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 Anne Leavitt by Michele Welch March 15, 2011
Utah Women’s Walk
TRANSCRIPTION COVER SHEET
Interviewee: Anne Okerlund Leavitt
Interviewer: Michele Welch
Place of Interview: George Sutherland Archives, UVU, Orem, Utah
Date of Interview: 15 March 2011
Recordist: Brent Seavers
Recording Equipment: Zoom Recorder H4n
Panasonic HD Video Camera AG-HM C709
Transcription Equipment: Express Scribe
Transcribed by: Allison Rowe Hatch
Audio Transcription Edit: Lisa McMullin
Reference: AL = Anne Leavitt (Interviewee) MW = Michele Welch (Interviewer) DJ = Doris Okerlund Judd (Anne’s sister) KW = Kimberly Williamson (Student)
Brief Description of Contents:
Anne Leavitt discusses her early years growing up on a farm, attending Branch Agricultural College (now Southern Utah University), and marrying Dixie Leavitt. As the mother of six boys, Anne explains how she found time to help her husband in his political career; her husband, Dixie Leavitt, served on both the Utah State House of Representatives and Senate. She shares that her strongest strength as a mother is her deep love for her six sons—all of whom are successful businessmen and politicians. One of her sons, Michael Leavitt, served as Utah’s governor from 1993 to 2003. In addition to helping both her husband and her son in the political arena, Anne found time to travel to Houston as part of the Utah delegation to the International Women’s Year conference. Anne also mentions that she was asked to write the history of Southern Utah University, which she did in record time.
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. Clarifications and additional information are footnoted.
Audio Transcription
[02:20] Beginning of interview
MW: I just feel it an honor and a pleasure to be able to interview you, and you’ve lead a remarkable life. I enjoyed reading the little bit that you sent and hearing about you from others. So let’s start with your background information: where you were born, your parents, and that sort of thing.
AL: Oh, I’d love to do that. I was born in a town that not many people acknowledge or know where it is. It was Bicknell, Utah. I was born there because my parents lived in Loa, and there was a tiny little hospital with the one doctor in Bicknell. He was actually a very bright young local man who had gone away to school. And it was very good that he had such good skills because my birth was attended with some trauma; in the fact that I lived and that my mother lived was probably because of this young doctor. My father had just been home from his mission maybe a year or two, and Mother was out of college, and they met and married. My father was a stockman; he had grown up with sheep and with farming—had intended really to go somewhere else, but his father persuaded him that he needed him there with the sheep, and so they settled there. And so that’s where I grew up until I was seventeen. I went to high school there, and then left there and went to college in Cedar City.
MW: What year did your family settle in Bicknell?
AL: They settled in Loa.
MW: Oh, in Loa, okay.
AL: I was just born in Bicknell, but they settled in Loa. I think it would be 1931 that my parents were married. My father had grown up there. They made their home there right after they were married and that was 1931.
MW: What year were you born and what birth order were you?
AL: I was born in 1932, and I am the eldest in my family. I have three sisters and one brother. So there were five of us and I’m the eldest. Utah Women’s Walk: Anne 2 Leavitt
MW: What was life like growing up there?
AL: We had a happy childhood I think all of us. I think back on our childhood with a great deal of affection and warmth. It was the Great Depression, and so I’m sure my parents struggled mightily but we weren’t really aware of that. One thing I’ve always remembered about my parents is that they had the capacity to be happy and to help us be happy even though in retrospect I realize that they must have struggled a great deal just for the necessities of life, but my parents were very good at making things wonderful.
Our mother had a great zest for life. She sensed beauty, and she loved beautiful things: trees and flowers. She didn’t ever fail to share that beauty with us or to call our attention to it. Daddy had a sense of—even though I’m sure he was tired and weary sometimes from working on the farm and working with the animals, he would say, “If you dig some worms when I get finished we’ll go fishing.” So we’d go fishing after when he finished working. They made life good and looking back, it was probably a very meager existence, but at the time, we weren’t aware of the meagerness.
MW: What kind of chores or responsibilities did you have as the eldest child?
AL: Well, always to get the wood and the chips because my father was gone with the sheep a lot. He would chop a big pile of wood. He was very careful to leave us as prepared as he could. So he’d bring home always pinewood when he came in from the herd. Then he would have it chopped into a pile, and then our responsibility was to keep the wood and chips in and the coal because we heated our house and we cooked with a wood stove. And we’d heated the house with the fireplace and with a wood and coal stove. Those chores were really important.
It was important to us to save all the lambs and sometimes the ewes would not claim a lamb or a ewe would die. Always in the summers as soon as lambing was finished we had a pasture full of what we called dogie lambs, and we fed them with bottles of a mixture that we mixed up. I think it was just something we bought at the farm store that we mixed and fed these lambs. A real part of our childhood was raising lambs.
We always had a big garden; the rows were miles and miles long we thought. We could earn a nickel for a row, and so we were very diligent about that. Our gardens were an important part of our economy, and that was a chore.
Because I was the oldest child, I had responsibility to help with the younger ones. One of the things that’s memorable about our childhood is that there wasn’t much medical help there. You drove sixty miles in what we called over the mountain into Sevier County to a hospital. After our very bright young doctor was no more, then the only help we had was over in Sevier County, which was a long ways a way. We had a sister who became very ill. The sister next to me became very ill with first nefritis and then rheumatic fever, and there was no such thing as sulfa or penicillin or things that they treat those diseases with now. The treatment was to keep her in bed. So for a long, long period of time—and I Utah Women’s Walk: Anne 3 Leavitt
really can’t say how long; sometimes I think it was more than years, but it couldn’t have been that long—my mother was very much consumed with the care of this little sister— who by the way did live and grow up to be very beautiful and very gifted—but at the time, we were very much afraid for Jane’s life. At a very young age, I became quite responsible for my younger siblings. (laughter)
MW: So you cared—
AL: This is one of my younger siblings.
MW: So you cared for the others while your mother cared for Jane?
AL: For Jane. Yes. Of course, it wasn’t completely my responsibility, but especially the baby was just a tiny, and she was my youngest sister. So consequentially we formed a bond that was almost like a mother and daughter bond. And I notice as I become older that “baby sister” kind of becomes my mother in a sense. Those things go back a long way.
MW: Yeah.
AL: Those were hard times, but I remember them with—I do have some memory of the fear that we were going to lose our sister; we were very much afraid that Jane would die. That was not hidden. We were all worried about that and did lots of praying, and there were lots of blessings and people came. I remember the people of our town probably thought she wasn’t going to make it too.
MW: Hm.
AL: Those were hard times.
MW: How old were you at the time?
AL: I was seven or eight about during that time.
[09:54]
MW: Wow, so really young—
AL: Pretty young.
MW: —really young. So tell me the names of your siblings.
AL: All right, just younger than I was Jane and then Fawn and then Doris, and then we finally had a baby brother, and that was a great event when we had this baby brother. It was a community event—a celebration because finally my father who was an outdoorsman if there ever was one—finally, he had a son. So our brother was a great event for us.
Utah Women’s Walk: Anne 4 Leavitt
MW: Are there any other important childhood memories that you think really impacted your life?
AL: Yes, I do. I guess I would have to say that—this is a personal memory. Are we talking about personal things?
MW: Yes, definitely.
