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 Sandra Rogers by Jay Corey October 28, 2013
Utah Women’s Walk
TRANSCRIPTION COVER SHEET
Interviewee: Sandra Rogers
Interviewer: Jay Corey
Place of Interview: George Sutherland Archives, UVU, Orem, Utah
Date of Interview: 28 October 2013
Recordist: Brent Seavers
Recording Equipment: Zoom Recorder H4n
Panasonic HD Video Camera AG-HM C709
Transcription Equipment: Express Scribe
Transcribed by: Brenna McFarland
Audio Transcription Edit: Lisa McMullin
Reference: SR = Sandra Rogers (Interviewee)
JC = Jay Corey (Interviewer)
MW = Michele Welch (Director, Utah Women’s Walk)
Brief Description of Contents: Sandra Rogers recalls her years growing up in a small town in Arizona, being inspired by her parents’ strength, tenacity, and faith. She shares the lessons she learned serving a mission in the Philippines for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She then details the path she took obtaining her doctorate: bachelor’s from Brigham Young University, master’s from the University of Arizona, and a doctorate from University of California San Francisco specializing in International Cross Cultural Nursing. She talks about receiving a graduate research grant from NIH to fund the work she did in Nigeria; she shares what she learned in Nigeria doing that internship for her dissertation. She recalls her surprise at being asked to be the Dean of the College of Nursing at BYU—a position in which she served for six years. Sandra shares her feelings about serving on the LDS Relief Society General Board with two presidencies. Lastly, she discusses how she balances her career, LDS Church work, and her personal life.
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
[00:00] Beginning of interview
JC: My name is Jay Corey. Today is Monday, October 28, 2013, and I am at the university— the Utah Valley University George Sutherland Archives in Orem, Utah, interviewing Sister Sandra Rogers for the purpose of the Utah Women’s Walk.1 Today we’re going to be talking about Sandra’s life and her contributions to life in the state of Utah and elsewhere.
Will you share with us your background information, where and when you were born and where did you attend school?
SR: I was born on January 18, 1952, in a little hospital in Holbrook, Arizona, and was raised in Joseph City, Arizona, which is about ten miles west of Holbrook. I went to elementary school and through the tenth grade in Joseph City, and then we were all bussed over to Holbrook High School to complete high school, so I graduated from Holbrook High School.
JC: And how far of a bus ride was it?
SR: About twelve miles as the crow flies; it had to pick up various students along the way, but it’s about twelve miles.
JC: Please tell us about your early family life including your parents, siblings, your birth order, and some of the important memories that you have from your childhood.
SR: My parents were both from northern Arizona: Orson William and Elaine Turley Rogers. My father was born in Joseph City; my mother was born in Woodruff. Both of them are little towns that were settled by Mormon pioneers.2 They met at high school in Holbrook because the Woodruff kids bussed in from Woodruff and the Joseph City kids bussed over from Joseph City, and so that’s where my parents met. They were high school sweethearts. If you look at their yearbooks, you can tell that they were already pretty serious about each other in high school. They were married during the Arizona All Church Basketball Tournament, which was held in Mesa, so they were married in the Mesa temple. And I am the oldest, and I have two younger brothers.
JC: Okay, in one of your talks you mentioned your grandmother. What kind of woman was she and how did she influence your life? What about other grandparents or ancestors?
1. Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints often address each other as Brother or Sister.
2. Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are often referred to as Mormons.
Utah Women’s Walk: Sandra Rogers 2
SR: The grandmother that I think you’re talking about is my paternal grandmother, Malinda Porter Rogers; she was a faithful woman. I have no doubt about where my grandmother is because she was such a good, good woman. She completed the eighth grade at the Church Academy in Snowflake [AZ], which was considered a reasonable education for the time, met my grandfather, and they married. When she was probably about thirty-six, her two oldest sons were—died in a drowning accident in a local—you’d hardly call it a river—but there was a pool of water that had sort of swirled itself into a deeper [pool], and her two oldest sons were drowned together. She was widowed when she was forty. So four years after her two sons drowned, my grandfather died of kidney disease. And the thing that I—so I never knew my grandfather. My grandmother did not have an easy life. She was widowed right at the end of the Depression. The elders quorum remodeled a small home that she and her children—her five children moved into, and she also took care of her widowed mother.3 And so the girls slept in the living room, and the boys slept on the porch, and my great-grandmother had a bed in the closet.
