he said, “Man, what a civil rights case.” You know, [Eldredge] knew the Doctrine and Covenants backward and forward. He was amazing and one of the most charismatic people I’ve ever met. Tall, deep, [with a] resonant voice, [he] never said a word unless it was something very [significant] or very erudite or powerful.
Anyway, we travelled around a couple of places, to Idaho, for the National Conference about the family. He was one of our speakers and spoke about the Constitution and obedience to law. Then we were on a television program together, and he defended the Church, which was really interesting to me. Someone asked him a question about it.
DA: He had been imprisoned where, in Europe?
JP: No, he wasn’t imprisoned until he came back. He fled after the shootout in Oakland and he [went first to Cuba. Next he] went to Russia. He went to North Vietnam or North Korea; he went to all the communist countries. [There he] met with all of these communist dictators. [When he went to Morocco, he realized that he needed to get out of there because they were going to kill him as he had served his purpose to discredit the United States. He took his wife and children to Paris. Then he went alone to Monte Carlo in Monaco. There he had] a very amazing experience. He went down to the coast, [while] his wife was still in Paris. He went down to Monaco and was sitting on a balcony of a beautiful hotel there overlooking the Mediterranean. He saw the moon come up and he saw first of all, Mao Tse Tung and then he saw [Lenin] and then he saw [Fidel] Castro, then he saw the [leader of] North Korea. All these faces disappeared, and the last face he saw was the face of Jesus Christ. [The face of Christ did not disappear like the others.] [Eldridge] had bought a gun, and he was ready to kill himself because he said, “Then my wife and children can go back to the United States, and they will not be put in prison.” And when he saw that picture of the Savior, it just shocked [him], and it shook him up, and he went in and he opened a Gideon’s Bible, and it opened to: “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want.”23 And he just sat and cried all night long. He decided to go back and take his family and turn himself in and pay whatever price he had to because he had discovered “that life in the United States, even in prison as a Black, was so much better [than life in any other country in the world.”] In fact, his life was at risk in Morocco because he had heard from a friend that they had a contract on him to take his
22. The Doctrine and Covenants is part of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint’s scriptural canon.
23. Jaynann is referring to Psalm 23:1 in the Bible.
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life and so he knew he had to leave Morocco. That’s when [he sent back to Paris to join his wife] and children and he [decided to] turn himself in. Of course, they put handcuffs on him, and they took him back to the United States, and they put him in prison for a while. He hadn’t killed anyone and so mainly it was the events that he [had participated in as a Black Panther that broke the law that sent him to prison for 18 months.] He had a Christian minister that converted him to Christianity as a born again Christian. So first of all, he became a born again Christian, then he went back to California to Cupertino where he and his wife lived, and where he was doing service to finish up [his sentence]. He was released from prison, and he had to do one hundred hours [of] community service, which he was doing, and that’s when he met Doctor Skousen.
And so then, it’s an amazing story; he died just a few years ago. I feel so bad—his wife actually—when he joined the Church divorced him and went back to Yale Law School with her kids and broke his heart. [Later], he ran for Congress, and I think Howard Ruff helped him financially, but he didn’t win. He was an amazing person; he still gave lectures; he still talked about the Constitution. He said, “If I had known what the Constitution really said, I’d never have become a Black Panther, I never [would have] gone against that, ya know, feeling.”
So, after the [Freemen] Institute—then I was invited to be the director for Central and Southeastern Utah for Senator Hatch. And I felt sad to leave the [Freemen] Institute, but I couldn’t do both. We needed the money. Dean had lost his job in Salt Lake [because] his company [had a hostile takeover], and so we didn’t have any income. At least in working for Senator Hatch, I was able to get medical benefits and get some income, and I worked for him for three years, which was a very, very glamorous job. I got to fly all over Utah. I got to deal with problems that people had and interface with the IRS and with the army and with all of these different national entities and try to help the people that were having problems with the government.
For instance, one young man was sent to Germany [while] his wife and three children were left here in Provo. Well actually, [they] were left in Washington State, and they came to live with her sister in Provo because they couldn’t find her visa or her orders to join him in Germany. It was my job to try to find where her orders were, where her visa was and where her passport was. All of these papers took a couple of weeks [to locate]. They had shipped all their clothes, and it was fall, and the kids were supposed to start school, and they didn’t have any winter clothes. She was a lovely, lovely lady. So I was able to call to my wonderful friend in the Army back there. He was a BYU football fan; he wasn’t a Mormon or a BYU student, but he’d always ask me what the BYU football scores were. He found her orders. They were in Oklahoma of all places, and he got her shipped off back to her husband in Germany. That was so rewarding for me to be able to do something like that. [I also would arrange for Eagle Scouts to get an American flag over the capitol building in their honor. While working for Senator Hatch, I developed a
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problem with my eyes called blepharospasm, which made it necessary] to resign from the senator’s office, but it was providential because my mother was ill, and I was able to care for her, and my dad just before she died in 1987. So this was in [’84, 85, and 19]86.
[At this time], my husband had a lot of neat projects. He was a bishop, and we got to support him.24 And he was in the branch presidency at the MTC.25 And that was a wonderful experience [as well as] a lot of other things that he was involved in—the sons of the [Utah Pioneers] and other things that our family participated in. And so like my friend Carma [DeJong] Anderson said, sometimes my husband’s projects are big cheese and sometimes mine are. And we support each other in doing the things that are important.
After my mother passed away [February 22, 1987], we took care of my dad, and my daughter Julie came to live with [him]. And after she was married, [Julie] and her husband, [Benjamin Paz], came to live with him [until] he passed away in ’94.
Just before that time, we were in Provo at the DeJong Concert Hall at the Nutcracker ballet, and [we] met Elder L. Tom Perry. [He and his wife, Barbara,] had bought the condo next to my husband’s parents in Salt Lake at the Trevi Towers, so we got to meet them and be with them a number of times when we’d go see Dean’s parents. His wife Barbara asked me—at first they said, Well when are you guys going on a mission? And I said, “Well, I’m taking care of my dad.” That was the year before, and then at this time in December she said, “Well how is your father?” And I said, “Oh he passed away in October.” And she winked and she said, “So now are you ready to go on a mission?” and I said, “Oh yes.” We were just waiting for that to happen.
Well just the next month in January, we got a call from the stake president [asking if we would be willing to serve a public affairs mission]. We were just ready to take off for San Diego to fly into San Diego because [we wanted to visit] my husband’s missionary companion. They worked there in the San Diego temple, [and] we were renting a car and driving over to Yuma [to visit] my daughter [Rosalie who] was having a baby. And so we were going to do that, and so the bishop called and said, “Can I come and see you in the morning?” and we said, “Yes if you want to come to San Diego and meet us in the San Diego temple.” And he said, “Well, I better tell you what this is.” He said, “We got a call from the stake president asking if you would [accept] a mission call, a public affairs mission.” I had no idea what a public affairs mission was, but Ray Beckham, who was
24. A bishop is the ecclesiastical leader of a Latter-day Saint congregation or ward.
25. The Missionary Training Center or MTC to which Jaynann refers is located in Provo, Utah.
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my neighbor, was one of the men in charge of the public affairs in Salt Lake, and so he told us a little bit about it. We received our mission call, and it was so beautiful to sit in the San Diego temple with the waterfall and crystal and all of the rainbows and think of going on a mission. We didn’t know where; we just knew it was public affairs. So then we asked them after we [got home], where would you like us to go? “Where would you like to go?” They said. “Well it would have to be English speaking, I’m afraid.” And then we said, Where would you like us to go? And then Bruce Olsen said, “The Philippines. We need you there in the Philippines; our present director there is coming home in August; and we need a couple there.” So we said, Okay.
And so that’s where we went, and it was the most amazing adventure. One thing opened and one door after another kept opening [for us to be able] to do the most incredible things. We didn’t do them. The Lord opens the doors, and we just happened to meet a certain [couple, Bob and Emmy Garon], at a certain place and “whamo,” he invited us to be on a TV show.
[Another time], we went to the book signing of a famous general because we were on the Filipino Alliance against Pornography, and our friend Peter [Reverente] was on [the board] of directors, and she was a friend of this general. I sat next to a beautiful young woman, and she looked at our badges as we were having some snacks, a book signing in the Philippines, four hundred people, full dance orchestra, a full buffet that linked up the hall of food, and like I said it’s a big event. We didn’t know that when we went, but we sat next to this young woman, and she said, “Oh I see, you’re what? Missionaries for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints?” And we said, Yes. And she said, “What do you do?” I said, “Well right now, we are trying to bring off an anti-pornography conference teaching young high school and college students the dangers of pornography, and we’re trying to hold this big conference.” And she said, “Wonderful, I must have you on my TV show.” And I said, “Oh sure.” Well it turns out her name is [Jeanne] Young, and she was the wake up call, which I was informed later is the “Barbara Walters” of the Philippines. I never thought it would turn out to be anything, but sure enough, two days later she had her secretary call and arrange for us to be on her TV show at eight o’clock in the morning. Of course it was only ten or fifteen minutes but still we got to tell about what we were doing as missionaries. We were trying to protect the family against pornography.
In the Philippines, because they’re so poor, the parents [sometimes] sell their children into slavery as they have all these sex tours come over from Europe and even Canada, America, [and] Australia and mainly down in Mindanao in the southern areas. It’s just horrible.
And so we were trying to protect [families. Pornographers had sent fifteen boxes to the Philippines]. We had a little mole in the airport who opened fifteen boxes. He was
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suspicious of it, and they were heavy, heavy, boxes marked National Geographic [and] Popular Mechanics. He opened them [and found that] they were all hardcore pornography—a book that would go through two hundred people before it wore out. Our Filipino Alliance [confiscated the pornography] with the government’s help and they, most of them, were destroyed. We used a few of them to have public porn burnings at the mayor’s office to show that we were against pornography. So, that was really exciting.
And we were on [Jeanne Young’s] TV show, and she said, “Well what else do you do?” And we were doing a National Family Week program, and she said, “Okay, well come back next week.” So we went back next week, and then she asked us back again. I [didn’t know what else to talk about, and so I spoke with David Fewster, our public affairs director], and [he] said, “Let’s put on President Kenneth Johnson, and he will be wonderful. He’ll talk about the family home evening manual and things that we do with our young people.” And so I called [Jeanne], and I said, “Would you be willing to have our area president, President Kenneth Johnson.26 He’s [British, and] he is adorable. He’s so witty and charming, he’ll charm your socks off.” So she said yes and so he was on for fifteen minutes and showed our family home evening manual and told all about that, and that was just wonderful. He was so charming and delightful. He was a Seventy, and I think he spoke one time in general conference.27 It was neat.
[We] had all kinds of experiences like that. We needed publicity. It was two hundred dollars for two minutes on the radio or on the TV spot. They had the home front spots two minutes, two hundred dollars; our budget wouldn’t stand that. Well, after we went to Sister Pelar’s Right To Life banquet, [with] five hundred people all dressed up really glitzy—and we sat next to a couple. His name was Bob Geran. He was very tall, and his wife was a beautiful little Filipino woman. They introduced themselves, and he said, “I was a former Catholic priest, but I became a born again Christian, and now we’re working with Sister Pelar in the fight against abortion.” And so we chatted with them for a few minutes and then nearly at the end of the dinner he says, “I’d like you to come and be on my TV show.” And I said, “Oh, well um,” And he wanted me instead of Dean because I guess it was a woman’s issue, and so I said, “Well what is the subject?” And he said the subject is: “Is abortion murder?” And then I really recoiled because I thought, Oh
26. An area is an administrative subdivision within The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter- day Saints. An area is overseen by an Area Presidency, which consists of three men—a president and two counselors.
27. Seventies are General Authorities in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints who assist in administering the Church. General Conference is a semi-annual churchwide meeting for members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
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what do I have to say about that? But we did go on, and they had this team of doctors and ACLU and other people that were for abortion and a woman’s choice is the way they talk about it. Then it was Sister Pelar’s turn, and she spoke, then Bob Geran spoke, and they were both very good in talking about the life of the child, and something happened to me that I still can’t explain, I remembered that Sister—
JH: Mother Teresa.
[01:41:12]
JP: Mother Teresa. Mother Teresa had spoken just a few months [earlier] before our Congress in the United States, and [President and Mrs.] Clinton were there. She spoke about abortion and made the statement, and I can’t remember all of it now, but it’s amazing it all came back to me there in that TV show: “There will never be peace in the world when you allow a mother to destroy the most precious gift she can give to this world, which is her child, for a better future.” Anyway, it was beautiful; it was poetic; and if you asked me how [I knew that quote, I don’t] know. I didn’t memorize it; it all just came back. And that was perfect because Mother Theresa is an icon there in the Philippines. You have Mother Teresa orphanages; you have Mother Theresa hospices, all over the Philippines. We went to a number of them and delivered clothing and delivered medical supplies and things to them. [Mother Theresa is] an icon and [her quote] was short, and it just sort of wrapped up the whole program. I thought, Wow, [how] did you remember that? Dean said, “I didn’t know you remembered that [quote,]” and I said, “Neither did I.” I just am so grateful for some of those things, and I give the Lord all the credit because I, in and of myself, I [don’t feel] that bright [to be able to] remember [profound things] and be [able to] articulate them [easily]. So, that isn’t the end of the Bob Geran story though, because we needed, like I said, some publicity.
Well one day [Bob Geran] called up, and he said, “I’d like to meet with your director at your Church offices.” And I said, “Okay.” We were up on the third floor, and the area presidency’s office [was] on the west, and we were on the east side. We went into the conference room, and Bob Geran walked in and he said, “I just bought a Christian radio station called KLOVE.” And he said, “I’d like to know if you would like to have three hours on Sunday night, [prime time] from five to eight PM to broadcast your Church programs?” I thought we were all gonna fall off of our chairs, and [then] David [Fewster] started to think of dollar signs, you know, two hundred dollars for two minutes and how much would it cost for three hours. [Then] Bob said, “I’ve heard your Tabernacle Choir, would it possible for you to put on your Tabernacle Choir broadcast every Sunday night?” And David said, “Oh of course. In fact you know, we would try to be getting something like that on.” And so then David said, “Well we have a very limited budget. How much would you need for us to have those three hours?” and he said, “How about two hundred dollars a week?” Well then I thought David was just gonna faint because oh
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my golly, that was a tender mercy that we just never dreamed would ever happen. So for two hundred dollars a week, we had three hours [of programming]. David [said we could use] the first thirty minutes Tabernacle Choir, the [next] ten minutes [for] news of the Church in the Philippines. [David turned to] Shirley and Ralph Hunter, our health missionaries that ran the health fair and took this big tent all over the Philippines, and then he said, “How about you interviewing health personnel and having Health Matters for the next twenty or thirty minutes?” And she said, “Okay.” And then he turned to Dean and me and said, “Okay you guys are on for Family Life Lines for the next fifty minutes, and you can interview parents and people, whatever you want to do with family problems.” And then we said, Oh we [also have] four young returned missionaries that are students at the University of the Philippines, and let’s do an [Especially For Youth] with them—because we, both Shirley and I had tapes and things of Kenneth Cope and “Never A Better Hero” and some of those fun popular songs.