AL: All right, my mother, because I was the first child and my mother thought I was brilliant and as soon as I could talk or anything, she taught me to read. When I went to school, I was sort of an aberration or enigma and nobody knew what to do. We didn’t have kindergarten in those days, so when I went to school and I could already read, no one knew what to do with me. The consideration was should I then skip a grade from first to third grade. My parents debated it a long time. I was really happy in first grade, but I thought it would be wonderful to go all the way to third grade from first grade. You have to understand that this was a one-room school. The classes were first grade in this row, second grade in this row, third grade in this row. So we were all together in this big room. I could move from this row over to this row instead of being caught in the middle. So I thought it was a great idea. My parents debated it and wisely so, but in the end, we decided that I should skip a grade. And so I did; I skipped from the first to the third grade and became instantly isolated because the children whose age I shared didn’t want anything to do with a girl who thought she was smarter than they were, and the third graders certainly didn’t like a little second grader who believed she was as smart as the third graders. The world fell in on me because I was very much didn’t belong anywhere.
So that did impact my life greatly in a lot of ways. I learned things that I wouldn’t have learned had I not had that happen to me. I learned a lot about childhood cruelty, and I learned a lot about what it feels like to be the object of cruelty. I’ve always thought that it had a real effect on me. I learned things that were valuable to me.
MW: How did you cope? How did it work out?
AL: It lasted until when we went to another town in the eighth grade, and then there were students from everywhere all over the other towns in the area. Then I had lots of friends, and it was better. My coping mechanisms weren’t very—my skills weren’t very good. I remember I did some things that I hoped would make me popular that didn’t. For example, I remember—you know I think these are some of the things I might want to delete. (laughs)
MW: That’s okay, we can.
AL: I’ve thought about this just recently though—that my sister I told you was sick and people would give her pennies because they thought she was going to die and even though pennies were scarce that was something they could do for her was give her little bits of money. She had a little bank, and I discovered that I could stick a table knife in that bank and get pennies out; then I could go to the store and have candy. And I did that Utah Women’s Walk: Anne 5 Leavitt
for quite awhile until Jane began to—I was popular and it made my life so much better (laughter) for a while—Jane discovered that her bank was getting lighter and the jig was up. I was the only one who could have been the culprit—and I was—and so I suffered the pangs of the sinner. I also learned that once the pennies were gone so was the popularity. It was kind of a hard lesson but—
MW: A lesson well learned.
AL: —a lesson well enough learned that I remember it to this day.
MW: Wow, interesting. Any other childhood memories or experiences that you feel helped prepare you for the future as a mother of six sons or in community work or anything like that?
AL: Our society was quite simple so we had lots of opportunities. The school was small. And so I was very unathletic so I didn’t do any of that, but my mother saw to it that immediately, I start taking violin lessons, and I had piano lessons, and we had an orchestra. I saw a picture of this orchestra the other day; it was two violins, three accordions, which were very popular, a drum, and a piano was our high school orchestra.
MW: Wow.
AL: We had the opportunity to do those things, and so I was in plays and in the operettas and things like that. And so I had lots of opportunities that prepared me for probably some. As far as being prepared to be a mother and a wife, I don’t know that I was prepared for that. I loved being a mother, and I loved being a wife, and I think if you love anything you learn how to do it.
MW: So true.
AL: I used to say if you can read, you can cook, you know for example. The success of my children—I’ve never been able to really feel that I could take credit for. I think that we were richly blessed. We raised six boys, and I think a lot of it was sheer the blessings of the Lord, lots of prayer. I don’t know what prepared me if anything did.
MW: Well, even caring for your little siblings.
AL: Yes, I knew how to do that, and I was not afraid of that.
MW: Who were the women in your life that you admired when you were growing up?
AL: My mother. And we had some aunts that were lovely women; we had some cousins who were beautiful and glamorous. One special cousin—one of our cousins married a lovely woman who was my Young Women’s teacher—the Mutual teacher—and she was very
Utah Women’s Walk: Anne 6 Leavitt
much someone I admired.1 There were good people around us, and I can’t think of any specific one.
[17:33]
MW: Your educational background then. Where did you graduate from high school?
AL: I graduated from Wayne High. And of course, I graduated quite young and went away to college at seventeen. That skipped grade reverberates through the rest of your life. And then I went to college in Cedar City, and it was then Branch Agricultural College and then it evolved into now it is Southern Utah University.
MW: Okay. Tell me about your courtship and marriage time. I know that—
AL: Well before I had left high school, I had dated a boy who went to BAC [Branch Agricultural College]. He brought his yearbook home to convince me that was a good place to go. I saw a picture in the yearbook of this very handsome person who was “Mr. Personality,” and his name was Dixie Leavitt. When I went to school, as it happened, he was the student body president that year, so I first saw him when he was greeting all the new freshmen. We kind of saw each other at that point, and he had no idea that I had my eye on him from having seen him in the yearbook. As the year went on, we began to date, and then we were married the next year. He finished school then, and I just had one more year. And we settled there. He taught school for a year, and then he went into business. We’ve lived in Cedar City with the exception of our years in England and a couple years on a mission in St. George. We have lived there ever since.
MW: Wow.
AL: Our boys started coming one by one. We had first Michael, then Dane, then Mark, then Eric, then David and then Matthew. We just kept getting little boys.
MW: How many under—what did you have?
AL: Well, there was a space between our first two; there was a big space there. Then we had two right together, and then after that, the last three just came at decent intervals. Well the next two came at decent intervals until Matthew, and there was a big space between the fifth and the sixth. So it took us twenty-one years almost to get our six sons.
MW: Wow, what was life like raising six boys?
AL: Well, I loved it. I loved it. I always said boys were for mothers and girls were for daddies. I felt sorry for Dixie that he didn’t get any little girls. I loved being the queen of the
1. The Mutual (Young Women’s Mutual Improvement Association) is the forerunner to the Young Women organization of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Utah Women’s Walk: Anne 7 Leavitt
household. Life was hectic of course—hard work—but just wonderful; I really did love raising boys. I loved all their activities. I loved the relationships. I just really enjoyed those years.
MW: We kind of skipped over the marriage part. Tell me where you were married and maybe circumstances surrounding your marriage anything about the proposal—
AL: You know—
MW: —you remember.
AL: —one of the things that is sad about our marriage is that we had a photographer come when we were having the reception and all those things, but we didn’t have enough money to get the pictures finished right away, and the photographer went broke and left town, so we don’t have any pictures, and that’s too bad.
MW: Tragic.
AL: I remember we had a reception in Loa; we had a reception in Bunkerville [NV] where my husband came from. And always in those days, it wasn’t just a reception; it was a dance. We had a dance with an orchestra, and we had that in both places. I chuckle about both our circumstances of all of our families being pretty simple. As wedding gifts we got lots and lots of Pyrex casseroles, (laughs) lots and lots of very simple things. When we began to set up housekeeping, we were pretty poorly equipped; we didn’t have a great deal. We lived in a war surplus trailer house. We called it trailer town; [it was] for the married students. They had these little boxes; I wish I knew the dimensions, but they weren’t any bigger than this room across. And they didn’t have water in them; you had to carry your water in with a pail. And they didn’t have bathrooms of course. There was a big company—everybody used the same—
MW: A communal—
AL: A communal area—you did your laundry out there, and you did your showers out there. We would trundle out in our bathrobes carrying our towels and shower in this communal bathhouse. We lived there almost a year and a half until we’d finished school. Then my husband taught for a year, and so then we earned 180 dollars a month, and so we could move up in the world a little. When we lived in these trailers, our rent was fifteen dollars a month.
MW: Hm.
AL: We could manage that; (laughs) so our beginnings were really meager.
MW: What were you studying in those first two years that you attended?
AL: I was in drama and English—nothing practical—and then when I went back to school and Utah Women’s Walk: Anne 8 Leavitt
finished, I still graduated in English. Those first years I was not preparing myself for anything, and as it turned out it was all right because I didn’t have to work and so—well I did work; I worked in an optometrist and I worked, but not at things that needed much preparation.
MW: Did you perform in any of the school musicals—
AL: I did.
MW: —at the college level?
AL: I did.
MW: What did you do?
AL: I was Ophelia in Hamlet.
MW: Hm.
AL: And I was Lola in Cavalleria rusticana and Elvira in Blithe Spirit; I was Elvira the ghost in Blithe Spirit. When I had finished school very soon after when I was just young, I was asked to direct a play to raise funds to build a new stake center, and so I got into drama doing that, but just on that level. But really I was kind of swept into the performing early on in college.
MW: Did you enjoy being on stage?
AL: I loved being on stage. Loved being on stage.
MW: And you did it in high school also?
AL: I did it in high school and in college as well.
MW: What was your favorite role that you played?
AL: I loved being Ophelia, and here’s a little secret: I tried out for the play. I got the role, played Ophelia, and it was my absolutely first time I had ever heard of William Shakespeare. In my little high school, we didn’t do much with Shakespeare so I thought that was really interesting. Then as a very young married woman because I had been Ophelia in Shakespeare—in the Relief Society, we were studying Shakespeare—early on I was asked to be the stake Relief Society leader and teach Shakespeare.2 And I’ve just marveled at that so many times to think that I would have the audacity to say yes or that
2. The Relief Society is the official women's organization of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Utah Women’s Walk: Anne 9 Leavitt
they would have been foolish enough to think I could do it. The truth is I did; I studied and learned and did it. So really, I guess I would have to say so much of what I consider my education has come from the Relief Society because I’ve taught Relief Society since I was like twenty-two or something like that. When you teach, you have to learn, and the opportunities that came to me on these callings was just sheer edification. You just learn so many things. You’re too young to remember, maybe the five Out of the Best Book series. Do you remember that?
MW: I have heard of that actually.
AL: Have you heard of it?
MW: Yes.
AL: These two men, BYU [Brigham Young University] professors, prepared these five volumes of literature—they were wonderful volumes—and so I was a stake Relief Society leader at this early age and taught clear through those five volumes, one a year. I came away with—expanded. That was a wonderful part of my early young womanhood.
MW: Good, good that’s great. What did your husband study? What did he teach?
AL: He was an educator, and he taught only a year. Then he went into business; then he went into the insurance business as a summer job and intending to go to school and get a master’s in administration. And he loved the business, and he did well, and so that was the end of him as an educator, which is kind of sad because he was a very good teacher. But he loved business, and he was thriving; he succeeded in it so he stayed in it.
MW: Where did you live in Cedar City? After you left the trailer?
AL: Then we lived in an apartment on Main Street—just a little apartment. And we moved to another little apartment—a basement apartment in a house on the same street where we live now, by the way. Then we lived in a professor’s house for a couple of years as he was away on a sabbatical. Then we lived where we live now, and we have lived on that corner with the exception of the five years when we’ve been on missions. We have lived on that corner for about fifty-five years.
MW: Wow.
AL: In that same home.
MW: And did you build the home or have it built?
AL: The home is a real story. Do you want the whole story of the home?
MW: Sure, I’d love to hear the story.
Utah Women’s Walk: Anne 10 Leavitt
AL: Well, my husband had set a goal when we were married: I want us to own our own home by the time we had been married five years, and he was always working toward that. Here it was, soon going to be five years, and we didn’t have a home, and we were still living in the professor’s house. He heard about some homes about a hundred miles west of Cedar City that were in a town called Panaca, Nevada, and they had some FHA homes built to facilitate the workers of a mine. They were just little bungalows: two bedrooms, one bath, a kitchen, a living room, and that’s it. These homes had been financed by the FHA—the Federal Housing Administration, I think it is. Anyway the mines had gone dead or they had closed; so here were all these houses out there sitting on concrete pads. And you could buy one of those houses for twelve hundred dollars. But you had to move it off the pad. My husband considered that and thought, What a great deal. It was decided he could do it. He took a month away from his business and hired someone who knew how to do it and built a basement, bought one of those homes, hired a house mover from Idaho who moved the house—I don’t remember how much that cost. But within that month, we had moved one of these houses on to our basement—they were on concrete pads, but we had built a basement—and we now had a home on this corner in Cedar City. It was just what I said; there was a garage and then the living room, a kitchen, two bedrooms, and a bath, and that was it. It was wonderful because it was our house, and we could put bedrooms down in the basement. Then we began to remodel it in a few years. We built a big thing on the back; then we built an upstairs, and then we built a kitchen. It is sort of like the house that Jack built. Our neighbors used to call it the Dixie Project (laughter) because we were always remodeling. Anyway, it’s become a good house to raise six boys in. And now it has become the home that our boys grew up in and so we’ve just stayed there.
[30:57]
MW: That’s wonderful. Tell me about your parenting philosophy or your approach to raising boys and any fond memories of raising the boys when they were younger.
AL: Well, you know one of the things that I learned the hard way is that I should have been tougher on making them practice. I failed with four of the six. I have two—well, all my boys play instruments that they learned at school—but piano? Only two of them ended up playing the piano even though they all had lessons. One by one they overwhelmed me, and I allowed them to quit. So there’s one bit of philosophy is you have to be tough enough to stick with them or you don’t end up with piano players.
I think that probably my greatest strength in parenting was I loved them so much, and I was smart enough to know that I wasn’t in a position to indulge them. We didn’t indulge them. They never had a car of their own; they could use our hand-me-down cars, but they were responsible to us. It wasn’t a time when indulgence was popular or maybe even possible so I think we were fortunate that we grew up in a time when you had to be practical and you had to be sensible. So they were never indulged, but they were always loved, and they always had my time, and they always were my first focus. Other than that, I was not really prepared by any sort of education or anything like that to parent, but I had good intuition. Utah Women’s Walk: Anne 11 Leavitt
MW: Did they all get along? Did they always get along and—
AL: They—I don’t remember any bad stuff, you know. And I think that’s maybe selective memory. They tussled and they—one day one of our boys came up behind the other and put his arms around him and pinned his arms down, and he threw his arms in the air and hit his nose and broke his nose. We had stitches, you know, hundreds of stitches; so we did all that kind of thing, and sometimes they were involved in the stitches. We have holes in our walls where they’d run from each other and hold the door closed, and it was a pretty active household. But they were very supportive of each other, and they weren’t competitive in the sense—they would see who would best each other in a wrestle, but they were always compatible. And I think I can say in all honesty that all my boys consider their brothers their best friends before any other friends.
MW: That’s remarkable. Tell me about what they are doing now. I know they’ve all been very successful. Tell me—
AL: Three of our boys work together in the Leavitt Group—the business. You know what Michael has done, and now that he’s out of public life, he has what he calls Leavitt Partners.3 He has brought some of the people with him that were with him at HHS who obviously were not there anymore when politics changed.4 These are very bright people, and there is lots of consternation about things like healthcare. Companies need some advice and help navigating the new realities, and so he has a lot to do with that. He advises, counsels companies on that sort of thing: food safety, healthcare, and other issues. And he now heads what he calls Leavitt Partners and has some bright people that work with him. He travels a lot, but he’s very happy in private life.
Dane is—I don’t even know what his title is—now the number one at the Leavitt Group and then he works with two brothers. Mark is responsible for acquisitions, for the growth of the company. And Eric is I think the senior vice-president or whatever. So those three boys work at with Leavitt Group.