[These were the same returned missionaries] that used to come in and talk with us at the [area] office. They did a call-in show. We did call-in shows too, but they were more popular with the teenagers for call-in shows on problems with dating, and they spoke Tagalog, if the kids didn’t speak very good English. [Then] the last thirty minutes, we had a talk from the General Authorities, either a conference talk or some talk at BYU like a devotional. There’s our three hours and we did that for thirty-five weeks, running up to [Quezón] city after church and doing our radio show. It was so much fun. I just have a testimony of doing stuff like this for the Lord is not only wonderfully, spiritually rewarding, but it is fun too because you know you’re interfacing with wonderful people. The Filipino people are so marvelous and so delightful and do anything for you.
[01:46:37]
JH: Tell about your articles that you wrote for the newspaper. How did that translate—
JP: Okay well, that red book [contains] eighty-two articles [I wrote] for the Manila Chronicle. That was another surprise. When we first [arrived] there, Paul Taggart was our first director. [He would be] leaving in August and we [had just arrived] in May. He had really prepared the ground for us a lot. He met with the president of the country, [President Fidel Ramos], and he had given him a genealogy sheet you know, like they do to VIP’s, of his family history and asked if we could have a national family week. and the president said, “Sure, I’ll put somebody in charge of it.” Well it went on, and they never did a lot about it so we had to pick up the pieces so Paul said, “We’re not getting our newspaper articles in the paper, nor our news articles, nor our news releases. The wind symphony had come, the Young Ambassadors were coming, [and] President Hinckley was coming.” We didn’t know all of these ahead but eventually we did, and the newspapers weren’t printing our news releases so he said, “Okay, find out who the editor of the Manila Chronicle is.” And it was Celin S. Cristobal. So I made an appointment to
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take her lunch and so Dave, Pau, and Dean and I took her lunch, and Paul said, “You know we have all these wonderful things coming from Brigham Young University, musical events and different activities, and we would like to have those put in the newspaper so your townspeople can come and enjoy them.” And she said, “Sure just send them to me.”
And then Paul just absolutely floored me, he said, “How would you like Sister Payne— she has twelve children—how would you like her to write some articles for your newspaper on the family?” And she said, “Well okay send me something.” And I said, “Paul, are you nuts?” I had never done anything like that before, writing a weekly column. But I said okay I’ll try, so I did a safe subject on women’s osteoporosis. They did the cutest graphics for me showing a tall skinny model eating a salad, and they did all kinds of fun things. If you look through this, not every one had a graphic on it but some of them were so delightful and charming [that] they made people want to read them. All of these articles were in the second section, usually on the front page of the second section, in the life section of the Manila Chronicle. And nobody was more surprised than I was. I told my children, “I’m gonna get even with you; I’m gonna write about all the funny things you did when you were little!” And so anyway I did eighty-two columns for eighty-two weeks and sat in the hot [heat], at the top of our office because they turned the air conditioning off on Saturdays [in order] to write these articles. But, the amazing thing was I [now] know why we did it.
Because when President Hinckley came [David] wanted us to call Celine and see if she would like an exclusive interview with President Hinckley and she said, “Oh of course, I’ll send my best reporter.” Then Dave was upset and he said, “I don’t want her best reporter; find out who she is or he is, and then we’ll take her or him to lunch.” And so it was [Dulce Baybay], a lovely young woman [that] he took to lunch, and I wasn’t there at that one. David had told her about this meeting with President Hinckley, and she said, “Why didn’t you get Mrs. Payne to write this? She’s a member of your Church.” And he said, “No, we wanted an unbiased account.” And then she said, “Well you won’t get it from me.” And David—I thought he was gonna faint, and then she said, “I’ve been over to your Church headquarters and been to your family history center; I think it’s wonderful that people can go there and find out your ancestors.” Well then David sat back and [thought to himself], Well maybe this isn’t gonna be so bad after all. Well what she printed—and I didn’t get a chance to copy it—was a two page article on President Hinckley that just blew us all away. Is a copy of it there?
MW: I think it is right here.
JH: It’s not just on President Hinckley; it’s on Joseph Smith and the whole history of the Restoration of the Church.
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JP: Well the thing about this article is I never could have written anything like this. I got pretty bold in my articles by quoting some of the General Authorities. I would say as Harold B. Lee said, [who I first quoted as] a noted educator. He said, “The most important work you’ll ever do is in the walls of your own home.” But then I got pretty bold, and I started quoting some of the prophets and the things that they said—but notice the way she says this; it isn’t that he says that he’s a prophet and you look at these pictures and what this says; it’s everything that defines our Church or defines The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, as distinct and different from all the other churches. Not only this, but on the other side you have—well first of all, the angel Moroni; then you have the First Vision, Joseph Smith; then you have twelve Apostles; then you have missionary work; then you have family history work, then you have what else?
JH: Administration of the priesthood. Did you put that?
JP: Yeah, and so when David saw this he said, “Get two hundred copies.” So we did, [and] we sent [some] back to Salt Lake, and we sent it to [many of] our people: the stake presidents and Church officials in the Philippines. Like I said I thought I had several of those but there’s only one left.
JH: Is this a problem to be talking more about involvement in the Church?
MW: Oh no, no, heavens no, we want to hear everything; it’s just a remarkable story.
JH: Do you want her to speak about—you tell me. I don’t know how far you want her to go, but do you want her to share one of the most significant trials in her life?
MW: Yes that would be great, maybe talk about Enterprise [Mentors] International first and then.
JH: Yes, [Enterprise Mentors].
JP: Oh yes, because like I said, one step [led to another. One] door opened, [and then another] door opened. My mission in the Philippines led to Enterprise Mentors because while we were there, [we were] sent down to Cebu. We were sent down [there] the last part [of our mission]. We served actually one month short of two years instead of eighteen months because we were sent the last three or four months down to Cebu, which is the middle island with a lot of Chinese and [other] people there. That’s where the temple is now—well, [there is another] temple in Manila [and one] in Dumaguete, which is up north.
[But] it’s amazing how the Church has grown, and I don’t take any credit [for] the public affairs program, but those Filipino people ran with the ball like you would not believe.
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One of our chores was to organize every stake with a public affairs council, which [consists of] three people: a director, a communications specialist, and a media specialist. So the media [specialist] worked with radio and television and writing articles. The community relations specialist did special projects for family week [and work to] clean up the Philippines.
The most amazing experience that I had [was spending Valentine’s Day in Cebu prison. We may] have to cut and piece this, but in Cebu we had become acquainted with Ed [Siady] who was in charge of the [Visayas] Foundation, which is part of Enterprise Mentors. What they do is they take people who are having small businesses—they teach and train them business practices and how to keep accounts, how to open a bank account, [and] then they give them small loans, which they have to pay back, to help them start their business, and it is amazing. It’s grown, and they have 98 percent payback on their loans. Nearly every one of the Enterprise Mentors foundations all through the [Philippines—three of them—are making progress to teach people self-reliance]. They’re in Peru; they’re in Guatemala, El Salvador, Mexico, and now in Honduras they’re opening up.
JH: Are they in Chile?
JP: I don’t think they’re in Chile, but it’s a wonderful program because these people [are making great progress]. For instance, I [have] a picture with me [and young woman holding a] teddy bear. She was a young [mother] with two children, and she used her loan to buy an old sewing machine. She started to make teddy bears and little toys for children. She had an order for three hundred little gold teddy bears with the black mortar board for a high school graduation. She was so excited; she had a couple of friends help her; and she was able to make enough money on that to buy another sewing machine and to hire somebody else to help her. She had orders for toys for all of these special events, Christmas and so forth. And it just explodes because you’re not giving them a hand out, you’re giving them a [hand-up] and helping them become self-reliant. They have to be able to make and keep promises, so they have to be honest and honorable, but it is exploding all over and it’s wonderful. I was actually on the board of directors. When I got home, I did an article for them in the newspaper and wrote about them and [contributed] pictures from the trips I had taken, and so they asked me to be on the board of directors and Dean on the board of governors. We have been supporting them all this time since 1999 to 2000, well 1999 I guess when we started.
JH: Tell about some of the families that have been able to put their children through college and medical school.
[01:57:29]
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JP: Oh yes, that’s been wonderful because they work together as families. For instance when we were in Guatemala two years ago, this one family makes piñatas, and all the little children help. They help make the wire frames and put the stuff on them, and they send them to Mexico and up to the United States. It just helps them to have a family business. Some of them collect junk; some of them make pans out of old metal things. They just do so many wonderful things—
JH: And they blow glass.
JP: [Yes], they blow glass [from old fluorescent tubes from light fixtures]. I met Ed Siady, and we started getting interested in Enterprise Mentors, and then I was telling you about the most memorable Valentine’s Day I ever spent. And the reason I’m telling you about this is because it shows how the Filipino people have run with the ball, have caught the vision of what public affairs can do in not only helping the missionary work but helping the people themselves. Joy Arriba Rosales—she was single then—she was just Joy Arriba. She was in Cebu city, and she met with [Fay Ruiz], who was a city council woman. She found out that there were in the Cebu prison, six prisoners, three women and three men that had not seen any family member for five years. Why? Because the people were too poor to come by a boat from a neighboring island or a by a [jeepney], or by some other way to see their family and partly because it’s a stigma, you know. Anyway, she arranged with the city council, then the mayor, to pay for the transportation of the families of these six prisoners to come into the prison to have lunch with them and to have a special program. Joy arranged it, and she got the stake president to come in and give them a beautiful talk. She got all the young women and the young men to do dances, the Filipino dances, the Tin-a-kling, with the bamboo sticks. We fixed boxed lunches, and we gave them little baseball caps and the children little toys. That was one of the most heart-wrenching, yet rewarding things that I’ve ever experienced. We went to the prison. It had been raining. It was like a sauna bath; it was so hot. They had no air conditioning in the prison. The warden had a fan in his room and that was it. Anyway, we got the little boxed lunches ready and the toys and everything for these families to come in, and it was so sad because one of the little children was young and hadn’t seen her mother for a long time and wasn’t sure who she was. Some of the teenagers you know, were sort of uncertain, and it was heart wrenching because finally the mothers held out their arms, and the little children rushed into their arms and the same with the daddies, but I just oh it was a “five hanky” time for me because I just thought what a beautiful public affairs project that was to help people. The teenagers danced so beautifully, and the stake president of course, quoted “inasmuch as ye have visited those in prison ye have done it unto me.”28 And I just, like I said—I can’t get over that wonderful Valentine’s day where our hearts were melted and our hearts were knit
28. Jaynann is quoting Matthew 25:40 from the Bible, which reads, “Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me.”
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together with these wonderful mothers, a couple of them had been abused, and I think had killed their husbands to keep from being killed because quite often they had big machete knives. They loved the boxed lunch, and they loved the dancing. And it was a wonderful, a wonderful meeting.
But again, I didn’t think that up. [Joy] was our public affairs director, and she decided to do something very special. We visited all of the stake presidents [with our public affairs directors] and this was a challenge. They have no telephones. Now most of them probably have a cell phone, but at that time, they had a phone in the church and that was it. If they weren’t in the church, you had to write a letter to them and then tell them when you were coming because a lot of times we had to fly. We flew to Cebu; we flew to Aklan; we flew to [Bacolod]; we flew all down to Legaspi and also to Tacloban, and all these different islands to meet with the stake presidents. We never had one that didn’t show up, which was amazing because we just wrote them letters and said we’re gonna be here at this time, could we meet with you to organize public affairs councils to help you in the work of the Church and the missionary work? They were all there; it was wonderful. Quite often they had little luncheons for us or something like that, but we organized fifty-two stakes. We had twenty-five, and [Merrylin] and Ron [Whitehead], the other couple, had the other twenty. Lenny had [stakes] in Mindanao because we couldn’t go down there. We did organize these stakes with these three public affairs directors, and then we said to them after we got them all called, we said, You call three people and we’re going to fly them all to Manila and train them for two days. And so, we flew them all in, in two batches [at a time]. We had to wait till the MTC up there—the Missionary Training Center was vacant for a weekend because we trained them on Friday and Saturday after the missionaries left. So we had about, let’s see, we had 150 or 160 come. We had 80 come. No. We had 70 or 80 come with the first batch; then we had the rest come with the second batch. Our director was from Salt Lake.
[02:04:00]
[02:04:25]
JP: No. Once I get started my mind keeps going and anyway—why can’t I remember his name? Anyway, he was the assistant to Bruce Olsen, the public affairs director over the whole Church. Mike? I’ll think about it in a minute. He came over while we were training these missionaries. He was blown away. Every one of them came dressed in their Sunday best; every one of them came with notebooks and pencils, prepared to really get to work and be trained. What we discovered in the résumés is only one of them didn’t have a college degree, and there were about ten Ph.D.’s. And our wonderful director up in Laog, at the tip of Luzon, was the Stake Relief Society president; she was the stake superintendent of public education with a Ph.D., and her two ladies that she chose [also had their] Ph.D.’s. [When] President [Daiquiog] said, “Well do you want
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this? Do you want to still be a Relief Society president or do you want to be the public affairs director?” And she said, “Oh, I want to be the public affairs director; [it] sounds exciting.” And so that’s what they did, and they all came so professionally prepared, and they were so well-trained, and they went back, and they just blew everybody apart. They held National Family Week; we held health fairs; we did anti-pornography campaigns; we did zero waste management, which was cleaning up the Philippines. They did ideal families, where they brought in ideal families from all over the Philippines, and they would blow you away.
One woman was a widow with thirteen children who managed to put all of her children through college, and they worked together, and she was a beautiful, lovely little lady. All of these people were so impressive, so as you can see, it was exciting. One day we would be at [Malacanyang] Palace for the Mother Teresa awards with the president of the country, the next day we were out in Tala, a [leper] colony doing a hot, sweaty, health fair with lepers. And it was just an amazing, wonderful experience. You’re going twenty- four hours seven, and it was just the most wonderful, rewarding, exciting adventure of my life because the Lord opened so many doors, and we had such wonderful people to work with and they really caught the vision of what public affairs can do.
And I asked President Del Rosario in Aklan what the Church growth was. When we were there in 1995 to ’97, the Church was 450,000 members with 52 stakes, and 13 missions. And now, his latest statistics were: we have 600,000 members; we have 72 stakes; and we have 17 missions. And so that is a tribute not to us, but that’s a tribute to the Filipino people who really caught the vision of what they could do in the community.
So many of them, even the Church officials are very poor. They don’t have cars; only two or three of our stake presidents had an automobile; and it’s usually because they work for CES [Church Educational System], and the Church gave them a car or a telephone [to use]. And so communication is a real challenge to them. [We were trying to get stake presidents to have public affairs events so the missionaries could come and do public service in the communities. I spoke to a bishop in a neighboring community of Kalookan.] I said, “Well you go into the mayor and ask him what they would like done in your city.” And it wasn’t Tala the leper colony; it was Kalookan. And he said, “Oh I couldn’t do that; I’m just a poor person.” I said, “Sure you can, you hold the priesthood [of God]; you’ve got more power in your little finger than the mayor does.” I mean, you know, maybe I was a little more flamboyant, and so these people did it. They were scared to do it, but after they found out that people were wonderful, and they treated them [with respect].
When they would have special clean up events or we’d have the health fair there, we got all of the NGO’s [non government groups]: the Lions Club, the Rotary Club, and the Junior Chamber of Commerce. [The Junior Chamber of Commerce] was one of our
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biggest supporters because they had three thousand members. They delivered all of our stuff to the orphanages for us. They helped us [get] the trucks and everything for us to deliver these two great big forty-foot containers that we had sent from Salt Lake Welfare [Center] of toys [and items needed for] the orphanages. [We had] diapers, formula, crutches, wheelchairs, and everything [was] delivered to I think four or five orphanages there: Mother Teresa, Hospicio de San Jose, the [DSWD—Department of Social Welfare—the government organization to help the poor]. We had so much fun going there with all of our missionaries and feeding the babies and playing with them and delivering all these wonderful supplies and things to them.