David is a lawyer, and he practiced law for quite a few years, but then he became passionate about helping establish a justice system in Ukraine. So he and his wife, who’s also a lawyer, took their seven children to Ukraine. And they live here now, but they go back and forth. They’re working with Ukraine and some other nations now to help establish a justice system in countries that were formally communist. He loves doing that.
Matthew’s our sixth, and he’s a doctor here and lives in Utah County. He has eight children. I should give you that detail. Matthew has eight children, David has seven, Eric
3. Michael O. Leavitt was a three-time elected governor of Utah and served in the cabinet of George W. Bush.
4. The Department of Health and Human Services is the federal government agency that ensures the health and safety of United States citizens. Utah Women’s Walk: Anne 12 Leavitt
has six, Mark has five; Michael has five. Is that all of them?
JD: Dane.
AL: Dane has six; (laughs) so we have thirty-eight grandchildren, I think.
MW: That’s wonderful
AL: And lots of great-grandchildren.
MW: How has grandparenting been? Have you been actively involved with—
AL: Very actively involved—
MW: —that too.
AL: Yes, I—you know. You worry about your grandchildren as much as you do your children; in fact a little more because you’re not sure their parents know exactly how to do it. (laughter)You know you can trust the parents of your children. I’m being facetious, but we’re very much in involved with the grandchildren. I’m friends with them all, and they’re important to me. We spend a lot of our summers—we have a ranch in Loa now— and we spend a lot of summertime nourishing grandchildren. They love to come and they love to stay, and so we do the best we can to get around to all of them.
MW: Good. What do you do at the ranch when they come?
AL: When they come, they change sprinklers, and they think they work. We work helping them to work. They do things like clear fields of rocks. They just do farm work, and they love doing it, and it makes them feel grown up and important. The girls don’t do so much of that, but the girls like to learn homemaking skills and just be there and be together.
MW: That’s great. You’ve done a lot of service in the Church.5 And I know you have had many callings that you’ve done, but you stated earlier that the Young Women was a particular highlight to you. What did you enjoy about working with young women?
AL: I loved working with the young women because I could relate to them. I felt that I had a propensity for relating with them. Those were good years when I worked in Young Women.6 I’ve been cleaning out my own archives lately and I found I’m a keeper. I’ve kept so many things. I found so many letters from young women who wrote and said that our relationship had nourished them. I worked with Young Women. I worked in Lambda
5. Michele refers to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
6. The Young Women is a youth organization in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter- day Saints.
Utah Women’s Walk: Anne 13 Leavitt
Delta Sigma. I worked in the stake Relief Society at the university. And so in all of these things, I’ve been associated with young women, and I’ve just always loved those associations. I love Relief Society too; I’ve loved working in the Relief Society, and now I’m more suited to Relief Society. But the years in Young Women were very good. I loved our missions because I had a special relationship with the sisters. And the sister missionaries all became my friends, and still I feel very, very tender toward all of them.7
MW: Tell me about the call to serve in England. Did that come as a surprise?
AL: It came as a surprise, and it was a wonderful, wonderful experience. All the boys were married except David and Matthew; I should say our first four were married. David was just finishing his mission—a Spanish-speaking mission in New York City. He had been in the ghettos of New York, and he was about to finish and Matthew was just eleven. The call came from President Hinckley. And when we were assigned to Leeds, England, it was just such a wonderful adventure and—
MW: What year was this?
AL: It was 1984. We served from 1984 to 1987. And I loved being a missionary, and I loved nourishing. I’d four missionaries already; I had five by then because David came home and went with us for the first six months or so. Of course, we took Matthew. I knew how to love missionaries already, and it was a great advantage to my husband as mission president because he knew how to love missionaries. Any problem that ever arose in our mission his first thought was, If this were my son how would I want his mission president to handle it? It was a great code to live by for him. I probably can’t extoll enough to tell you how much I loved being a missionary. [An] interesting thing about England was that when we first got there we had this strange feeling of being at home—Matthew especially. He said almost the first week he said to me, “ Mom, there’s something about this; I feel at home.”
After our mission, we became active in family history and realized that we had been exactly where my husband’s people came from. We had this sense of rightness, but we hadn’t been into family history enough to really know. And then in subsequent years, we learned a lot about it and realized that was exactly where they began. And my own people had been just over the mountain into Derbyshire from where we were.
England was a wonderful place for us to be. We loved it. Matthew loved it; he went in the fifth grade. Whereas he might have been sort of a casual student in our system because school was easy for him, and he was into the athletics and that sort of thing; in England, he became a scholar because competition for a scholarship was much different. And it was great for him. He came back scholastically much more eager and probably more able as well.
7. Missionaries of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are volunteer representatives who engage in proselyting, Church service, and humanitarian aid.
Utah Women’s Walk: Anne 14 Leavitt
MW: You lived in Leeds—
AL: We lived in Leeds—
MW: —is that right? Permanently there at the mission home during that time?
AL: We lived in the mission home in Leeds on Adel Lane, which is a very nice area in Leeds. It’s near York, England, if you’ve ever been there you know it is a wonderful city. It was a large mission; we went from the Scottish border on the north to the Sherwood Forest on the south, which is Midlands and then sea to sea. The Pennine Mountains divided us from the Manchester mission. It was a huge mission, and we drove a lot and covered a lot of territory. But I loved the people and I loved England. I loved the people in the branches and the wards were dear. That was a privilege that I still thank Heavenly Father for because it was a wonderful part of our lives.
MW: How did you juggle Matthew and the responsibilities—
AL: You know, Matthew—
MW: —as the—
AL: We got a girl to come into the mission home because I knew that when he came home from school I’d be gone. We found this wonderful little girl named, Louisa Collins. She was from a convert family. And she helped when I was gone; she was there with Matthew, and that’s how we managed. Matthew knew that—he was wonderful—we had this responsibility. He considered himself a missionary too. I don’t think he ever suffered; I think only he gained.
[44:18]
MW: Good. Do you still stay in contact still with the people that you met there?
AL: Yes, we did.
MW: With the missionaries?
AL: We did. We’re having a reunion on April 1 [2011] of our missionaries here. And then we are going to England on May 27 [2011]; we’re going to have another reunion there and call together our UK missionaries and our continental missionaries and the ones who come from other parts of the world. So we do stay in touch with them, not a lot of them, but some of them we hear from always every year. You just love them, and there is never a time when your affection for them goes away.
MW: How many sister missionaries did you have, very many? Or—
Utah Women’s Walk: Anne 15 Leavitt
AL: I don’t know how many—
MW: —at that time.
AL: —but we had many. We had a good contingent of sisters—very good sisters and lots of them. Then for our second mission when we were in St. George, we had lots of young missionaries because the sister missionaries at the visitors’ center work part-time out in the field and part-time in the visitors’ center. So we had another contingent there of sisters.
MW: What year was that when you were called to St. George?
AL: I think that was ‘93 through ‘94; that’s a two-year mission.
MW: Okay.
AL: Whereas England’s three.
MW: Let’s go back and talk about when you went back to school. Because what brings me to that is, I remember talking to you on the phone, listening to you speak in Spanish—
AL: Oh—
MW: —to someone who had called in on while we were chatting on another phone, and you spoke beautiful Spanish. Tell me about going back to school and what that experience was like.
AL: Of course, I just had two years then when we were married. I always intended to go back. Matthew was in school, and Mark had been called to Bolivia on his mission, and so he was learning Spanish. I had always had this yearning to know Spanish. I think it was born when we were young. We had very poor radio reception, but at night you would get good reception, and the Spanish music and Spanish stations were much clearer than the English stations. We’d listen to this music, and I’d heard this.
And in fact, my father had a big battery radio that we had at the sheep herd on top of the mountain, and we could get those Spanish stations on that shortwave, I think, probably where we couldn’t get really clear good reception on other things. That sound of the Spanish and the music was very intriguing to me. I knew that someday I’d like to learn Spanish.
So when Mark was in Bolivia and Matthew was at school, I went back to school not really intending to graduate; I just went back to learn Spanish. At the same time I had a friend, Elvera Del Toro; this beautiful little Mexican woman who came to live in our town. And she was my friend, and she couldn’t speak English. She was just wonderful to help me with Spanish, and I think the fact that I have the Mexican accent and that I can speak Spanish has a lot to do with the fact I learned I wanted to communicate with her as Utah Women’s Walk: Anne 16 Leavitt
well. It took me four years of just taking a class here and there of Spanish and then I realized that I could graduate. So I began to take some English too and ended up graduating in Spanish and English, which was kind of an unlikely thing. But, I have to say this, the Spanish though I didn’t know I was taking it, when we were on our mission in St. George I was the only Spanish speaker. I could take these wonderful little Hispanic people through the visitors’ center and teach them in Spanish. It was a wonderful experience for me. I’ve had really nice teaching opportunities because I could use that language. I love that.
MW: When you went back to school did you take large credits or just one class a year? How did you manage that with your family?
AL: Oh I would take maybe one or two classes a quarter. I had enough credits to graduate in Spanish and English. And I think it was four years of just taking a class here and there. I think I went consistently, but it took that long to get the two years that I needed.
MW: I bet you enjoyed that.
AL: I did and I was really good at it then because I mean I was a good student then. My writing was better. Just the other day I found something I wrote, and I thought, Wow, I couldn’t write that now. I took a lot of poetry and a lot of English because that’s what I liked, and of course I was mature enough, and I didn’t have any extracurricular to worry about except family, (laughs) but I mean I wasn’t worried about social things.
MW: Right.
AL: And it was a good experience for me.
MW: Did you do something special to commemorate when you graduated?
AL: I don’t think so. I think everybody came to dinner or maybe went out to lunch or something. We didn’t do anything like that, no.
MW: It’s a good preparation for many of the things that you’ve done—so many different committees and advisory boards. And if you don’t mind telling me about those and discussing what you did. I know in the 1960s you were called to work on a drug—
AL: That was kind of an adventure because the drug problem—a lot of what I was asked to do was because Dixie was in the legislature and that would bring me to their attention. That’s why I think those opportunities came. I was asked to work on a task force to work on the drug problem that was just becoming—people were just becoming aware that drugs were a problem. I worked on a subcommittee that was just a six-month assignment. I think so we did our work quite rapidly. Mine was to try to ascertain the extent of the problem. I mostly worked with young people who were struggling with drugs. We’d interview them and ask them why and what is it and how many people are involved in this. I learned a lot and I don’t really know what we accomplished. We wrote a report, Utah Women’s Walk: Anne 17 Leavitt
and I don’t really know what happened with it. It was an interesting thing.
Not too long ago, I met a young man—the drug culture seemed to go along with the music—with young people’s music. And this kid was into music, a great musician; he was just a natural musician. Not long ago I went to some event and there he was with this band playing, and I just immediately felt this affection for him. And after all these years I went up—this middle, no, no, not middle, this old lady went in to the band—and said, “Allen, it’s you.” And he felt the same. I could see that even now his life had been still affected by those choices. I haven’t thought about that for a long time. There again I was going through the archives and remembered that.
Then one thing that was a great adventure for me in a civic way was that I was asked to become the convener to establish the Endowment for the Humanities in Utah. That was an adventure because I got to get all dressed up and leave my kids and go to Washington for a few days.
There were wonderful people that were with me: Elder [Dallin H.] Oaks was one; David Gardner was one; Leonard Arrington was there—he was the Church historian and a great guy. I just met people that were really great folks, and I learned a lot from them. We went to Washington. We heard their spiel and decided we wanted to do it in Utah. So we applied for the grant, and we knew we’d get it because they had asked us to come and apply. We did get the grant, and we established the Utah Endowment for the Humanities. I was the convener and then the chair for maybe two or three years and then moved it on. It’s still is an entity that does some good things, and it was a great adventure for me.
MW: I bet. What year was that? We could probably look it up—
AL: Yeah, we could look it up. It was whenever it started but I’d say—I know that it was past ‘73 because I had Matthew, and he was like three so I’d say maybe ‘74 or ‘75.
MW: These civic opportunities you mentioned, when did Dixie go into the legislature?
AL: Dixie went into the legislature in about 1962—
MW: Okay—
AL: —he was in the house for a term and then he went into the senate, and he was in the senate for I think it was fourteen years before we went to England. Then he came back and had one term after that again. I think he spent eighteen years total in the legislature maybe; I think that includes his house term too. That was a lot of adventure for our family. The boys loved it they learned a lot. I think Michael’s propensity for public service probably was born as we learned things at the legislature. We’d take the boys up and sit in the gallery. And legislatures at that time had what they called the pop room and there was a place where they had a soda machine and the children could go and drink as much terrible soda as they wanted. (laughs) They could wander the halls of the old capital. They loved—Ab Jenkins’s Mormon Meteor Car was down at the bottom and Utah Women’s Walk: Anne 18 Leavitt
there was a museum—there used to be a museum in the bottom of the capital .8 The boys had a wonderful time too. Those were good years for us. It was stressful to have him gone so much; it’s not like we were there all the time these were just our intermittent visits to the legislature that the boys and I were there. It was good, and it was good service. And he did a wonderful job and some good things for our area. The boys learned the value and the importance of public service and those were satisfying years. I can’t remember what your question was.
MW: No, No. This is exactly—it was about your community work and civic work—what you have been involved in. I know in 1977, during second wave feminism when its at its peak kind of—
AL: Um-hm.
MW: —you become involved with the Equal Rights Amendment, the delegation that was sent from Utah. Talk to me about that.
AL: As I look back on that in Houston, they had this enormous conference called the IWY, International Women’s Year. Feminism was—what’s the word—it was feverish and to be honest, the Brethren had the foresight to see that this would have negative effects on the role of women generally.9 They were very careful in their counsel, but they were also very wise. We went as a delegation. Do you remember—oh my goodness, what was her name—this wonderful Relief Society president—
MW: Belle Spafford.
AL: Belle Spafford—
MW: Yes.
AL: —course. Belle Spafford was the president of the Relief Society, and she headed our delegation. Florence Jacobsen was part of it, who I think at the time either was or had been the Young Women’s president. I don’t remember if Ruth Funk was president or what she was doing then, but she was part of it, and Elaine Cannon was part of it. It was a really impressive delegation of women. All of us—we were exactly the opposite really from the main stream of what went to this. I think there were ten thousand women there; I could be exaggerating that, but it was an enormous place, and the women were fired up with this tremendous fervor about choice. Really what it boiled down to—there was a lot to do with equal pay for equal work and the positive things, but underlining it all was the right to abortion. For our delegation, it was very sobering and very wrenching, and we
8. David Abbott “Ab” Jenkins, a professional race car driver, was Salt Lake City’s mayor from 1940–1944.
9. Anne refers to the First Presidency and Quorum of the Twelve Apostles of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Utah Women’s Walk: Anne 19 Leavitt
spoke and we had opportunities to speak, but we were not popular. Not very many people believed as we did. We saw it happen. After we came back from that, we were all of us were invited to speak at different places. I did some of that, but I remember one day I was going off to speak at some group—I didn’t speak out of my area, but I spoke around my area—and my little Eric, who is very astute wasn’t very old then, and he said to me, “You going out to give one of your radical speeches, Mom?”(laughs) and he meant it to be funny, and I wasn’t radical, but something happened to me. I realized that I really didn’t want to spend all this time on this because I knew that I wasn’t having any real impact, and I knew leaving my children was impact. That was the last time that I went out to speak.