[Elder Ralph Hunter and Sister Shirley Hunter were in charge of the Health Fair.] She was the nurse, and they’d come from Idaho, and he was a carpenter and football player and coach, and so they set up the tents and we did the PR. We would go in and meet with the mayors and NGO’s and get their support, and of course Shirley and Ralph did this too. We would get the publicity with them to have a big health fair and then the NGO’s were marvelous. They would have parades and have all of their people come out [from] their little towns to go to the health fair. We had the missionaries [attend] the health fair. It was a great missionary tool. The missionaries did their little puppet shows [on dental care]. And Shirley, [as a registered nurse, directed the health fair. She organized the puppet show, would do exams, take people’s blood pressure and direct missionaries as to how best to help]. We had doctors and dentists—I’ve got pictures of dentists sitting somebody back and pulling their teeth. (laughs) It was really interesting, and some of the places were so poor, but the people are so loving and [grateful]. They just do anything for you. I don’t know, I’m so wound up and so—
[02:11:35]
[02:12:28]
JP: Well I have to say one other thing, I don’t know if this is still on or you want to take a break or what, but I need to tell you a couple of things about the president of the country and the people that we worked with on a cabinet level. They were so wonderful and humble. There’s a picture there of President [Fidel] Ramos.
MW: So which one is he? Is he in the blue shirt in the center front?
JP: Yes, that’s a barong—
MW: So right next to you here.
JP: —that’s a barong. The men wear a shirt like that, a barong, and this was at our Young Ambassadors concert. We had invited him to come, [and while] he very seldom ever
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[accepted invitations] of social or entertainment events, he accepted to come to [our concert]. Our area presidency were all three out dedicating chapels, and David Fewster, our director, was down on stage announcing the program for them, and he said, “Dean and you, you stand at the door [and] wait for the president to come with his body guards, and Ben De Leon, his chief assistant, and show them up to the presidential box.” And I said, “Well I don’t know where.” And he said, “Well he’ll know.” So, they were a little bit late [and] so the program had [already] started [when the President arrived]. We welcomed [him], and he grabbed my arm, and he walked me along the hall, and he said, “Mr. and Mrs. Payne, I want to tell you that I saved your temple during the revolution in 1986 when they were shelling from Camp [Cramé to] Camp Aguinaldo.
Camp [Cramé] was down here, and Camp Aguinaldo was right across the street from our temple and from our Church headquarters [including] our mission home, [the APO, the MTC, and temple apartments]. He said, “I had a call from your Elder Oaks asking me if we would try to protect your temple.” And I told him, “I’ve already given the orders.” And he said, “They did have one shell that lobbed into the parking lot, but it didn’t explode and so and then we found out later that some of the soldiers had tried to get in and the temple president stood there at the door and said, “This is a very sacred place; you cannot come in here.” And they tried to push him and he said, “You’ll have to shoot me before you can come in this building.” And that sort of scared them off because he was very powerful, just very dignified, but he had the power of a man with the priesthood. So then they left.
And then President Ramos said, “I want to tell you something else, my auntie, my favorite tía, which is an auntie, is Doña Lucía Valdez. She’s a member of your Church, and she served a mission in New Zealand, and she’s a very famous artist. I hope that you’ll get to meet her sometime because she goes over to your Church headquarters to do genealogy work.” And I said, “Woo.” That was so exciting and we did get to meet her because I have some of her paintings. They’re just little cards that she did, little note cards, but they’re just beautiful little flowers and she was so charming. She lives clear up in Laoag, which is up at the tip of Luzon.
We tried to get them to go up to the presidential box, and he said, “No, no, no, no, no, you must come up and sit with us.” And I thought, Wow, when do you get a chance to sit in the presidential box? We went up and sat there [with him], and he loved the show, but he did have to carry on a little bit of business now and then with Ben De Leon asking him some questions. After the show was over, he said, “We must go down and meet those young people; they are so awesome and wonderful.” So we all went down on stage and he had his picture taken with all of the young ambassadors, putting their thumbs up, and he shook hands with all of them. It was just so neat. I get goosebumps thinking about how gracious and wonderful he was. He had already served two terms; he was the most
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popular president next to President McSisi who was assassinated. He was wonderful and Ben De Leon was a really good friend of ours too.
[Another VIP we met was] Senator [Magsaysay] and his wife Mary Lou, [who] invited us to their home for Christmas. [We had done] a health fair for them. We provided medications for them to go down to the slummiest area near the swamps where they had a lot of TB. They had no electricity, no running water, no sewers. I mean it was just incredible place with all these little children that had scabies and were [in need of] treatment. Senator [Magsaysay] and his wife raised funds to have a TB machine come and take pictures of them and bring dentists and doctors there to examine the children and give them some medications [and] some clothing that our Church had provided for them.
I could just go on forever, but [they] are just such wonderful people! [Secretary Lena Laigo] was head of [DSWP or the] head of the social welfare, and she had charge of all the orphanages. When Carmen [Reodica] was secretary of health, our Church received an award from her because of our “Knock-out Polio Campaign” All of our missionaries went to the chapels and gave 500,000 children polio drops during that campaign. [The Filipinos were] so appreciative of that because polio was still a problem, you know, [as it is] in many places of the world. The missionaries were so cute with all these little kids, giving them the polio drops. We were busy doing other things [during the campaign] when this happened, but the area presidency and Ralph and Shirley were clear up in Laoag with the health fair [so Dean and I were asked to receive this trophy award on behalf of the Church from Secretary of Health Carmen Reodica]. She was very charming and wonderful.
Dr. Cindy Ong was in charge of the Filipino Alliance Against Pornography. For our anti- ] pornography conference, we [needed] to raise one thousand dollars to put on that anti- pornography conference. And we didn’t know how we were going to do this because the hall was about eight hundred dollars, and we [also] had to provide [merienda, which is a Spanish word that means snacks] for the attendees.
So we didn’t know who we were gonna get for a keynote speaker, but anyway, Dr. Cindy Ong was in charge of the Filipino Alliance Against Pornography. She’s a Ph.D. and a wonderful teacher, [and the] head of a KKFI—Kapitan Kaunlaran Foundation—that helped unwed mothers, and it helped young women that were poor to get an education. [Dr. Ong] is one of my wonderful mentors there, and she said, “Jaynann, you’re coming with me, we’re gonna go up and see the editor of the Manila Bulletin and see if he won’t publish our articles for advertising our pornography conference, Society at Risk: The Dangers of Pornography and Protecting the Family. So we walked in and we [met with the CEO of the Manila Bulletin, the country’s largest newspaper]. We asked him [for his support]. He said, “Oh of course, I’d be happy to print your articles advertising your conference.” And then she said, “Oh, also, we need some funds to put on this
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conference.” And Cindy took a deep breath, and he said, “How much do you need?” and Cindy said, “One thousand dollars.” [He took a deep breath and] turned away and looked out the window for a long time, and then he turned around, and he said, “Go tell my secretary to bring in my check book.” And she brought it in, and he wrote out a check for the full thousand dollars. Now we just about fainted, oh my golly, we were so happy because we were able to hire the hall and provide all the refreshments, and our Church printed thirty-five thousand copies of this brochure, The Society at Risk. We sent them all over the Philippines! We handed them out at the conference, we had eight hundred university and high school and townspeople come to that conference; I couldn’t believe it. [The conference was a resounding success.]
Then we [said], Who are we going to get for a keynote speaker? Yeah, this is the [Pornography] Society at Risk, [which later] led me to the [conference] in Poland—[but] one step at a time. Our Church also printed thirty-five thousand copies of a family home evening brochure that told people how to hold a family home evening that we passed out at National Family Week, and that is this one. I was so grateful for David Fewster that he would use our budget [so effectively]. I guess he got extra money from Salt Lake to do this because these were really important projects.
The Filipino government does not have money to do anything like this. In fact, [when] you go into government buildings and you go into a restroom, you will find a big barrel with a bucket of water, and so that’s the way you flush a toilet, or that’s the way you wash your hands, and it’s [all so] unsanitary.
[We wondered who we could get as the keynote speaker.] Well, I had met Ricardo Gloria, who was the secretary of education at the National Ideal Parents Award Gala, and he had eight children. When he found out [that] we had twelve [children], we had a pleasant conversation with him and his wife. His wife was beautiful and adorable, and he was bent on teaching English all throughout the schools in the Philippines. He said, “If we’re going to come out of a third-world nation status, we must have English. We must have English, [and] our children must be proficient in English to do computers [and] to do all the things that are really important for them to make a living and support their families.”
So, I thought of his name and his office was a little ways away from where we were in our apartments. [I asked Dean if he wanted to come with me to talk with him, but he said], “No.” He was going to do some shopping or something, and so I walked into his office, and his secretary said, “Do you have an appointment?” And I said, “No, I’m sorry I don’t. But I’d just like to make an appointment because we would like to ask him to be a keynote speaker at a very important conference.” She said, “Well just a minute, I’ll see.” So she went in, and he asked who it was and she said, “A Mrs. Payne.” And he came out and said, “Oh Mrs. Payne, Sister Payne, how are those twelve kids?” And I
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said, “They’re doing just fine, thank you. How are your eight children?” And he said, “Oh they’re doing just fine.” [He asked], “Well what can I do for you?” And I said, “Well, we need a keynote speaker, and we feel that you would be an ideal person to keynote this conference on Society at Risk: Protecting the Family Against Pornography.” And he said, “I’d love to, but I’m pretty scheduled for the next three months; let me have my secretary go look at my calendar.” We told him the date. It was on a Saturday, and we had hired this big hall in downtown Manila. His secretary looked at his calendar, and he says, “You know something, that’s the only Saturday I have free for the next three months.”
Now, there are no coincidences I tell you because he just absolutely wowed everybody. He was very sharp, very brilliant, very witty, sort of like President Hinckley, you know, with a really cute, sharp wit, and he talked about pornography putting garbage in your mind. Our EFY boys also had part on the program. Two of them were very wonderful, and this conference was a really big success. [Eight hundred college students and high school students] passed out all of this information on [our] literature. I don’t take any credit for it. We just walked through the doors the Lord opened for us, and one thing [led to] another. The right person was there; the right person [that] could do the job that we needed to do.
Mainly the Filipino people [took interest in] this program, and they saw the value of it in their communities, whether it was a health fair or whether it was cleaning up the Philippines. Whatever it was, they really stepped out and were not afraid even though they felt very inadequate and very poor to do the work. [They] were trained, and they wrote articles for newspapers, and they did programs like I told you at the Cebu prison, health fairs.
They collected people, [and] we had a National Family Week. Dean and I were on the board of the National Family Week with Lena Lago, [the secretary of Department of Social Welfare]. She was a wonderful woman. She asked us, “I understand that you have a Thanksgiving Day in the United States. Is it right? Is it in November?” We said, Yes. And she said, “Well our National Family Week is in September; we would like to have a National Family Thanksgiving Day the first Sunday in September. She said you know we can’t use turkeys; we don’t have turkeys; we’re gonna have a chicken.” The chicken is the national symbol of the Philippines because they’re everywhere, and you hear them every morning, and they’re cheap. She had a cute little brochure, a flyer they sent out all over the Philippines about National Family Week, and then she said something that I still am very touched with. She said, “We would like every family to invite someone else to their Thanksgiving dinner that doesn’t have a place to go or doesn’t have a dinner.” And she said, “Whether you go to an orphanage or whatever you do, please share your Thanksgiving dinner with someone else that is poorer than you are or doesn’t have a place to go.” And I thought, You know, they beat us to it. That’s
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wonderful. What a wonderful idea it is that they would think more of others in reaching out [with] little as they have that they would share it with somebody else. So that’s why she’s my hero too. Secretary Lago [was] very kind [and] very wonderful. Now—
[2:27:32]
[2:29:18]
JH: Do you want to tell about when President Hinckley came? Is that something you’d like—
MW: Sure.
JP: Oh yes, oh yes, oh I’ve got to tell about that. President Hinckley was coming on May fourth. He had just completed the tour of Southeast Asia. Sheri Dew was with him, [and] I got to meet her. It was really fun because she told me all the inside details of their three-week trip to Asia and the Philippines. The last [trip was in] 1965 [when] President Hinckley had dedicated the Philippines for the preaching of the gospel at the American Cemetery out at Camp [William McKinley in Manila. It was] our task to find a place for him to meet. Everybody would be coming from all over the Philippines, so it had to be a big place. Well the biggest arena was the Araneta Center. The Araneta Center was a basketball court where they held the Slasher Derby, which they fit roosters with knives on their feet, and they kill each other, and big concerts and things like that, and it seated thirty thousand. Well the only other option was an outdoor place, but in May it is very hot there, and you couldn’t sit out in the sun—so the Araneta place they said no because the night before they were having a Slasher Derby. They couldn’t clean it up in time for him to come, and so we didn’t know what to do. [We worried about] where President Hinckley [would be able to speak to so many people].
Well, down near the docks is a big NCC, which is the National Conference Center where we held the Young Ambassadors, but even that isn’t big enough to have all of the Filipinos that would come. We just talked to Shirley and Ralph and David and who else? I think one of the area presidency went with them. I don’t remember which one it was, but they went and talked to the people at the Araneta Center, and they said, We will have people here to help clean up if you’ll just let us have it here. It’s the only place that’s inside where we could really have this very important event. They finally agreed. And I guess some of the members of our Church [helped to clean it up]. Shirley had to man a first-aid booth, and she said they still had feathers there in the first-aid booth that they had to clean up before President Hinckley came. It was a marvelous event because they had thirty-five thousand people there, but they could only seat thirty thousand. And the people had been there since four and five o’clock in the morning, standing in line in the hot sun waiting to get in.
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It was interesting because the [people] were so reverent that when the officials got thirty thousand people seated, the officials said no we [couldn’t] have any more [people come in. Many] people were standing outside crying, and they said, Oh we’ll just stand up. We’ll be very quiet; we won’t make any problem or block any doorways or do anything like that that’s against the fire code. So they let another five thousand in to stand in between the two tiers along the edge, and they couldn’t block any passageway or anything. They stood there so reverent and so quiet and the [Araneta management] said they never had any event where people were so [well-behaved]. You know the Spirit was there very strong, and President Hinckley spoke, and he was really touched. We, the public affairs missionaries, were the hosts, and so they had a big red carpet, and they had red ropes along where he was [going to] walk up to the podium. Sheri Dew was there, and I got to talk to her before he came [in], and he started. She said, “Oh Jaynann, it’s been the most—” I don’t know how she knew me, but she said, “You’re Jaynann Payne aren’t you?” And I said, “Yes, how did you know me?” She said, “It’s been so wonderful to travel with President Hinckley.” She said, “I put my track shoes on, and I can’t keep up with him, and he’s been going for three weeks all over Hong Kong, you name it, Vietnam, Korea, and Taiwan. Anyway, all of those countries along there.” And she said, “He has been so wonderful, and the Spirit has been so strong, and the people just absolutely love him.” Then she told me a couple of other things.
[This] is the talk he gave where he [first] told people [of other faiths]: “We want you” because it’s a Catholic country, because I guess a lot of the members had brought nonmembers with them to meet him, or to see him and hear him talk, and so he said there, and I’ve never forgotten it, “We want all of you people; you’re good Christian people,” because they are a Christian nation. He said, “We want you to bring all the truth and all the good things that you have and let us add to it.” And that was so neat, and I still get goosebumps because he said that many times. A number of the other Brethren have said that you just bring all the good you have and let us add to it, never contending, but just being loving and kind and where they’re willing to give them the truth.