MW: Interesting, how large of a group in the delegation?
AL: You know I think there were—I saw the news clipping just the other day—and I’d say maybe twelve or fifteen, and I was an alternate. I wasn’t able to vote, but I was just there in case somebody got sick.
MW: I bet those were very good learning—
AL: They were good learning—
MW: —experiences—
AL: —experiences, um-hm.
MW: —and certainly needed to be women who did exactly what you did and—
AL: Well, our voices needed to be heard, but the tide was moving much too forcefully for us to have much impact on turning it.
MW: Interesting. Any other committees or community work? In a minute, I’ll ask about your family history work. What other committees have you served with either with the Church or within civic service?
AL: Right now, I’m not remembering.
MW: That’s okay. We can add that later.
AL: I don’t remember.
[01:00:01]
MW: Do you have record of some of the speeches that you gave in regards to the—
AL: No.
Utah Women’s Walk: Anne 20 Leavitt
MW: You don’t have any of that—
AL: I don’t think so.
MW: Well—
AL: I have speeches, but not that I gave on that subject —
MW: Okay—
AL: No.
(conversation between Michele Welch and Doris Judd)
MW: Yes. Yes. And we need to talk about that. Before we leave civic services, talk to me about your husband’s candidacy for governor and what kind of experience that was for you and how that impacted your family or you.
AL: No one really wants to do that (laughs) it was—
MW: Were you always supportive? Were you always happy—
AL: I was always supportive. I hated it. It was the worst day of my life when he agreed to file—the worst day of my life. Oh no I must have had worse days. I don’t remember feeling worse—
MW: Really.
AL: —than I did when he decided to do that. I just had this sickness—that it was going to be so disruptive. He was persuaded to do that, and we were so innocent and so ill prepared. Compared to how things are done now, it was ridiculous. Michael took on the job of managing his campaign; he didn’t know anything about it. The first thing was the convention, and we all just worked on; it took up our family life. Michael and Jackie had just been married I think about a couple of years or something, and they had their baby boy—their first baby. Jackie sort of cared for Matthew who was—he would have been four. We came up and we got an apartment in Salt Lake, and then we just worked on the campaign.
The county conventions were a real task. You just go all over the state. And I did a lot of speaking, and I did a lot of campaigning, and once I threw myself into it I was pretty good at it. We just worked really hard, and we won the convention, and that was fun, and then we lost the primary. That was good because then we went home, and Dixie had stopped being in the legislature to run for governor, and so then we just focused on family and business. We all look back thinking my goodness how wonderful it was that our life took that change.
Utah Women’s Walk: Anne 21 Leavitt
I remember it as we had lots of things that were enjoyable: There were lots of triumphs. We met a lot of good people. We made a lot of good friends. I really have a great deal of compassion and admiration for people who will do that kind of thing—who will run for public office. It’s really hard work; it’s really hard work; it’s very intrusive. (laughs)
I remember as a child my father ran for Tail Twister of the Lions Club and leading up to that election I was just a nervous wreck as a little girl so I know that I am not built for politics. Having said that, I’m good at it, you know. I can give a good speech, and I can get all involved at it. The reality of being a candidate: just placing yourself there where people say things about you and vote on you or against you, is just horrible for me. Now this maybe something we want to delete but that’s how I’ve always felt the anxiety of the elections. We’ve had a lot of elections. I mean, my husband was in the house and then in the senate for how many times? Four or five different elections that we went through and all of them were just horrible for me. But having said that, the experience has been good.
MW: Were you involved in Michael’s run for governor?
AL: Yes, we were. We helped with his election and that was fun. It was not as painful, although you know that’s tough too when people are saying bad things about your husband or your child—
MW: That’s tough.
AL: —that’s really tough. And people say good things too, and that’s nice, but it’s the hard things that people say about you that are really—I’d rather not do.
MW: I can understand that. Well we’ve gone—there’s still more to ask. Are you doing okay? Can we continue?
AL: I’m doing okay.
MW: Are you?
AL: What time—sorry, I thought that was my water.
MW: You’re okay. Have a drink of water for a minute, and I’ve got a few more that I would like to ask you and then we can meet again if we need to. I want to make sure that we get these—
AL: You just go ahead. I’m all right.
MW: —final questions are you okay.
AL: Uh-huh, I’m fine.
MW: This is Kimberly Williamson. Utah Women’s Walk: Anne 22 Leavitt
AL: Hi, Kimberly.
KW: Hi.
MW: She’s a student of mine and a major involved person in our—and an intern for the Utah Women’s Walk. She will be helping with your transcription. This is Anne Leavitt
AL: Thank you. It’s nice to meet you.
(conversation concerning recording device)
MW: Okay, let’s talk about your family history work and what you’ve done. You have done so many interesting things. I’m very interested in the book that you wrote too of SUU. Let’s start wherever you’d like to go—
AL: Let’s start with that—
MW: Okay—
AL: —because I started with more of that when before we started—
MW: Good, okay
AL: The history of Southern Utah University is quite dramatic, and everybody who is connected with that knows the history and loves it. It was very much a community effort. And after we were home from England the president of the university came to me and said, “Would you write the history? We are going to have a hundredth anniversary. Will you write the history of the university?” I was eager to do it, and I said, “Yes, I will.” Then we were called on our mission to St. George. So I knew I was going to have two years away, and I went back to him and said, “We’ve been called on this mission; I won’t be able to do it, and he said, “I’ll wait.”
MW: Who was the president?
AL: The president was Gerald Sherratt at the time and he said, “ I’ll wait if you’ll still write it.” I didn’t realize that taking two years off that process was going to put such pressure to get the book done. I said okay then when I get home I will write it. And it was a real press to get it done, but it was a great adventure. I loved writing it; I loved doing the research, and I loved the subject. That was about a two-year period. We barely made it in time for the hundredth anniversary of Southern Utah University, but it did get published in time. And it was pivotal for me because it really stretched me. I had written a family history before of my own family, but I hadn’t written a published thing and this was a tome. Those two years a lot of people sacrificed a lot. My mother sacrificed a lot of my time my children—don’t bother mom; she is working on “the book”—that happened a lot during those two years. It did turn out well; it was a great adventure for me, and I’m very Utah Women’s Walk: Anne 23 Leavitt
proud of the book. I’m so grateful that I had the opportunity to do that.
About that same time as I was finishing the book—Michael was governor by then. People in the East who are Leavitts— the first Leavitts came to this country in 1630, and they began to proliferate through the New England and all through the eastern seaboard states. Then this little tiny group who were up in Canada found the gospel and moved west. They proliferated through polygamy and became an enormous family west, but the eastern family is also big family. And the east and west didn’t know much about each other. When Michael was elected governor, the eastern Leavitts wondered who this Leavitt out here was. And some of them began to ask the question: well could they be a part of our Leavitts? Of course they contacted Michael and said we’d like to know how you relate. As it turns out and we knew this and we knew how we were related, we’re all just one family. We all descend from John Leavitt who came in 1630, and then one of his sons—the descendant that came West and joined the Mormon Church was just one of his twelve children. There’s a big family on both sides of the nation. Michael wrote back and said, “You’re welcome to come and have your national”—they have an association called the National Association of Leavitt Families, and they officially contacted Michael to say are you connected with us. When he found out he was, he invited them to come west and have your annual meeting and they accepted. Well Michael was not in any position (laughs) to organize the National Association of Leavitt Families meeting. He asked his father, “Look I got us in to this. Will you help us; will you take it over?”