So that was a great event in spite of the Slasher Derby. I said they had a Slasher Derby, which was, they fit roosters with knives, and then they go out and fight cock fights and bet on them and see who kills which one, and so it’s a bloody mess. That’s why Araneta Center said we couldn’t have it there the next day, but our members and some of the missionaries went and cleaned it up, and the only feathers that were left, Shirley said, were in her first-aid room, and she had to sweep a few out or something, I don’t know. But that was a wonderful event with President Hinckley, and he came by and sort of waved like this, and I brushed his fingertip as he came by.
Well then, what is next that you had—
[02:36:14]
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JH: Did you want to talk about how your experience battling pornography in the Philippines helped introduce you to the world congress on families?
JP: Yes, because [Dean and] I [were] on the [board of the] Filipino Alliance Against Pornography [and had printed materials that we had distributed. This led to my involvement in the World Congress of Families in Poland 2008]. My husband belonged to every conservative organization that you can imagine: American Heritage, the Hillsdale Foundation, and other organizations.
We and our children one year for Christmas had bought a cow. [Each of our] children sent in a dollar to buy a cow for Carol Solberg with United Family International because they bought cows for Africa. [Through this], I interfaced with her, and then I [received] these brochures inviting us to go to conferences.
While I had been working for Senator [Hatch] and while I was with the Freeman Institute, Doctor Skousen sent me back to Washington to interview VIP women for the Freeman Digest. I was able to go to Washington D.C. and interview Faith Whittlesey, who was President Reagan’s chief liaison, public liaison. Oh, she was a lovely, gracious woman, and it scared me to death because I just sort of wing it all the time, but she was so gracious.
I told Janice [about] my experiences with great women [like] Phyllis Schlafly, Dale Rogers Evans, [and] Brenda Hunter. I did a series of articles on them and their contribution to society and the work that they were doing.
Faith Whittlesey was so gracious and wonderful, and I found that with great women that they are accepting; they’re validating; they’re helpful; they want you to do your best and be your best. Here’s this little, timid housewife trying to interview someone really famous and important, but they put you at ease, and it was just a wonderful exciting experience. Dale Evans Rogers [was] especially [interesting] telling about Roy Rogers and their life together. Brenda Hunter wrote Where Have All the Mother’s Gone? She was a lovely woman too, and [the] same with Phyllis Schlafly.
Well anyway, so that was sort of exciting but getting back to the World Congress of Families. Dean had [received many] brochures [from conservative organizations. It] was [mostly] just junk mail. [There was one brochure on the] World Congress of Families in Poland in May of 2008, and I was just ready to toss [it] in the waste basket, and I thought: Poland. Well Dean and I had [gone] to Russia and Poland [about three years earlier] for the first time on a trip. He loved to travel and loved sightseeing especially to places that he hadn’t been before. So anyway, I was ready to throw it in the wastebasket, and I just had a spiritual prompting, a little prompting, “Take a look at it.” So, I opened it up and
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the title was Demographic Winter, and I thought, What does that mean? Well what it meant was that because these social values or because moral values had [declined] and because our social infrastructure was in danger, our birth rates are so low that they’re not even replac[ing current] populations. Even in the United States, they figured [populations] were down to some of them not even 1 percent or a half a percent in some of those countries because of abortion, because of cohabitation, because of AIDS, because of a lot of different [moral] issues that have really been denigrating to our society [and] have been detrimental to the family. [Our current population replacement] can’t replace our infrastructure, [and so] our societies are [going to commit] sexual suicide.
George Gilder wrote a really good book called Sexual Suicide, where he took the feminists to task, and he said the very things they’re asking for [are] the things that are going to commit sexual suicide. There won’t be any men left and any families left to repopulate our countries.
JH: And sustain the economy, right?
[02:41:35]
JP: [Yes], and sustain the economy. The problems they’re having now in Europe with all of the economies is that young people are not interested in getting married and having a family and teaching their children to work and having good jobs [to be an asset to the economy]. I looked at that [brochure], and I read down it, and I saw that Dallin Oaks was on the advisory board. I thought, That’s interesting, and then also, [our neighbor] Patrice Pope’s husband, Wayne [Tew], who’s also a very fine member of the Church and [was also on the advisory board]. Then, I looked down, [and] it said “big families.” It had people that were talking about large families, and I thought, Hmm, well that would be interesting, but then as I went on down further it said “pornography.” Somebody was going to present on pornography, and the prompting said “That’s what you did in the Philippines; you’ve got some ammunition to take to that conference. You’re not a speaker; you may not be a speaker, but you can take something that would be helpful to protect the families.” So I thought of my brochure here, so I decided, Yeah, maybe I could go. So I talked to Rosie about it. Well, before I even talked to Rosie, [I thought about] my husband [who had] died in 2006. [I kept thinking about it and thought], Well, I’ll see how much it costs. It was reasonable because it was just [for] four days, and there was a package that went with the conference, and so I thought Well, maybe I could do it. So then I called Rosie—
JH: Your daughter.
JP: —my daughter Rosalie, one of the twins. She lives in Yuma, Arizona, and [I] asked her what she thought about it. “Should I go?” And she said, “Sure, Mom, that’s what you did
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in the Philippines.” She said, “Maybe I can go with you.” And so I said, “Well you know, that might be nice too.” So in the meantime she called her twin sister in Houston, Texas, and Rachelle said, “I want to go too.” So they both asked their husbands if they could go. Well in the meantime, I went up to Bruce Olsen, the public affairs department in Salt Lake and asked him if we could have permission to print this brochure because if you look on the back, it is The Church of Jesus Christ [logo] and also all of the National Councils of Churches and all these other groups that we had with us, but I felt that I had to get permission from the Church to reprint it. Well, Bruce Olsen was going out to dinner and—oh, Mike Oddison is the one that I [talked to].
JH: Is this the one again?
JP: Uh-huh, yes, and so we had all of these groups on the back that supported us, so I had to get permission to reprint this. Well, Mike Oddison said, “I can’t give you permission; you can go ahead and do it if you want—like it’s ya know—don’t ask permission, but just do it and repent later.” But I really didn’t have time to do it; I had one week, so then I remembered that [JoAnn Hibbert] Hamilton had given a wonderful class called “Protecting the Family Against Pornography” at Education Week. I’d gone to her class. I had her handout, and I had one of her brochures, so I thought, I bet she’s going and maybe I can get ours printed or something, and we can go together. I called her on the phone in Bountiful, and she said, “Jaynann, I’ve had a recurrence of childhood polio; I’m in bed and in a wheelchair; I can only sit up about two hours a day.” And I told her—I said, “Oh I thought you would be going because you’re the perfect person; you’ve got all these books and all of her brochures and everything.” And she said, “No, you’re going to take them. Right?” And I said, “Oh my golly.” And she said, “I want you to come up to Bountiful tomorrow; I’ve got boxes and boxes of books, of videos, of brochures, of handouts, everything.” Three huge boxes. She said, “I’ll have my husband put them in your car and please take them for me because I can’t, and she said there’s no way now that I can get out and talk at Education Week or do anything.”
With all of these wonderful materials that she had published and had printed books on, it [was] very wonderful. She’s an icon. She received the Guardian of Light Award from the Lighted Candle Society for her work against pornography. I said, “Okay, can I have permission to print three hundred copies of your handout that you gave at Education Week?” She said, “Sure, print all you want.” So that’s what we did, and I took these three boxes home, and the twins said, We’re gonna go and help you. And that’s what they did.
And it was touch and go all the way because we had to take different planes. [Rosalie] came from Yuma; [Rachelle] came from Houston, and I came from Salt Lake, and we were supposed to be at the airport in New York by ten o’clock PM when the plane left. Well, we waited and waited from nine o’clock on. We got all of the boxes checked because I had checked those on at Salt Lake to New York, so they didn’t have to carry
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any of the boxes. Rosie called and she said, “Mom, the plane was late, and we missed our connection.” She said, “If I can’t make it, I’ll see you in the morning.” Well the last minute just as they were ready to close the gate, she came running down the hall with her suitcase she said, “I made it, I made it, I’m here.” And so she got on the plane, and we all three got there in the morning, and we checked into the hotel with all these three boxes of things.
We made VIP packets for [Dr.] Alan Carlson, the head [of the World Congress of Families] and for Elder Bruce Hafen and Scott [Loveless, head of the World Family Policy Center at BYU. Richard] Wilkins, [who] just died [recently, was] there at the same hotel we were and we didn’t know that, but we were able to network with them and give them some of [our materials. We prepared a VIP packet for them with a DVD, one of JoAnn’s books, and lots of brochures.]
The girls helped me carry [all three boxes] over to the palace. [It was a] the big palace there in downtown Warsaw. I [was] wondering if there [was] a place that we [could] put them [or if] there [was] a booth that we could rent? The lady at the door of the exhibition hall said, “Well, they cost fifteen hundred, but I don’t think we have any left.” And so we thought, Oh what are we going to do with these three boxes of things? She said, “Go down at the end of this hall; there might be a card table there; you can set your things on that.” And so we went down at end of the hall and guess what we found at the end of the hall? An empty booth. And guess who was right next to it? Carol Soelburg with United Families of America. And guess who was right across the hall there from us? [It] was The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Guess who was around the corner? The BYU Family Studies with Joy and Gary Lundburg and down the hall further was Family Watch International with Sharon Slater. [Wow], did we have fun networking with all these ladies. I asked Carol, “Is anybody taking this booth?” And she said, “Nope, if they’re not here now, nobody’s got it I don’t think.” So she said, “Set up shop.” So we did; we set up all of our stuff. Well I just [thought], Oh my golly, thank you thank you for all these little special gifts and tender mercies. We set up the handouts; we made these special VIP packets; and we got those to the people that we wanted to—to Elder Hafen and to others and then, we gave some of course to BYU and to the Church, and to Carol and Sharon Slater.
There were three days of conference, but by the middle of the second day all of our [materials were] gone. Shelly said, “Mom, well I thought of that old song, ‘Praise the Lord Pass the Ammunition.’” She said, “We’re helping you carry the ammunition in the fight against pornography.” By the second day, we didn’t have anything left. We had people ask us—we heard the man talk on pornography that afternoon, and he had not one handout, not one. I was very disappointed because he talked about a lot of statistics that he didn’t really talk about protecting the family against pornography. And so all of our stuff was snatched up, and I just was so thrilled, and we kept a few of the little handouts
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because people would talk to us and ask us. We stood up at tall tables like this and had a boxed lunch, and my twins were over here with a Polish lady.
She was a newspaper woman, and she asked these beautiful daughters what they were here for, and they said, “We’re twins. We’re the eleventh and twelfth children of our mother over there.” And she couldn’t believe it; she said, “You are?” And they said, Yes. So she said, “Oh well, tell me what you’re doing.” And they told her that we were here to carry information about protecting the family against pornography, and she said, “Oh, I must interview your mother.” And so she said, “Please go get her.” So. I talked to her for a few minutes, and she spoke very good English, and she said I want you to come down to the pressroom right now for an interview with the two girls.
So we went down to the pressroom. And we had this interview with her, and then other people heard about it, and I guess she said, “This lady has twelve children, and she’s here to fight against pornography” or something. I don’t know what they said. But we had two other people wanted to interview us for the newspaper, and so we were there nearly all afternoon, and then we had a television interview come up. I just couldn’t believe it. [The twins] said, Oh we want to. The twins were interviewed on television, and they were so cute and so adorable. They’re the ones that really brought everything together. Rosie is so articulate anyway and so is Shelley. That was a wonderful day. We couldn’t believe everything, and so we sort of coasted the last day.
We went to a lot of the meetings, but a couple of interesting things that I remember from that conference was Wade Horn, who was the U.S. [Assistant] Secretary of Children, Youth, and Families in the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services]. He gave a lot of statistics on homosexuality that I was not aware of. One [question] he asked was “Who was the most abused segment of our society?” And he said, “Would you say children? No.” He said, “Lesbians.” The statistics show that they’re the most physically and sexually abused and then homosexuals are next and then children. And you know he gave a lot of statistics and different things showing that, and then another thing that he said is, “So many couples that are cohabiting, do not really get married. They don’t stay with each other for very long. The tendency for this lifestyle is to have multiple partners. Some of them [have] as much as several hundred partners, and that’s how AIDS was spread so [rapidly].” Anyway he gave a lot of chilling statistics, and I’ve thought about this a lot with the big drive against the Constitution to have [same-sex relationships] legalized set in constitutional concrete that might have devastating results for not only the couples themselves, but for our society. [Many people] proselytize [open sexuality] with all the sex tours that they had in the Philippines. It’s really sad that the people are so poor that they sell their [own] children into sex slavery. [The hyperfocus on sexual freedom is devastating to the children who are the most vulnerable.]
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We had the conference, and [it went well]. I’ve got to just share our Sunday with you because it was Mother’s Day. My daughters wanted to take me to Old Town because [the] conference ended Sunday just before noon. They wanted to go and have lunch and buy a few little gifts and things for their kids. We did, and we sat at an outdoor café, and they had a fence around the outside that was about waist high to fence in the restaurant. We sat on the outside edge so we could see what was going on in the square because there were people milling about, and some people singing and some people playing instruments and things. We ordered our dinner, and this young man came up and said, “Ma’am,” he said, “I’m really hungry, and my mother is in the hospital. Could I have some money to buy some food?” He looked quite young, but it turns out he was about twenty-five years old. Rosie said, “No, your mother’s sick in the hospital?” And he said, “Yes.” And she said, “No, but I’ll tell you what we will do. You come in here, and we’ll treat you to dinner, and we’ll give you that [as our] Mother’s Day gift.” It was really funny, and so he looked sort of nonplussed, and he said, “Well okay.” And then he went away, and we thought that’s the last we’ll see of him because he just wanted money. [We thought he just] wanted a handout. Pretty soon he came back with a younger brother, and he said, “Yes, we really would like something to eat.” So the waiter brought them in, and they sat on this side of us. We had put our purses down here by our feet and by the edge of the fence. They ordered a soup bowl in a bread bowl, and a Coke. We bought them that, and they were really hungry which was interesting, but all the time, our waiter was very nervous, and he kept looking at them and he kept looking at us. [Later we found out that he was thinking], Oh, I’m not sure this is a good thing for you to do. We didn’t think anything of it, and Rosie gave them a big [spiel], “Today is Mother’s Day, and we’re buying our mother lunch, and we want to buy lunch for your mother [or at least] for her sons” or something like that. She’s really cute and funny about it, and so anyway, they got through and they thanked us and went away. [Afterward], the waiter told us that they were purse snatchers that inhabited the plaza there, and they kept snatching people’s purses and he said, “You know why I was so worried? [I thought] that they were gonna snatch your purses or something or rob you.” And we said, Well thank you very much; we’re gonna remember this forever—Mother’s Day with purse snatchers, feeding purse snatchers in Warsaw, Poland, at a restaurant.
That was the end of our trip to Poland, but I was so grateful for JoAnn Hamilton and her gift to give us all of that information to carry and so grateful for the way things turned out, and that was [in] 2008. I’m grateful because just after that, I lost my eyesight in 2010, and so I can see peripherally, but I [can’t drive]. I tell people facetiously, “I may be deaf and blind [and] losing my mind, but thank heavens I still have my driver’s license.” But it’s now only to identify my body because actually it does expire in 2014. I just haven’t been driving for the last three or four years. Anyway, so I want to talk about my children.