So Dixie and I took it over. We contacted the eastern Leavitts and then we gathered a bunch of them. And that’s really where we became acquainted intimately with Ardeth because Ardeth and Dixie are these Leavitt descendants and she came and began and helped us with this. She did part of the first reunion; she had a great role in that. We organized this giant reunion in Salt Lake City. We had it at the Assembly Hall and at the Joseph Smith Memorial, and it just turned out to be way beyond anybody’s expectations. About two hundred people came from the East, but we had thousands from the West.
MW: Wow.
AL: It was an enormous reunion it was very successful that was 1998, in June of 1998. And then from there, we began to trace more of the Leavitts that were not our Latter-day Saints Leavitts. Could I have some water?
MW: You bet; you bet.
AL: We began to realize that we had all these ancestors in the East who were buried and that had had a lot to do with the founding of America. There was a woman in the 40s who was a Leavitt who had written a book called, The Descendants of Moses Leavitt and that’s our line. She had written several books, and she had done a lot of genealogy. We realized that there would be all these graves and all these people back there, and we decided to begin to research them and place plaques on their graves if we could find them and put markers on the graves if we couldn’t find them. So that launched this and the first one we did— the first big reunion—I think was about 2000 because this was 1998, and I think in 2000 Utah Women’s Walk: Anne 24 Leavitt
we did that was the bicentennial, wasn’t it?
MW: Uh-huh.
AL: Was it? When was the bicentennial?
MW: For?
AL: The nation.
DJ: That was in the seventies.
AL: That doesn’t even relate. Cancel that. Delete that.
MW: Okay, we will.
AL: I think the year 2000. By that time I had written a book called, From Hingham to Hatley and that was the book that traced the Leavitts from Hingham, Massachusetts, to Exeter, Massachusetts, to Grantham to Deerfield and then up to Canada. The first five grandfathers from this John—those couples—we did the research, and we traced them, and wrote the book called From Hingham to Hatley
MW: When you say we who is we?
AL: I wrote the book, and Dixie organized the reunion.
MW: Okay.
AL: Let’s put it that way.
MW: Okay.
AL: He contacted the people. He set up the venues. He got the plaques. And then in that first reunion, we put five plaques. Sometimes we did the monuments; sometimes we could find the monuments and just put a plaque on that told the story of these first five grandparents.
John in Hingham, Massachusetts—there is wonderful obelisk—granite—to him but there was nothing on it, just a little thing that said Leavitt, and so we put plaques on all four sides that told about John. That’s at the Old Ship Church in Hingham, Massachusetts. We started there; then we went to Exeter where we found the farm that Moses Leavitt had had and who is the next grandparent—Moses and Dorothy Dudley. We found a little graveyard with little fieldstones, and the historical society there knew that that’s where they had been buried—these families. So we put a monument there with a plaque for Moses and Dorothy Dudley. Then we moved on up to Deerfield where their son Joseph was, and we put a monument there with a thing. Then we went to Grantham, and we did Utah Women’s Walk: Anne 25 Leavitt
some more, and then we ended up at Hatley where our progenitor who joined the Church was. Jeremiah and Sarah Shannon Leavitt finally found the Church and then started west. That was the first one and the first book.
And then I think two years later, Dixie decided that—well, we had learned that of the fifty-five Leavitts who left Hatley to find the Church, and they didn’t get the Church there, they just got the Book of Mormon. And then they went to look for the Church and ended up in Nauvoo or in Kirkland first, then in Nauvoo. We decided that we needed to find where these people had died because twenty–two of the fifty-five died before they got to Salt Lake Valley. The next one was called From Hatley to Home, and home was wherever they finally settled. Along the way these twenty-two people had perished, and so we did monuments. I think, like six monuments going across the country, and we placed plaques there that told their story, and then now the people who died have monuments to them. Then we decided that the ones who didn’t come—there were some of the Leavitt families who didn’t join the Church and left children there and grandchildren there, and we didn’t know about them.
The next research we did was called Those Who Bade Goodbye, and we did another trek and took all these people. And we went back and in the process, we found where all of these children and grandchildren settled and where they were buried, and we gathered them in and did monuments to them.
[01:16:20]
MW: Wow.
AL: It was a great adventure, and it was in three big treks back east, and now we’ve done things just sort of out here. That’s as quickly as I can tell you about that adventure.
MW: Oh I know. That’s amazing. That’s remarkable have you done another book on those ones here?
AL: I’ve done three. I’ve done, From Hingham to Hatley, and then I collaborated with all the families on From Hatley to Home, and then I have done Those who Bade Goodbye. I’ve just done those three family histories.
MW: I know you’ve done some statues and monuments and things in—
AL: We have—
MW: —in the area down in St. George—
AL: Yes, we have—
MW: —Cedar City.
Utah Women’s Walk: Anne 26 Leavitt
AL: We have done some of those. We did. Sarah Sturtevant was the matriarch of all these people, of all these boys that are directly Dixie’s direct descendants. Her husband died before they had left Hatley. No, No. Sarah Shannon’s husband died before they left Hatley, but Sarah Sturtevant’s husband died as they left Nauvoo, and she came with her sons and daughters, and then they settled in southern Utah. She became kind of a matriarch to all these pioneer families they settled in Santa Clara, [UT], and so we’ve done a statue there of Sarah Sturtevant and then busts of her sons who were the pioneers in southern Utah.
MW: How nice—
AL: So that’s the big effort we did there.
MW: Well, it’s remarkable you just have done a ton of work. You just never sat still, is that true?
AL: Well, we haven’t. I’m talking way too much—
MW: No, no.
AL: I think I’m getting tired of talking about me.
MW: You’re doing great. Let me just ask you two or three more—
AL: Okay.
MW: Then we’ll pick this up again. We ask this question to every woman. We’d like to know if there are any words of wisdom or maxims that you’ve lived your life by—that you could attribute your success to. Has there been a scripture or a thought or a poem or a—
AL: Yeah, I have a scripture that you probably won’t find in the scriptures. It’s a pretty personal thing, but I can recite it. Let’s get this straight, when you say you attribute your success to—
MW: Right I know.
AL: —that’s uncomfortable for me—
MW: I understand.
AL: —because I don’t think you can say that about me.
MW: I certainly think I can and but you’re so humble, and I appreciate that and I probably stated that wrong or just something that motivated—
AL: Well I can say if you need a maxim it’s the only one I got and the only one I can think of Utah Women’s Walk: Anne 27 Leavitt
right now, and it’s an important one to me. At a time when I was studying really hard wanting to expand personally—that’s as much as I need to say about that. I heard a statement of President Hinckley’s that just had penetrated me at the time. And it answered exactly what I was searching for and that has become more and more important and more and more real to me over the years, and I think it was like in the early nineties when I heard this and I’ve taught it a lot since because it matters a lot to me and the statement he said, “Love of God is the root of all virtue, all goodness, all strength of character, all fidelity to do right. Love the Lord your God and love His son and be ever grateful for His love for us. Whenever other love fails, there will always be that shining transcendent everlasting love of God for each of us and the love of His son who gave His life for us.” That’s probably the scripture that is most important to me of so many others. I love the Book of Mormon, and the scriptures in there that guide my life and that come to me when I need them or that I can preach when I need it. But as far as basic what you need to learn in this life, President Hinckley taught me that.