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MW: First tell us, how did you lose your eyesight? You mentioned the disease you had earlier—
JP: Macular degeneration. I had my [vision in the] right eye for a long time, and then I got some blank spots in it that they can’t do anything about and a cataract, and they can’t do anything about that. [So now] I am legally blind.
But I want to just talk a little bit about our children because they’re the joy of my life. We had so much fun doing things together. We dragged our kids to [plays and] concerts. The other night I took Tom and his [twin fourteen-year-old] boys to a concert at BYU. He said his wife asked him, “Did you always want to go to the concerts?” And he said, “No, sometimes I’d say I had homework to do, but Mother and Dad always had us go.” And he said, “I was never sorry because the concerts turned out to be really nice.” [When I was a young girl], my parents had taken us to the ballet in Salt Lake [like the] Nutcracker Ballet every year. It’s sort of traditional. We can’t afford to go to that anymore, but sometimes we go [to the Provo] Covey Center. We have loved the arts and [most of] our children took piano. I want to give [Dean] the credit because he paid for their lessons even though we didn’t have a lot of money at the time. Our three oldest girls and our three youngest all took piano lessons, and Nancy [and Tom played the] violin. Tom took violin for a little while, but [he decided to play the] saxophone [like his older brother Ben. Ed played the] trumpet [like his grandfather]. Music has been a wonderful part of our lives, our children sing. Janice’s family are just angels; they all sing so beautifully. Janice is very accomplished on the piano and has taught her children to sing and play the piano.
I’ve just enjoyed our children. We’ve had some rough places where some of the children had problems with their marriages, but it’s turned out happy. Now, the heartbreak of certain experiences like that, disappointments in marriage and health problems—Janice, how many health problems have we had?
[03:01:06]
JH: We’ve been pretty blessed.
JP: We’ve been pretty blessed. What other things do you have on the list that we have missed?
MW: I’d like to know, what has been the most significant trial out of all your experiences? Is there a trial or two that have been particularly difficult and how did you overcome?
JP: One was when my oldest daughter went off with Sonia Johnson and left the Church. And she never did come back. She had four husbands. I loved all of her husbands; they were
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wonderful to her. She sort of had a gypsy soul I guess you might say. She was a fabulous dancer. [She was the only freshman to go with Mary Bee Jensen to Europe as one of the members of the International Folk Dancers.] She could do anything. She became a flamenco dancer and then a belly dancer. [She was beautiful with long dark red hair and very artistic. She also painted several oil paintings. She danced for the Dalai Lama in India and also learned Native American dancing and international dances of peace. She taught dancing to many young women and Christian groups. Susie and her first husband Howard, were married in the temple and had three children. They were all raised in the Church and all three, Scott, Heidi, and Shawn served missions and were married in the temple.] I pay tribute to her first husband, Howard Better, for that; he was wonderful. He remarried, and his wife helped raise those children, and Lori was a wonderful mother to them.
[Susie lived in the Portland area. She] participated in a lot of dance festivals, peace dances. One very ironical thing is that she raised funds to go to India to do peace dances with Dalai Lama and her mother dancers, [but she was unable to see the Dalai Lama]. Guess where the Dalai Lama was at that time? In Spanish Fork dedicating their [Hari- Krishna] temple [in] Spanish Fork. I told her afterward, “That’s sort of a bitter irony for you that you went clear to India and raised all that money to go dance for the Dalai Lama and he was right here [in Spanish Fork, Utah].” And she said, “Well we did [take clothing and supplies to] some [of the] orphanages, and we danced for somebody else.” She was [so] delightful, charming, [and] talented. She sang, she danced, she played the piano and just had a special personality. She could charm anyone, especially children; she loved children. She converted to Judaism [when she] married a wonderful [Jewish] man whom I love. [His name was Alan Bachman and now he works as an attorney in the State of Utah’s Attorney General’s office. He was also a very talented musician in ancient Middle Eastern music and composed New Age music that they performed together.]
[She then became involved with Native American culture and dancing and met and married Phil and completed her BA at the University of Utah and worked in women’s studies and social work.]
[When that relationship didn’t work out, she next met and married Steven Miller], a wonderful architect [and they lived in Medford, Oregon. She later became ill with endometrial cancer], and he took care of her [until] she died. He was very kind to her.
Well, all four of [her husbands] came down to her funeral in Provo, and [three] of them spoke at her funeral. They praised her; they all loved her to bits, [and] they all thought she was the most wonderful woman. [Susie changed her name to Shoshanna Rose when she converted to Judaism.] Steven bought two hundred roses to give to everyone at her funeral, which was [so generous and fitting].
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And she’s buried next to [my cemetery plot where my husband Dean is buried and next to] my mother, [her beloved grandmother Fern], at the Provo cemetery. [Before she passed away], she wanted to be cremated and have her ashes flown all over the ocean. [Steven told me this and said], “I hope you’ll respect her wishes.” And I said, “I will.” But then I woke up at three o’clock in the morning, and I had the thought, her name was Shoshanna Rose. Why don’t you have everyone bring a rose to her funeral and scatter the rose petals across the ocean and have us bring her home and bury her next to her beloved grandmother [Fern], whom she took care of [until she died]? And so I talked to her about that the next morning, and she said, “Oh, okay, that’s wonderful, if you’re sure that I can be by Grandma Morgan.” And I really went out on a limb at this time because I did not have any idea if there’s a plot next to us. Daddy [Grandpa Morgan] bought eight places there in the Provo cemetery for my Grandparents Roberts, for my dad and my mother, for Dean and me, and for my brother and his wife, so those are the eight places. I had no idea if there was any place even nearby that wasn’t already taken. I told her, “Well I promise I’ll bring you home.” And I said, “You can have a funeral here,” which she did. We had a funeral in [Ashland, Oregon, and one in Portland, Oregon], and one in Provo. A lot of her friends came from Salt Lake that were her dancing partners. [Susie was a wonderful grandmother, and she loved her grandchildren. One of her greatest heartaches was not being able to do things with her grandchildren. As soon as] I got home, I talked to my son, and I said, “We’ve got to go to the Provo cemetery and see if there is a [plot available] there.” And so we did. Of all the places [in the cemetery], there were just two places left. [It was a miracle of miracles. Only three spaces were left at the foot of our family plot.] And so I told [Susie], “We found the place,” and we could bring her home. But I guess that’s one of the great trials. I loved her; she was very charming, but it was heartbreaking [to lose my daughter at fifty-six years old. It is so hard to bury one of your children].
MW: Did you always have a good relationship with her through all those hard times? I would imagine knowing how you feel so strongly, and it must have just been horrific.
JP: This was the irony. As I was back in Washington and in Houston fighting against abortion and the ERA and homosexuality, and she was off with Sonia Johnson on the opposite end of the [political] spectrum. It was a strange relationship right during that time, but our door was never closed. She was always invited to the family reunions; she was always invited home. We always went up to visit her wherever she was whether it was in Portland with whomever she was living with at the time. We had Hanukah with Alan one time at our [home] with [Susie], and it was really a lot of fun [and enlightening] because [they were] Jewish.
JH: She was impressed with Hadassah, which was the women’s [Jewish] organization, and then she [realized] that the Relief Society was very similar, but [was worldwide with] even more responsibilities and opportunities for women.
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JP: She got her degree from the University of Utah and graduated Cum Laude I guess it was—
JH: [In women’s studies and social work.]
JP: She wrote a beautiful biography of my grandmother or Dean’s grandmother, Mary Smith Ellsworth, [which we treasure. It is important to realize that] you never close the door on [someone], that even though she had been excommunicated, [God loves all his children]. After she passed away, her daughter Heidi and I thought we’d like to have her work done for her [in the temple], but Heidi said: “I’ve got to work through a lot of stuff first.” So I said, “Okay I’ll wait for you till you feel it’s time.”
And so then in 2008 for my eightieth birthday, I decided I didn’t want to have a party at the church and stand in line and wait, I was gonna kidnap my children and take them to Hawaii and put them on a ship. My daughter-in-law Heather is part Hawaiian, and she and her mother had been on these cruises around the islands. They’re [relatively] inexpensive actually because everything is furnished: all your food, hotel. You [leave] your [suitcases] on the ship and just go and [travel to] the different islands and see everything. We decided to do that.
We have a family business [and decided to] give a disbursement that will [pay] half for this [trip] and [each child could pay the other half] to celebrate my eightieth birthday. All eleven children came with their spouses. It was so wonderful. The kids said that that was the best trip. I got to spend time one on one [with my children and their spouses]. We have all these grandchildren [and it can be difficult to spend time just with my children and their spouses. I loved having some alone time with my] darling kids and with their spouses [to] see what’s happening in their lives and catch up with them and see about the grandchildren without having all the grandchildren to take care of them. [We now have seventy-five grandchildren and eighty-one great-grandchildren, and so family reunions are a delightful circus.]
So for a whole week, we just had a ball. It was interesting because just before that time, Heidi said, “I think it’s time to ask the First Presidency if they will reinstate Susie and restore her temple blessings.” And so, [Heidi and I] wrote a letter [requesting permission to baptize her and restore her temple blessings. We also needed] to have her husband Steven write a letter [giving approval] because he was still legally her husband, [but not a member of the Church. This] just happened before the end of September [because] our cruise was October the seventh. We put all these papers we had to do: the genealogy sheets. I had to write a letter. Steven had to write a letter. Heidi and her siblings had to write letters. We put them in a big envelope, and [Heidi] said, “I’m not going to mail these. I [will] take them down to the First Presidency’s office [myself].” So she marched
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down to the First Presidency’s office, and they wouldn’t let her deliver them because it was in a manila envelope. It looked very suspicious to all of the [security] guards. She said, “Look, I [would like you to ask] one of the secretaries from the First Presidency’s office to come down and take this envelope.” And they said, No, no, no. And she said, “Look, this is my mother’s eternal destiny; I want somebody to come down and get these papers. There’s no bomb in here.” I mean she was really spunky about it, and they said, Well, okay. So the lady came down and got the papers.
Just before we left to go on my eightieth birthday cruise, I [received approval from] the First Presidency [for Susie’s temple blessings to be restored, but was told it might be several months] before they would do the work for her in the Salt Lake temple because only the temple president and the matron could the work of this kind of reinstatement when somebody has been excommunicated. [I spoke with a lady at the temple department and she said] it may be months before we would hear whether her work had been done or not. But at least they had permission. I was so thrilled that they had given permission.
[We planned on our cruise to attend a session in the Hawaiian Laie temple as a family on Friday, October 9, 2008.] We got on the ship, we took the planes and we got to Laie. [We were able to attend a temple session] just about two days before they closed it for remodeling. We were in the temple the eighth and ninth, and then we went back to—
JH: Honolulu.
JP: [We went back to] Honolulu and boarded the ship. We had this wonderful trip all around the islands. I had the kids all to myself, and they gave me a birthday party at this fancy restaurant and gave me little presents. [It was a dream trip with a lifetime of memories. At the end of our cruise, we were met by my] Japanese friend’s daughter [Elaine Nakao and her sister Teri Nakayama. They celebrated not only my birthday, but our fifty years of friendship. Over the years, we have had] a lot of friend’s sons or friend’s daughters that have lived with us.
JH: Why don’t you name a few of them?
[03:14:49]
JP: Ok, Rondy [Tom] was [an] Indian placement student in junior high school that lived with us for four years, except in the summer times when he went home.
We had Elaine Nakao who was from Hawaii. She came when I lost a baby in December, and she hadn’t gone home for Christmas, so she came and took care of the kids while I was in the hospital. And then she became just a dear friend daughter. She didn’t live with us really very long because she was in nursing school at BYU. When she went back to
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Hawaii, her stake President [Adney Komatsu] called her on a mission. She called me, and then she wrote to me [telling me that] she had thought of going on a mission, but she wasn’t sure. When her stake president asked her if she would go, [we encouraged her to serve a mission. When she received her call, she was concerned about financing her mission as her mother was a widow with eight children. We] said, We’ll support you on your mission. She was called to Okinawa and served a Japanese-speaking mission because she was Japanese.
We [also] had Danny Lin, a Chinese boy, then we had Manami Anderson, a Japanese girl for a year. Danny Lin did not [live with us but he was a convert and served a mission to Hong Kong Cantonese speaking], but his family had been part of our family ever since. And then we had [Gina, a girl] from Columbia that lived with us for a year, and then we had Isabel, [who was our granddaughter’s convert from France. Our granddaughters] lived with us for a year while they were going to school, and oh, we’ve had Alan Cherry, a wonderful black friend and Georgia Esparza from Boston, and they didn’t live with us but they have just been wonderful friends, part of our family. [We also had Oscar Lopez, one of Nancy’s converts from Puebla, Mexico, live with us for a year.]
JH: Robert Smith.
JP: Yes, oh yes. John Smith. And Mary Lou, we met him when I was on Education [Week in Huntsville, Alabama]. We met a lot of these people when I was teaching Education Week all over the country.
JH: Wanda Woodrum.
JP: And Wanda Woodrum, oh yes, she’s my special, special friend daughter. And oh my, it’s been such a wonderful life. I’ve learned so much from all of these people.
JH: Glen [Friedman].
JP: Yeah, Glen [Friedman] was a Jewish boy.
MW: So you’ve been more than a mother to twelve; you’ve been a mother to many.
JH: Yes, yes she has.
JP: Well I’ve loved all of these people. I’ve learned so much from them. Wanda Woodrum, for instance, was thirteen when I met her in Atlanta, Georgia. I was teaching Education Week, and she came up after, and she said, “Sister Payne, you only have twelve children; you need one more, me.” And she was this darling little girl with long golden curls, and she was thirteen, and she said, “I’m coming out to BYU when I’m sixteen, and I want to
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come and live with you.” Well when she was sixteen, she was in an almost fatal automobile accident and had her leg cut off. So she didn’t get out to BYU till she was nearly eighteen, seventeen or eighteen, and she had to live in the dorms because she couldn’t [drive]. You know, we lived up on the hill and she couldn’t [live with us because] we didn’t have a car for her to drive. She was trying to get with a prosthesis so that she could walk. [She] spent those few years, but she got her degree from BYU, and she always came up to our place, and we always [included her in our family activities like] our family reunions and Joseph Smith birthday parties.
She has been the dearest, dearest friend, and she invites us over [to her home] every Christmas for a special party, and it’s a testimony meeting with many of her friends who have beautiful singing voices, who have beautiful testimonies. It always starts Christmas for me, and she’s been a really important part of my life. She’s had some spiritual experiences when Dean passed away that are really too sacred to tell but she is a very, very spiritual woman, and now she’s fifty—
JH: She’s like a counselor to a lot of people.
JP: Yes, she got her degree in counseling, and she’s done marriage counseling and family counseling. [She helped] some of our kids when they were going through divorce. I just am so blessed to have all these wonderful friends that have influenced me in my life in many, many ways that I am so grateful for and just can’t explain. I give all the glory to the Lord because He, through all of these other experiences, led me to meet somebody here and somebody there. Robert Swenson in Atlanta, and John Smith in Hunstville, Alabama. [John served in] Vietnam. He wanted to be adopted by our family, but he decided that maybe wasn’t appropriate, but he married, and all of his children have gone on missions now and gotten married [in the temple. My] life has been so rich, and it’s because I’m so old. You could go on forever talking about [it], and I don’t want to be boastful. I’m trying to be very meek because I do see the hand of the Lord in my life in many wonderful ways, and I don’t feel worthy of it oftentimes because I’ve been very cavalier sometimes about not spending enough time listening to someone or [to] my own kids. I do love the Lord, and I’m so grateful for His hand in my life and the wonderful callings that I’ve had.
I guess I was Young Women’s president one time for just one year actually. I had five little kids, and it was just too much because that’s when mutual was at night, and you had to go two or three nights a week. I came home one night—we lived on Center Street at that time, and my little baby, [Wid], was out on the street [in a] diaper, with cars whizzing by. I had a babysitter there because I had been to Young Women’s at night, and I got home, and I ran and snatched him. I think of his getting killed. Well, the babysitter was sitting in—we had a little teeny TV like this, and she was sitting watching TV. Out on the back porch was a bushel of peaches that my kids had thrown all over that
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we were going to bottle the next day. I was so mad at that girl; I just said, “My baby was almost killed out in the middle of the street. What are you doing? You’re not watching my children.” I said, “You go home right now, and I’m never having you come and babysit again. You need to take a lesson in being responsible.” I really chewed her out. So I asked the bishop if I could do something else, and so he helped me. He called me to teach the literary lessons in the Relief Society, and that was another wonderful experience too.
MW: What other callings have you had?
JP: I’ve [been the] “Gospel Doctrine” teacher for five years. I’ve been the “Spiritual Living” and Relief Society [teacher] and the humanitarian director. [That] was really exciting because it was when they just started the war in Iraq, and we had neighbors in our ward— a young woman that lived across the street—Isabel [Morkel] who was fighting with a Mormon battalion over there.
JH: The Mormon battalion?
[End of tape one: 03:22:48]
[Beginning of tape two: 00:00:01] JP: —but they called them [that] because a lot of them were Mormons. Not all of them [were], but some were. We did humanitarian packages for them, and then sent them all over. We collected [supplies and food in ten] big boxes sent all over to the soldiers there in Iraq. We also did clothes for kids in Africa. We collected and did the kits—you know, the baby kits and the sanitary kits and all of these things. And that was really fun ‘cause it was really active to do that. And uh—oh, and what other callings? Oh, one that I loved to share with my husband was as a bishop’s wife out in the Cherry Hills school trying to get these older students that had mostly graduated married off to each other. But that’s being facetious. He was called in the branch presidency at the MTC, and that was exciting and wonderful because the wives, at that point in time, got to meet with the sisters, and we got to teach them on Thursday nights about a whole bunch of different [things, such as] dress and grooming and also bearing their testimonies. Well, Education Week was a wonderful, wonderful experience. I taught that for twenty years. And we got to travel all over the country in those days. They don’t do it [anymore, but] Dean and I went on the eastern trip to Boston, and together we team taught [about] the Constitution, “In God We Trust.” [Dean] taught about legal issues: preparing your estate, making a will, and different things like this, while I taught “Treasures to Give to Your Family.” And then—what else, Jan? JH: On your questions, or—
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JP: Uh-huh. JH: Um, well, did you want to just— JP: Oh, one thing I said there. Be sure and don’t forget that that I wrote down. JH: Your, your— JP: Oh, we helped save Academy Square. JH: Yeah. JP: I started that in 1977 with a whole bunch of people: Jean and Dick Paul and the Englands and, uh, Roy and Shirley Paxman. JH: They were wanting to tear it down. Did you know that? JP: They wanted to tear it down. And we never were successful ‘til after we went on our mission, and Doug Smoot took it over and really got it going and raised the funds. And it’s wonderful. But we did put—we did try to get Avard Fairbanks, the famous sculptor, to help advertise for us at that time, and he said, “I have a bust of Brigham Young that I’d like to put in this building some time.” But then he passed away before the building was completed. And so when we got home from our mission, I remembered that because I had talked to his son Jonathan, who is the curator of the Boston museum, and his other son David masked them, “Was that bust still available because we’d like to raise the funds to put that bust of Brigham Young” [in Academy Square]—that’s what Avard Fairbanks wanted to do. He was the dearest man. He was so genuine and helpful and had such a generous heart. And so we did. And we had that put in just after the building was opened and had their [dedication]. And it’s been fun to be involved in the community in that way. But I didn’t do it all. I just had a wonderful team and wonderful people to work with. You have an idea and so you go for it, and sometimes it works out. [04:06] JH: So what advice would you give to younger women in Utah? JP: Oh, okay. I would give them the advice that after having the experience as being—I guess you might say, quasi-professional—as the director for Center for Family Studies and also for Senator Hatch that motherhood, family life, homemaking is the most glorious profession of all. Oh, yes, and I wanted to say something—or did I say it already—that we are fortunate in the many ways we have of serving each other. I said that, didn’t I? JH: What about education for women?
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JP: And education for women is very, very important. I think that—my mother—I was one of the very few girls in all of my schooling days that had a mother that had graduated from college. And that’s why I went to school with my mother after school with Sister Jensen because she saw that need for women [to have] the thirst for education. And so I think that that is very important. But one other thing that I think for young women, too: whether you are single, if you are living in an apartment, you still have to make a home, don’t you? You still have to cook. You have to clean. You have to do certain things to keep your living space fine and tidy and neat. And those things are fun. Cooking is so creative. Oh, my golly. And even if your mother didn’t teach you, you can still read a cookbook and have a lot of exciting times. [Janice’s oldest daughter], Angela, is not married, but she lived with me for a couple of years after Dean passed away and helped me write some of these family histories. We had so much fun together because Angela is a gourmet cook, and we’d go through the cookbooks, and she’d say, “Oh, let’s try this and this.” And so she still does that. Her children are all gourmet cooks now. All of those things are very creative to me. Besides creating babies, creating a home and a family and having lovely experiences with them [and] playing games with them [brings me the greatest joy]. We used to have a Family Night Fairy, and this was so funny because our kids got the idea of baking cookies.29 When a new family moved into the ward, we would go, and we’d time it and have somebody call them at the time and [have] the kids run and ring the doorbell and leave a plate of cookies there and say, “This is the Family Night Fairy. Welcome to the Oak Hills Fifth Ward. We hope that you have a nice time, and that you’re holding family home evenings.” Well, that led to some really funny experiences because George Esparza, Elder—was it Elder Dunn? JH: Paul Dunn. JP: Paul Dunn brought him to BYU to speak, and he had just gotten out of Walpole prison as a safe cracker and had—I think—was he a member of the Church at that time. He had just joined the Church? JH: Maybe. I’m not sure when. JP: Maybe. Anyway—but he came to BYU. And Janice always brought home some very interesting people. She was in Angel Flight, and she was an usher, and so she always brought these really wonderful, interesting people home for dinner. And so George came,
29. Jaynann is referring to family home evening; in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter- day Saints, member families set aside one evening a week, usually Monday, to spend time together.
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and he talked like a Boston crook, a mafia. He was in the mafia at one time. He was a safe cracker, and he’d spent eighteen months in Walpole prison. What got him interested in the Church was that he met a Mormon girl at his sister’s wedding, and she was so beautiful, and she wouldn’t give him the time of day. He had a big Porsche. I mean, he was wealthy and wanted to take her to this fancy restaurant, and she wouldn’t give him the time of day. Finally, he kept bugging her, and she said, “I will if you’ll let the missionaries come.” And so he did and expected old men with white beards, and these two young guys showed up, you know. And then they saw—you know, [that] he was a pretty tough guy— DA: Oh, the elders, yeah.30 JP: The elders did. So they took him to President Dunn, who then [was the president of the New England mission and they] took over [teaching] him. And so he came [to our home], and we asked him if he’d like to be the Family Night Fairy. So he would call up, and he’d say, “Dis is de Family Night Fairy.” And I remember John Cannon; he said, “Is you holdin’ family home evening?” And John said, “No, I have a cold.” And he said, “Ain’t you ever heard of Dristan, buddy? Now you get up outta dat bed, and you hold family home evening with your little kids.” I mean— [08:50] JH: And he’d say, “Go out and look on the doorstep ‘cause— JP: Yeah, “Go out and look on the door step— JH: —the Family Night Fairy’s left you something.” JP: —the Family Night Fairy left you something.” Anyway. Oh, that was so hilarious and funny because he had that accent and had so many neat stories to tell. [One Sunday after church, we were locked out of our house and didn’t have the key with us. George told us not to worry and asked one of the girls for a bobby pin and then proceeded to easily “break in” to the house.] Well, there was a couple of other things that I had you write down that I didn’t want to forget. JH: Did you want to tell about John Harmer and the Lighted Candle Society? Or do you feel like you kind of covered that? JP: Well, I guess so. Anyway—
30. Elders is a common term used to refer to young male LDS missionaries.
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JH: Anything that helped you in particular to cope with the loss of Dad passing away and Susie and little Camille— JP: Yes— JH: —your two-year-old granddaughter? JP: It got harder and harder, in a way, because Daddy was ill. We had served two missions together. He had served one—three, actually, with his first mission. And he’d had—he’d been stake mission president and a bishop and branch president and had all these wonderful callings in the Church and always had been so active. And I give him credit that all of our kids were active in the Church because he had a wonderful testimony, and he personally—we didn’t hold family home evening every time. A lot of times, I’d prepare the lesson, but our most significant family home evenings were ones he thought up by himself. One was on the Plan of Salvation where we went from the kitchen—he’d demonstrated it. We went from the kitchen, which was the pre-earth life, then we went down to earth life, which was in the dining—or the family room, and then we went— after we died, we went out in the hall. But then Dean slipped around into our new living room that had closed doors, and he put on his white temple—not his temple robes—but his white shirt and his white tie and his white pants. And then I welcomed each child to go home to Heavenly Father—to go home to their earthly father and to their Heavenly Father. And he had it all programmed out, and it was so touching and beautiful to actually physically recreate that. We talked about what happened. We read scriptures in each of the areas on the Plan of Salvation, and then we went up into the new living room, just one at a time, and nobody knew what was up there until they got in there. And then Dean embraced them in his arms and told them, “Welcome home.” It was just really touching. I get teary[-eyed] thinking about it. And another one, then, that he did that was so much fun was we walked all over Provo where we had lived, both of us—he as a student at the Pinegar’s place. He’d cleaned wallpaper. He’d done all kinds of things to help himself through school. And then I had lived there on Fifth North and Second East. So we walked all over the campus of where we had first met there on the bridge, and when he said, “When I saw your mother I just about fell in the water,” you know. And the kids thought that was so romantic. He’d tip me back and gave me a kiss. And, oh, the kids giggled and laughed, and it was really funny. And then we ended up going around and sliding down those railings going down to the Seventh North—or Eighth North there, and then we went over to Bishop Sowards’s store. He was my bishop—he was a bishop for thirty years, and he was my bishop. He had just foiled a robbery attempt in his store. Now get this: he was ninety-seven years old when this happened, and his picture hit the front page of the Daily Herald because this kid
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came in with a gun and wanted to rob him. Bishop Sowards came around, and he said— and kicked the gun out of the kid’s hand, I guess, and said, “You get the hell out of here.” And that was a quote and that was [from] our former bishop. He said, “You dumb idiot,” or something like that, and the kid got scared and ran away. So he called the police, and his picture was on the front page: “Ninety-seven-year-old store keeper foils a robbery attempt.” But the funny thing is, when he recreated that for our children at this family home evening night, it was so exciting for the kids because he told all about it, how he’d done it, and then he gave them all a creamsicle, which was a wonderful ending for the night. [It was fun] walking around [our old] neighborhood where we used to live and sort of recreating memories. He was a wonderful dad. There is one other quote that I love from Phyllis McGinley if I can remember it: “God must love housewives as he does the poor, he made so many of us. But it is our privilege”—let’s see—okay.31 [14:15] JH: I wish I had it here. JP: Okay. [“We crave light and warmth in this century. Only the mother, the wife, can supply it for the home. To be a housewife is not easy. Ours is a difficult, a wrenching, sometimes an ungrateful job if it is looked on only as a job. Regarded as a profession, it is the noblest as it is the most ancient of the catalog. Let none persuade us differently or the world is lost indeed” (p. 259 in Sixpence in Her Shoe). She also said, and] I’ve amended [it some, the] light of the gospel of Jesus Christ and the warmth of his love— “and on us as housewives rests the responsibility to see that the pot boils, that the babies remain healthy, and that there is a light shining in the window after dark.” She wrote a beautiful book called Sixpence in Her Shoe, and that’s been one of my favorite books because she talks about manners [and] morals—and she had a lot of good recipes in the back, too—but she talked about so many things that are really important as homemakers and housewives. She won the Pulitzer Prize for her books on poetry, and like Erma Bombeck, she was one of my heroes. Phyllis McGinley and Erma Bombeck, and they’re both gone now. But— MW: And Phyllis was a Utah women poet, isn’t that correct? JP: Yes. [No, I believe she was a woman from Boston and not Utah.] MW: We have her on the Women’s Walk, too, so you’re in good company.
31. Jaynann is quoting from a newspaper article published in The Milwaukee Sentinel on February 22, 1965. It’s titled “Keep the Hearth, Warm the Heart.” It was later compiled in McGinley’s book of essays Sixpence in her Shoe.
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JP: Who? MW: We have her as a nominee in the Women’s Walk also because we honor women who are also deceased, not just those who are living. JP: So Erma Bombeck? MW: Not Erma Bombeck but Phyllis McGinley. JP: Oh, Phyllis McGinley. So you know her? MW: I don’t know her, but we are researching about her life. JP: Oh, she is amazing. Sixpence in Her Shoe. And then I have her book of poetry, and they are so delightful. She talks about what husbands do: they slaughter spiders and, you know, all of these cute things. But they’re on the importance of family values on marriage and the importance of family values. She’s one of my heroes, too. [16:32] JH: Do you want to talk about some of your writings just briefly? JP: Oh, I guess I better mention that. JH: The one book in particular. JP: I started out to write a book with Gracia Jones. Our paths crossed when I was invited [by Buddy Youngreen] to go back to the first family reunion of Joseph Smith [Sr.] and Lucy Mack Smith in Nauvoo in 1972. There I met Gracia Jones, and we have been kindred spirits ever since. But just before we were called on our mission, she and I started to write a book called Women at the Crossroads, and it had a lot of different subjects. She’s a marvelous writer, and so I put in my two bits worth. But we were talking about adversity, about divorce, about health issues, a whole bunch of different things. We took it up—it was five hundred pages—we took it up to Corey Maxwell— JH: Corey Maxwell, yeah. JP: Maxwell—I— JH: It’s—Maxwell. JP: Maxwell. I got it right in the first place. Okay. Anyway, Corey Maxwell—and he said, “It’s really neat. It’s five hundred pages, [but it’s way] too long.” [He said], “Edit it down. It’s got some good ideas.” So then we were called on our mission, and she got called to do gathering in the descendants of the Prophet Joseph Smith with Mike and Darcy Kennedy. And then she wrote on Joseph and Emma and got writing her books on Emma, and that was more important, that was her thing.