MW: When do you think you first gained your testimony of the gospel? How old were you? Were you a young child or—
AL: You know, we always knew that the gospel was true just because our parents knew. Our father knew and we knew; so I’ve always known. I think that’s a great gift to know because I have friends who question and have to find it. I’ve always known, but I think my testimony intensified when I was mature and with our missions as I taught. And so I’ve always known, but the passion for it came gradually, and my missions both helped a lot.
MW: You’ve been mentored by good women throughout your life it seems—is there one or two that you want to mention that you feel like have been important?
AL: Ruth Funk blessed my life; she was my very dear friend, and unlikely as it seems, we were really quite intimate. You know, we shared things that—I think because I was not prominent; I lived in a different part of the world. I was not part of the inner-circle, I think she valued her friendship with me, and she could share things because it was not likely that anyone else would know. I’ll probably cut that too.
MW: How did you meet her?
AL: I met her at IWY. She came rushing in—there was a cluster of people who were on the plane, and they all knew each other, and I was sitting by myself. I knew who they were, but they didn’t know me much, and she came in and sat by me. And we talked all the way to Houston, and we never stopped talking for the next thirty years. She just died you know.
MW: I do. That’s—
AL: She was really a dear friend of mine. And then my sisters are important to me—our mother. We didn’t have a grandmother, any of us; we had aunts who were older, but we Utah Women’s Walk: Anne 28 Leavitt
didn’t have a grandmother. So lots of good women in my life really.
MW: You’ve been a mentor yourself to many. Is there a particular experience or fulfilling experience with you mentoring another younger sister or woman or—
AL: You know that’s always a satisfying experience, and I guess I would have to say that there have been many—many young women. I still hear from them—just the other day I received a plaintiff letter from a young German woman who had married an LDS boy, and it had turned out badly, and I sheltered her and helped her, and I still hear from some of them. I have loved that part of life. [I still hear from our sister missionaries—all of whom I love.]
MW: What do you think about how important it is for women to—you call it shelter, you know, help them to mentor them—
AL: Well, I think it’s especially important to grandparents to, you know? We live in a world where there’s a temptation for grandparents to escape. As soon as they get their children reared they go off in their fifth wheels and spend the winter. I think that’s one of the tragedies of our age because I really feel that grandmothering, grandparenting—the sister that you know of mine, they spend as much time grandparenting as they do living on their own. And I think the product is that their children are doing so well. That’s the kind of thing I think people of my age ought to be doing. There’s a temptation to be too tired or to be weary of it, but it’s a great loss if we insist on having our own. What is the scripture in the Book of Mormon, “to be for themselves?” It’s about children; it’s about the prophecy that children will do that, but adults can be for themselves to a very great extent and that’s a very great loss.
[01:26:02]
MW: That’s good advice. Do you have any advice—I didn’t even ask you and maybe this is too personal, maybe can you share with us the most significant trail that you’ve gone through as you look back across your life. Was there—
AL: Yes, I can, but I won’t share it in much detail, but it’s the hurt of a grandchild, you know? The pain of a grandchild—yeah, that’s the hardest thing for me.
MW: If you had advice that you’d like to share with other women in Utah or in our state? What words of wisdom would you share if you could share something?
AL: I think that it’s important to have joy in the journey and keep on keeping on. I would have to think about that, Michele.
MW: Yeah, we can—
AL: I don’t know what my final word would be.
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MW: (laughs) but those are good two pieces of advice for me today. So good. Thank you. Anything additional that you would like to have recorded. I’m sure this will be a—
AL: Doris—
MW: Doris—
AL: —what have we forgotten?
MW: Why don’t you add something, Doris, too. I’m going to just—
DJ: Don’t put the camera on me please; I’m—
MW: —just for a second.
AL: She’s worse than I am at being—
DJ: I keep thinking of things when you were speaking that I don’t think Michele would know from listening to you. Because you—I don’t think you realize really what an amazing person you are. She’s such a gentle person when you were asking her about mothering and she was just so gentle and kind. I don’t think she gives herself her due. I don’t think she recognizes how many lives truly she’s impacted.
AL: This is the one—this is the one that was the baby.
DJ: She raised me, and she has always been my best friend.
AL: I guess if you wanted us to call who were the most influential people it would be my sister; she is. This is maudlin; you don’t want to hear from us.
DJ: And don’t put that anywhere because I’m the biggest crier in the world.
MW: Well we’ll just give it to your family to use as you see fit. But that’s so special and important, and sisters know things—that means a lot.
DJ: Yeah.
MW: I just really appreciate your goodness in your life and things you have contributed to the area of state that you have been planted. You’ve bloomed where you have been planted and you have done good, good things and—
DJ: One thing she didn’t say—
MW: I really appreciate that—
DJ: —is she did lectures with the Church education system. Utah Women’s Walk: Anne 30 Leavitt
AL: I always thought I was a phony about that though. (laughter)
DJ: Oh, she’s a phony about everything you know.
MW: So what was that about?
AL: I don’t know; for a while they did lesson enrichments at BYU. It was Elaine Cannon really who got me to do that. For awhile, they did a series out in the inter-lands of the Church and I loved doing it. I did a whole year of Relief Society lessons for example. That was a great adventure. And then I got so they asked me to speak at Know Your Religion. I did feel like a fool. You know I could give a really good talk, but I was not really qualified to do that. I did it, but I was glad when we got called on a mission and I didn’t do it anymore. (laughter)
MW: You could just speak to those hundreds of missionaries
AL: That’s right. No, I could preach to missionaries. I was qualified to do that. (laughter) One of the things that was really great about being a mission mom was that I did do that. I could teach them while Dixie interviewed. He would sit down at a zone conference and think, Boy I’ve got to see him and him and him. He interviewed every missionary every month so it was a big job. I did a lot of the teaching of the skills and things, and that was great adventure for me. That Know Your Religion stuff Doris I was not—
DJ: I was so impressed by that, I was. (laughter)
AL: Well, I was too at the time, but I wasn’t really qualified.
DJ: We can’t cry because we have to go to a party tonight.
AL: Oh that’s right, we’ve got a dinner tonight, and you’ve messed up our make-up. (laughter)
MW: Well I appreciate it. As things come to your mind, make a note and we’ll talk by phone.
AL: Okay if I can think of something that will be the adage that you want.
MW: Well.
AL: I’ll do that. But I love the Book of Mormon. I didn’t say that, I really love the Book of Mormon and I love the New Testament. I love the scriptures. I love the Pearl of Great Price. If I can think of something, I will.
MW: Let me ask you one more thing. What would you like to be remembered for? If you were going to be remembered for one thing, what would you want your family or people who study your life to know about you? Utah Women’s Walk: Anne 31 Leavitt
AL: You know, I was a good woman; I loved the Lord; and my family stood strong, and they are strong.
MW: Amen to that. Thank you so much.
AL: You’ve been a delight.
MW: Well, I have just—
AL: We’ll be friends forever. (laughs)
MW: For sure. For sure. I hope so; I’m just so honored to interview you.
[01:32:52] End of interview
After the interview, Anne Leavitt added the following: I have for the past four years been an ordinance worker in the St. George temple. I love serving; it is a culminating joy.
Utah Women’s Walk: Anne 32 Leavitt