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Well, I had written some articles—I think I mentioned this before—Lucy Mack Smith, Eliza R. Snow, for the [Ensign. They] were published in the Ensign, and I think that’s why I was called and asked to go do Lucy Mack Smith back at the reunion. But that has been a wonderful chapter in our lives because so many things have happened where our paths have crossed. And in 1972, Buddy [Youngreen] brought Mike and Darcy Kennedy up to meet us at Christmas time, and they were going to Ricks College at the time. They were going to get married in May—May 4, and I think it was 1974—and they asked if we would go to the temple with them and if we would arrange for their temple sealing in the Provo temple. Well, I knew President Harold Glen Clark and Dean did, too, and so he called to see if they could arrange for their marriage. The interesting thing was he was the first male [descendant of the Prophet Joseph Smith] to hold the priesthood and to be sealed in the temple. And so this was really exciting for the Church. He has a long story. If you ever want to read it, I’ve got it written down. So, our paths have crossed. They drove down from Ricks that morning, or the night before, and Darcy was going to stay with her parents, who had driven over from Tonopah, Nevada, and his parents were coming over in an Airstream trailer with a truck. Well, he was going to stay with us and sleep that night, and they were going to park their trailer in front of our house and sleep there. Well, he went to bed, and we got a call about 1:00 AM, and it was a nurse. It was at 1:00 because the accident happened at 11:00 PM. There had been an accident just outside of Delta, [UT]. And the nurse was at the Delta hospital, and she said, “Is a Mike Kennedy there?” And we said, “Yes.” And she said, “His mother and little brother have been injured in an automobile accident.” And so we said, “Oh, Mike what do you want to do? Do you need to go down and be with them?” And he said, “No, I’m supposed to go to the temple and be married [in the morning].” And he talked to the nurse a little bit, and they were not serious. It wasn’t life threatening. And as we went back up the stairs to go back to bed, I had the most dark, dark feeling. I asked Dean, I said, “Will you talk to the nurse? Did she say what happened to the father?” He said, “Oh, I’m sure the father is there taking care of the mother—of his mother and brother.” I still couldn’t go to sleep. Well, at three in the morning, Dean answered the phone, and it was the highway patrolman, and [Mike’s] father had been killed in that accident. And so we got Mike up again [and] got him on the phone. It was very interesting because he didn’t start crying or screaming or, you know, being out of control in any way. He just stood and stared for a little while. And then he said, “I knew I wouldn’t see my father alive again because on the way down from Ricks I kept hearing a voice saying, ‘You will not see your father alive again.’ And three times it said that.” And Darcy said he was awfully quiet, and she wondered why he was so quiet on the way down. And he said, “I think that this is the only way my father would be with us in the temple when we’re sealed,” because his father was not a member of the Church, nor his brothers, nor his mother or little brother. So that was really strange. And I said,
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“Well, don’t you want to go down and be with your mother?” And he said, “No, I’m supposed to get married. We’ll go down after.” So we couldn’t go to sleep. We got up and showered and got ready to go to the temple. We had to be there early like at 7:00 AM; Darcy came with her parents, and when she found out that Alan had been killed, Alan Kennedy, she was really sad. She said, “Well, Mike, what do you want to do?” And he said, “We’re supposed to go and be married. That’s something I know.” He said, “My dad is where he is supposed to be right now, and my mother and little brother are okay.” He said, “As soon as we get through with the wedding”—and we’d fixed lunch for them and had a bite of lunch, they would go down to Delta at the hospital. So that’s what they did. And when President Harold Glen Clark married them, he said—and when he found out that Alan Kennedy had been killed, he said, “I feel the presence of your father and of the Prophet Joseph Smith in this sealing room and want you to know that things are going to be okay.” Anyway, it was so beautiful and so touching that he felt that their presence was there in the sealing room in the Provo temple. So afterward, we went down later to Delta that next morning, and Dean was an attorney and helped them with the [details of collecting insurance for wrongful death. In] this big sheep trailer, the guy had fallen asleep and crashed into them. They were parked on the side of the road because they’d run out of gas, and they were filling their truck with the gas from a gasoline can. And they were parked off the road, just their left wheel was barely on the road. But this sheep trailer came across, and the driver had fallen asleep, and he just hit them to kill one man. The policeman that had investigated said it looked like the planned execution of just one man because if it had gone further it would have killed all three of them. If it had gone a little bit further this way it would have just probably side swiped them and not killed him. But it killed [him] and drove the [steering wheel] up into his chest, and he was killed instantly. And then Mike has come to our family [gatherings like] our Joseph Smith birthday party. He told us, “I know and I have been given to know in the most certain way that my father had to die at that time so he could open the work for the rest of the prophet’s descendants.” And that’s what they have been doing—what Mike and Darcy have been doing and Gracia and Ivar because she’s a descendent through Alexander Hale Smith. He is also a descendent through Alexander Hale Smith, [but] from different mothers [25:55] MW: Did you and—did you and Gracia, finish the book? We started talking about that book. JP: Oh, I’m sorry, yeah. MW: Is this it?
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JP: Yes. MW: This one? JP: Yes, Okay. Well, Gracia and I, like I said, were writing the book, and we had a chapter. I have a very dear friend whose son took his life. Jane Ann Olsen is her name. She just passed away. I feel so sad. But we had several of my really close friends—in fact, when I got around to it, there were about eight or nine of them whose child or father or daughter or son had taken their lives. And so Gracia was being published—her book was being published by Covenant Books, and we had this chapter on adversity and on suicide. She asked them if they’d be interested in publishing a book on suicide, and so they said yes. She said, “Jaynann, this is your baby. You go for it.” So I was down in Arizona for two winters for a few months, and I wrote it down. I’d interviewed all of these women and written down things that they’d said, and men also. Anyway, I got back, and I presented it to Covenant Books, and they said they liked it. But the marketing director said it would never sell, so it sat there for a year. We had the—it was called Hidden Treasures out of Ogden, and Dr. Rick Hawks [was the director. He] heard that I’d written this book on suicide, so he came down, and we talked it over. And he said, yes, they’d be interested in publishing it. Elder Marion D. Hanks was on their board. It’s now changed to the National—what is the name of it? JH: Let me see. I can’t see it from here, either. JP: They changed their name from Hidden Treasures— JH: Foundation to the Mental Institute— [27:50] JP: Foundation for Mental Health Institute or something. JH: Mental Health Library. JP: Anyway, so it finally got published, and we have used it. [The title of the book is Where is our Hope for Peace? A Resource for Families Coping With Suicide.] Here in Provo City, Greg [Hudnall] has been in charge of suicide watch in all the schools, and so they asked me to be a member of their program here in the schools. I was until just two years ago, and I couldn’t drive anymore so I couldn’t. But we’ve used this book and given it out. It’s—they sold it in the bookstores for like $10.95 or something like that, and it was okay. It really wasn’t a marketing success. But we have used it for the national conferences that they’ve had on hope. They have a gatekeepers program where they target kids in the schools that people— young kids that are at risk would talk to, and they’re called peer gatekeepers. They help
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kids, and they target kids in the school. And it’s cut down the suicide rate in the schools immeasurably. Then they have a national conference, usually at BYU each year in the fall, and I usually take a couple of boxes of [my books] and we just make them available. If they want to send in a ten-dollar donation, we have a little slip so that they can be published again. But if you asked me if I ever thought I’d write a book on [suicide, I would have said no. I] have had close friends that I’ve lived through this with them, and I have been impressed because the theme of this book is the Atonement of our Savior. And we were—Elder Boyd K. Packer allowed us to print from his Bright Morning of Peace—yeah, Bright Morning of [Forgiveness] a statement that he made [in the Ensign]. And also Elder Holland’s [friend, who was a] bishop in Bountiful, is in a neighboring ward of yours, right? JH: Uh-huh. JP: He took his life and [Elder Holland] spoke at his funeral, and he had some beautiful things to say about it that bring a lot of comfort to people who have suffered this tragedy in their lives. And so he allowed us to print his ideas [from his funeral sermon]. Then I think the most marvelous thing of all is what the people learn from it, what they learned that has brought them so much peace and [hope, and] it is truly the Savior’s Atonement. But, anyway—so be that as it may, that was the book. And then I did [a little book called] Beauty for Keeps when I was in the Mrs. America pageant. They printed that at BYU. And then I did four Education Weeks in Canada, [and my resulting book: To Fulfill Her Promise, contains the interviews I conducted with] a lot of my friends of how they raised successful families or what were some of their problems in raising their families. [30:50] DA: Jaynann, I just don’t know how you found the time— JP: I don’t either. [laughter] DA: —to do all of this. Do you ever sleep? Do you sleep—you must not sleep very much. JP: I don’t, I don’t— JH: We think she’s like President Kimball. She sleeps about four hours a night—four or five hours a night. JP: Asleep, you mean? You know, that’s been a blessing in my life. It really has because I’ve had good health. When I was a teenager, I was short and had heavy legs, but they could ski, and they could ice skate. I’ve been grateful for that because they carried twelve babies, and as I look back now, I said Heavenly Father knew what was better for me than
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thinking that I should be like Julia Roberts with long legs. But I have been blessed to be healthy. DA: But you don’t use— JP: My mother was always interested [in eating a healthy diet]. When our kids were little, [we ate] Clinton’s Whole Wheat Stoneground—whole wheat bread, and my mother brought me some, and Dean just went bonkers over it. He loved it. My kids used to say, The whiter the bread, the sooner you’re dead. They’d go around saying little funny things. When they came home from school—oh, it was Evie. But you kids said, When two vowels go a-walking, the first one usually does the talking, i before e except after c” and then Evie would pipe up, “The whiter the bread, the sooner you’re dead.” But my mother was quite interested in nutrition because when I was three, I had hepatitis and almost died. My grandmother had been on a mission in the Samoan Islands and had contracted malaria [there. Years later], as they were living in California, [she had a recurrence of malaria]. They had a sanitarium there [in California. It was] not a TB sanitarium. It was a health [sanitarium run by] Dr. Gaylord [Hauser], one of the very first health food pioneers in the United States. [He recommended] whole wheat bread, vegetables, [and] not a lot of meat. He was a health food pioneer. And so when I was really sick, Mother wrote to Grandma or called her and said, “Would you ask Dr. Hauser what to do for Jaynann? She’s bright orange; her liver is failing,” And she asked him— Grandma asked him, and he said to give her dandelion juice and cod liver oil. That’s what Mother did, and it healed me and got me better. And so then when I, as a teenager, had some health problems, I started reading Gaylord [Hauser’s] book. I became interested in it, and my mother was interested in it, and so we always had fresh fruits and vegetables. JH: And we ground our wheat— JP: We ground our wheat. JH: —and baked our bread. JP: Made homemade bread. JH: You had milk with the cream on it, and we churned the butter. JP: We went down to Fisher’s farm and had organic potatoes and carrot juice and apple juice— JH: Yeah, freshly squeezed apple juice.
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JP: —freshly squeezed. And so we raised our children on health things before they became really proven [today]. Those things are a [part of the Word of Wisdom.32 And] there are certain foods that are “super foods” like avocados and— JH: Salads. [34:29] JP: Yeah. But—so I’m grateful that I was physically active carrying all those kids around and playing with them and taking them swimming and ice skating and things like that. I was able to get by on about six—five or six hours of sleep a night. But I slept well, I did, which is something I can’t do very well now. But one of my other big challenges is just being sick recently, and I make it—and I’m still trying to get my health back, so I’m on the mend for that. JH: So is there anything that you would like to accomplish in the future? JP: Yes, I would. JH: Tell everyone what you are working on. JP: [I want to] finish these family histories. [It is entitled: Footsteps of Faith: Roberts Morgan and Payne Family History Book.] They are so exciting of my grandparents’ mission in Samoa and my aunt Kate and uncle Grant and Dean’s family. I want to finish these. I’ve got a lot of them written, especially this one on my side of the family with my brother. [You see, there are] only two of us. My little brief history of twenty pages and Alan’s of twenty-five pages. And then I’m afraid that our Dean and Jaynann Payne family history with all twelve kids writing their own little bio and putting in pictures of their family is probably going to be ten thousand pages. I don’t know how much it’s going to be, but I have a lot of that written, too, because I have our mission experiences written in that. And John Murphy at BYU’s Special Collections, called me on the phone. I didn’t know who he was. He said, “Were you a delegate to the IWY conference?” And I said, “Yes.” And he said, “Do you have anything left from that conference?” Well, as a matter of fact, I had about thirteen bankers boxes full of stuff that I had collected in my filing cabinets— I have six or seven filing cabinets—and I was secretary to the delegation, so I had kept minutes and notes and everything. I said, “I was just ready to toss them all in the garbage.” And he said, “No, no, no!” He came up and got all thirteen boxes and
32. The Word of Wisdom is considered the Lord’s law of health by members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Members of the LDS Church are counseled to avoid alcohol, tea and coffee, drugs, and tobacco.
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catalogued them all and because he said, “You lost the battle, but that was a very interesting part of history.” The Relief Society, [President] Barbara Smith, called out the troops for that conference. We had fourteen thousand women. The women of Utah became educated, not just Mormon women, but we interfaced with a lot of different people, Catholics and other women that were interested in the family and preserving the family and family values. [I was an elected delegate to the IWY Conference in Houston.] So anyway, that’s how I got started. Then [John Murphy] wanted information on not only that but on all these other things, and so I promised him that I would write up about our mission because that was really important. They, I think, wanted a copy of that up at the public affairs office in Salt Lake. I don’t know. I don’t want to be in the limelight. And I just—it’s embarrassing for me, like I said, but you’ve primed the pump, and I can go on forever. But I do want to pay tribute to my kids for their support. It’s been a team effort; it really has. You know, I couldn’t have done the speaking that I did or go on Education Weeks [without Dean’s and the children’s support]. Some of our older kids were wonderful: [Evie] and you, [Janice, were] taking care of the kids while we would be gone for maybe a week or so. And if I were gone sometimes, I took the kids with me. I took Julie and Tom with me to Washington and Idaho one time, and I took Wid with me back East. I was able to take the children a lot of times on these trips with us, and that was a wonderful experience, too, as they got educated. One other thing that we did that I’d like to mention, and that is, our kids remember the, quote, “hysterical pilgrimages” that we made. What we did one year, we decided when Susan, John and Janice and Evelyn—Susie was twelve, John was eleven, Janice was ten. [39:00] JH: I was nine and a half, uh-huh. JP: Nine and a half, and Evelyn was eight. We decided to take a trip back East to recreate what my parents had done for me when they had taken me, when I was a young girl. So we got out a big map of the United States, and we told the children to look [at which] places we’d like to go. They all wanted to go to Carlsbad Caverns. Okay, well, we’ll start, and we’ll head down there. And then they wanted to go to San Antonio and the Alamo and San Jacinto Inn and across to New Orleans and all up through the South and Williamsburg and Jamestown and on up. And then we gave the kids the chance to choose a place that they would like to write to the chambers of commerce and get information about a city. When we got there, they would be the guide to that city, whether it was Chattanooga, whether it was Atlanta, whether it was Jamestown. And so the kids wrote to all these chambers of commerce, and all winter long they kept getting packets of stuff. And so we said, Now, when we get
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there, you tell us the things that we’re supposed to see. Do you remember your cities that you had? JH: I think I did Gettysburg— JP: You did Gettysburg, yeah. JH: —because that was really impressionable to me. JP: Anyway, so the kids wrote these things down, and when we got there, we asked them what we were supposed to see. And we went in a little Edsel Ford, six of us with no seat belts. And did we have fun! I was surprised: the kids didn’t fight until just about half a day before we got home when we came across Kansas, and it was sort of boring. Well, they didn’t really fight, but, you know, got tired. But we had so many wonderful adventures living history on the spot and Church history on the spot, and the kids have always called it “hysterical pilgrimages.” But we [retraced our steps, and then when we went to Washington, didn’t we take you to the Air and Space Museum and the National Art Gallery? JH: Um-hm, um-hm. JP: And our aunt Ruth was a docent in the National Art Gallery. And we went up to Boston and went out on Cape Cod and had lobster dinners and all of those wonderful things. And then we couldn’t do that again for a few years, and finally we rented a camper, and we took eight of the kids back to retrace those steps. Then the children—I think the twins didn’t get to go until Dean and I took the twins back, later on. I had an assignment or something in Washington. And so we took the twins back with us and did it. But all twelve of our children have been on that special “hysterical [pilgrimage].” JH: And it has really awakened a love for history and a love for— JP: Our government. JH: —our country and a love for learning and culture. [42:01] JP: And Daddy was a walking encyclopedia. He loved everything, especially geology. Wherever we went, [he would say]: “Oh, that’s the Mesozoic age or that’s the Cenozoic age,” especially down in southern Utah. [And history], he loved history, and he had so many stories of both of our ancestral history. Remember Enos Curtis? JH: Uh-huh.
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JP: He loved to tell stories about Enos Curtis, one of our ancestors. And then he knew a lot about John Adams and Ben Franklin and some of our presidents, and it just—living history on the spot is so wonderful. When you’re there it’s like going to Israel and going to the Garden of Gethsemane or going to the Garden Tomb. You can have that experience without actually being there, but being there really, you know, has a special spirit for you. So I’ve enjoyed the fact that my husband loved to travel and loved to take the kids. And the nice thing about Dean was he wouldn’t eat at McDonald’s or a greasy hamburger joint. We had to go to a pretty nice restaurant, not expensive, but our kids learned manners and how to eat in a restaurant [politely]. We’d have one nice meal a day in a restaurant, and then we’d buy snacks along the road. And sometimes if we— MW: Keep going. One is—one, the card was full and this—but it’s—mine is still going, so you’re fine. JP: Oh, my golly. I just wish it wouldn’t be videotaped because I had tears and everything. DA: That’s good. It’s great. JP: Anyway, hopefully you’ll edit out those things. MW: Well, we’ll get it all transcribed for you. JH: Did you want to share that final— JP: Yeah, what was that? JH: Well, you kind of—you did sort of— JP: Why don’t you read it for me? JH: —paraphrase it. JP: No, you read it for me. You have a lovely voice. [44:10] JH: “Marriage between a man and a woman is an institution ordained by God. To multiply and replenish the earth, to love and raise an honorable family is the highest and happiest work a man and woman can accomplish in life. We are blessed by the service we give to one another in our families, even in menial ways, for such service is sacred to love, and nothing is menial where there is love. It is my glory as a woman to be heaven’s gateway and heaven’s cradle and to prepare those precious children which God has entrusted to my care to go forth and make the world a better place by honoring their commitment to the family.”
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JP: Okay. MW: That’s beautiful, beautiful. Jaynann, let me ask you one last question, if I can. We like to ask the question, What would you like to be remembered for? You’ve told us a long list of amazing experiences you’ve had. Is there any one particular role or belief or thing that you’ve accomplished that you would like to be associated with you? You have a lot to choose from. JP: Did we talk about this, Jan? Did I mention something to you or not? JH: Well, let me see. I really kind of think it was—it was, um, your love of being a woman and being a mother. How wife and a mother— JP: I didn’t name my twelve children. Oh, I can’t stop without doing that, can I? Susan— should I—Susan Carol Payne. I’ll name them—and should I name your married name? It’s Susan Carol Payne Bitter. That was her first husband by which she had her children. And John [Rulon] Payne. Janice Ruth Payne Hymas. Evelyn Payne—Evelyn Rose Payne Naylor. Wilford James Payne. Edward Morgan Payne. Benjamin Ellsworth Payne. Nancy Gwen—now— JH: James. James. JP: —James. Thomas Roberts Payne. Julie Ann Payne Paz—P-a-z. Rachelle Payne Baum. And Rosalie Payne Lines. And they live all over the country; I mean, most of them are here in Utah. DA: How many grandchildren? JP: We have seventy-four grandchildren; another one in the oven due in September. [Number seventy-five is Nathaniel Owen Baum, Rachelle’s youngest.] We have—by the end of September, if all goes well, we will have seventy-five great-grandchildren. [By March 2014, we have eighty-one great-grandchildren with another three due around December 2014. The number changes faster than I can keep track.] And I am totally blown away. I’ve tried to send birthday cards to our grand—our children and their mates and our grandchildren. And thanks to Janice, she’s helping me so much now because she remembers—she’s, “Oh, we need to do two more birthdays for this month.” And I’ve appreciated her help so very much. I’ve had to give up [writing to] the great- grandchildren, but I am grateful because my grandparents, as I said, on both sides only had two grandchildren, myself and my brother. And I just look forward to a happy reunion when all is over, and hopefully we are welcomed home that I can present all of these beautiful children and grandchildren to my grandparents and my parents, too. They were only able to have two so—anyway, it’s my joy. And, you know, heaven’s gate and heaven’s cradle is interesting to me. It came from Moses 6 and 59 where we’re told that by transgression came the fall and death, and
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“Inasmuch as ye are born into the world of water, of blood, and the spirit, even so ye must be—which I have made—even so ye must be born again into heaven by water— baptized by water, by the conferral of the Holy Spirit and by the blood of mine Only Begotten.”33 And so I was thinking about that one day, and I thought, How is the only way a person can come to this earth life? It’s through the body of a mother. The water—they’re encased in their womb in water, and she sheds her blood as a symbol, a prefiguring of the sacrifice of our Savior’s Atonement, and then copartnering with our Heavenly Father, who sends the spirit of that child. And so mother is heaven’s gateway to this earth life and heaven’s cradle as she cradles that child within her body and then after that child is born. And then the father, through his priesthood, baptizes that child and confers upon him the Holy Ghost, and through the Atonement of our Savior that child is able to return back to his heavenly parents and his Heavenly Father. And that was so beautiful to me. And I think of Carol Lynn Pearson’s poems that I love. One of them, if I can remember, is called “Investment”: “I watched the rosewood bear her bud / and at that moment I wish the sweet myth were true / that I could pluck you, my child, from some green vine / but now that you breathe through flesh that was mine / gently in the small circle of my arms / I see the wisdom of investment / the easy gift is easy to forget / but what is bought with coin of pain is dearly kept.” And then another one that I love of hers that I quote to my new little granddaughters when they have a baby is “Day Old Child”: “My day old child lay in my arms, / With my lips against his ear. / I whispered strongly, ‘Oh, how I wish— / I wish that you could hear, / I’ve a hundred wonderful things to say’ / (a tiny cough and a nod) / [Hurry, hurry, hurry and grow/ So I can tell you about God]/ But my day-old baby’s mouth was still / And my words only tickled his ear, / But a kind of a light passed through his eye, / And I saw this thought appear: / ‘How I wish I had a voice and words, / I’ve a hundred things to say. / Before I forget, I’d tell you of God— / I left Him yesterday.” And I just love that. [Carolyn Pearson] was a good friend of mine, and I just—I’ve loved her poems and Beginnings, and I guess she was a mentor to me.34 At least, she was a good friend and
33. Jaynann is quoting from Moses 6:59, which is a verse found in the Pearl of Great Price. It reads, “That by reason of transgression cometh the fall, which fall bringeth death, and inasmuch as ye were born into the world by water, and blood, and the spirit, which I have made, and so became of dust a living soul, even so ye must be born again into the kingdom of heaven, of water, and of the Spirit, and be cleansed by blood, even the blood of mine Only Begotten; that ye might be sanctified from all sin, and enjoy the words of eternal life in this world, and eternal life in the world to come, even immortal glory.” The Pearl of Great Price is part of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint’s scriptural canon.
34. Jaynann is referring to Carol Lynn Pearson’s book of poetry Beginnings and Beyond.
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very, very capable, a very lovely poet. So—well, I think we’ve babbled on for a long, long time. I don’t know if there’s anything valuable you can use there but— [52:23] MW: Oh, my word. I would say so. That was a beautiful interview. You’re a remarkable woman. I feel very honored to have the time that we’ve had with you. Thank you so very much. JP: Well, I’m honored that you would even consider me. You know, it’s just that I’ve lived so long. You collect a few little skeletons in the closet along the way, I guess. I don’t know. JH: Oh, Mom, you have a great memory. I can’t remember poems like that or people’s names or experiences like that. DA: Thank you so much for sharing today. It was really impactful to me. I was so touched by it. JH: Well, thank you for giving us this opportunity. JP: Yeah. JH: I’m grateful if I can get a copy of this to share with my family because I just think this is priceless. DA: Yeah, you’ve had so many incredible experiences. JH: Yeah. JP: My twins were my most incredible experience as far as birth is concerned because I didn’t know I was going to have twins until just the month before they were born. DA: Oh, my. JH: They didn’t do ultrasounds then. JP: They didn’t do ultrasounds, but I was so huge, and I was so sick 24/7. And, anyway, it was—but it was a miracle ‘cause it was the first time my husband got to be together—or to be there with the twins—when the twins were born. [53.51] [54:50] MW: Thank you so much.
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JP: Thank you so much. MW: And we need to get some of the pictures and things that you brought. This is so remarkable. But because we have access to Jan, then we’ll get what we need when we’re ready for it. JP: Okay, okay. MW: And then we’ll get you a copy of the transcript so you can read through it. JP: Okay. We forgot a couple of really important things, and that was our trip to Wales. MW: Then you can add that in. You can just put that in. JP: We did. Ron Dennis, a professor of Welsh and Portuguese at BYU, asked us—or asked me to go to Wales with him on a tour and do the pioneer women [that] left Wales to come to Zion. MW: I was reading about that. JP: It was called The Call to Zion. And we had fifteen of our family that went. My dad helped to pay for some of it, and we had costumes made, and we did fifteen or twenty performances. And Jan got to be in some of them and also in Patriots in Petticoats. JH: We went to Washington. MW: That was so fun, and I was reading all about that. This is just amazing information. [56:07] [56:32] MW: But we’ll stay in good touch with you. And I’m— JP: I was so scared this morning. I thought— MW: Oh, dear. Don’t be scared. JP: I thought— JH: You can go home and get a good night’s rest, huh, Mom? MW: You’ll be exhausted. JP: I couldn’t remember anything. JH: You remembered everything. I’m amazed.
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MW: You are very amazing. So did you know Ardeth Kapp? JP: Yes, not well, but we were on Education Weeks [together, but] she was the big star. MW: Well, you’re the same age. You’re the very same age. She’s eighty-two also. We’ve interviewed her. JP: Oh, I’m eighty-four. MW: Are you eighty-four? Oh, my heavens. Oh, my goodness. What a—what a mind. JP: You know, I’m thirty-nine plus forty-five years experience. Doesn’t that make me eighty- four? My kids want to ask and don’t tell me that. Anyway— JH: My daughter’s still asking me, “How come you’re still twenty-nine and I’m past that?” I say, “Well, that’s a mother’s privilege.” MW: How old are your kids, Jan. You have six? JH: I have— JP: She has ten. JH: I have ten. [57:26] [58:35] End of interview The following portion was added by Jaynann at a later date:
In thinking about my life and the amazing experiences I’ve had, for me it was a road of high adventure and now I see how the hand of the Lord was present in nearly all of those experiences. From my experience in the Mrs. America Pageant, which led to my being asked to teach Education Weeks for BYU. A friend entered my name in Mrs. Utah and the Mrs. America Pageant. I had ten children at the time and was a dowdy little housewife. I told her, “Bernetta, you are crazy. No one in their right mind would choose a woman with ten children.” But, on April 1, I woke up as Mrs. Utah and went on to become second runner–up to Mrs. America. This led to many speaking engagements and to be asked to teach many Education Weeks classes at BYU. I travelled all over the country teaching classes on the home, the family and “Queens of Faith,” “Patriots in Petticoats” as well as many youth classes.
Then in the early 1970s, the political scene changed and the battle for ERA, abortion, and gay- rights erupted. The International Women’s Conference (IWY) was scheduled for November 22,
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1977. I had met Phyllis Schlafley previously and had become educated on these issues. In the Utah IWY Conference held in June of that year, I was one of the fourteen delegates elected to attend the big conference in Houston in November. We delegates met each month in Salt Lake City to educate ourselves on the twenty-six resolutions to be presented that November. Belle Spafford, Elaine Cannon, Georgia Peterson, and Ruth Funk were some of the other delegates with me. This experience led to my being invited to be a board member of Utah Association of Women where I was publications editor. We published many papers on political issues of the day. I helped organize several national conferences for UAW.
Then in 1979, Dr. Cleon Skousen asked me to become the National Director for the Center for Family Studies for the Freemen Institute, a political conservative organization instituted for publicizing and preserving constitutional values. I went to the White House several times to interview President Reagan’s public liaison, Faith Wittlesey, and a number of other VIP women. I also attended national conferences for Right to Life and White House conferences and the State Whitehouse Conference on Family. I also reviewed the applications for grants for the department of education on issues concerning teenage pregnancy and family values. I interviewed many women, including Phyllis Schlafley, and wrote their biographies for the Freemen Digest. At the State Whitehouse Conference on Families, I was assigned to speak on teenage pregnancy and abstinence as the preferred preventative. I presented statistics and studies showing the risks physically, mentally, and emotionally for young women who engage in premarital sexual activity. As I was concluding, a University of Utah student stood up and shouted at me, “You’ve got your nerve trying to foist your religion on everyone and trying to brainwash teenagers.” I replied, “I haven’t said anything about religion; you don’t know what religion I belong to, if any. I’m talking about the physical and mental well-being of young women and their future educational opportunities. Young women who are sexually active and become pregnant out-of-wedlock close the door on so many opportunities for a happy future.” The crowd clapped in approval.
In 1980, Ron Madsen, who was state director for Senator Orrin G. Hatch, called me and asked if I would take over the Provo office and be the director of the Central and South Eastern Utah office. It was a very exciting and glamorous job, meeting with mayors, commissioners, and thirteen counties in Utah and addressing the needs of the senator’s constituents. I flew all over Utah and interfaced with government officials. One of the problems that really impacted me was helping people during the Wilberg Mine Disaster and Thistle Slide. It was very rewarding as I was able to help real people with real problems.
Due to my blepharospasm, I had to resign, but it was providential because I was able to take care of my mother and dad before they passed away. My mother died in 1987, and my father died in 1994. In 1995, we were then called on a public affairs mission to the Philippines where we worked with President Fidel Ramos and many government and local officials. We instituted National Family Week, and organized fifty-two stakes with public affairs councils to publicize the Church. We were able to build bridges of friendship and understanding within their
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communities. The Filipino people caught the vision of the missionary work and as a result, membership in the Church rose from 450,000 to 600,000. We were able to establish a credible media presence in the Philippines. I wrote eighty-two columns in the Manila Chronicle called “Family Lifelines” for the Sunday paper. We had a three-hour Sunday night radio show on KLove, a Christian radio station for thirty-five weeks. In 1996, I received the Golden Pearl Award from the ad council as the best newspaper columnist of the year out of eighteen other nominees.
Of the many experiences I’ve had, the most rewarding and joyful were the glorious experience of childbirth, reading fun stories to my children, studying the scriptures, scrubbing cucumbers on the back lawn and having water fights with my children. Seeing my children grow to adulthood and having babies of their own is to me what C.S. Lewis calls, “Joy is the serious business of heaven.” Looking back, I can see the Lord’s “divine signature” on the pages of my life. I’m always touched by the Lord’s “amazing grace.” I am grateful to Heavenly Father and His Divine Son for their supernal love and blessings.
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