My grandmother worked hard, took in washing and ironing, the children worked and contributed to the family livelihood, and yet she was probably one of the most generous people that I know. There was always a deaf mute peddler who would come through town—we were on Route 66—selling little pins or trinkets; I still have a pin that she bought from the peddler to give to me. She had neighbors who didn’t have electricity, and she allowed them to come and use her washing machine. So she would have wash day on one day and wash all of her clothes, and then another day in the week her neighbors would come and use her washing machine to wash [their] clothes. She was never bitter. I never heard her gossip; I never heard her say anything negative about her circumstance or anyone around her. She always had a large picture of the Savior in Gethsemane; it was a copy of a [Heinrich Hofmann] painting that my grandfather had done. He was quite artistic, and he had painted this copy for her, and a [picture] of whoever the First Presidency was.4 Those two pictures were always in her home. I can remember that the only thing I ever did that really displeased her is: she thought that I spent too much time playing softball and not enough time developing my home craft skills, but she was loyal, good, honest, courageous.
JC: Sounds like a great woman. Is there one experience from your early beginnings that you think particularly prepared you for your life ahead?
SR: In some ways I think one of those experiences occurred when I was a senior in high school. My father was in a very serious car accident; it was determined later that the
3. An elders quorum in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a group of men organized to act together as a body.
4. The First Presidency is the highest-ranking governing quorum in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. The First Presidency consists of three men: the President of the Church and two counselors.
Utah Women’s Walk: Sandra Rogers 3 individual who ran into him on the two-lane road that they were on, was committing suicide by traffic accident. I can remember arriving at the hospital. We were blessed I think because the accident took place fairly close to Phoenix where they could get him to a major hospital; if he had been in northern Arizona where we only had really small hospitals without a lot of services, I think things may have been different. But he was close to a major hospital. The police came and told my mother, and my uncle drove us to Phoenix to see my father, and the doctor told my mother that he didn’t think my father would live, but that if my father lived he would never walk again. His legs were crushed from the knees down. They had done what we call an exploratory laparotomy to cut him from top to bottom because they were sure he must have internal injuries, which he did not. His arms were fractured from the elbows down. I watched my father sort of take on the challenge. He could have gone on disability if he had wanted to; he could have not gone through the hours and hours and hours of physical therapy that he went through, but my father walks on his own, no crutches. He’s eighty-four; he still moves faster than I do when we try to go somewhere. But I watched this sort of amalgam of faith and tenacity and courage and willing to keep working at it, and I think that was a very, a very significant thing in my in my upbringing—a lot about faith and work combined into the same effort.
[10:26]
JC: Who were the women you admired growing up? Did you have one particular person that influenced you or mentored you that you feel had particular influence?
SR: I was lucky enough to have a wonderful mother—a mother who was very encouraging, who was also really quite smart. My mother realized early on that I hated to do dishes, and so she realized she could get me to do almost anything else by pairing it up with: you can either do this or you can do the dishes; you can either practice the piano or you can do the dishes; you could do whatever it was she wanted me to do or do the dishes. It was a great strategy because in order to avoid doing dishes, I would do anything else that she wanted me to do.
I had great-grandmothers; I told you about one of them. My other grandmother was just a marvelous woman, had a beautiful singing voice, and I could remember the accomplishment I felt when I was good enough at the piano that I could accompany my grandmother on the piano when she would sing at wedding receptions or funerals or something like that.
I was tall early, and so that meant that in my schoolroom where sometimes we had two grades in one schoolroom, tall kids sat in the back, and I always got to sit by the bookcase, the little library. And I remember reading my way through most of the books in the library and one of the series of books—probably when I was in the fourth grade— was a series about great women. So I read about Clara Barton; I read about Harriet Tubman; I read about Molly Pitcher—all sorts of marvelous women from historical perspectives, but none of those women, while they were wonderful stories and gave me a great sense of history and accomplishment, they weren’t any more powerful than the
Utah Women’s Walk: Sandra Rogers 4 women in my regular life: my mother, my grandmothers, schoolteachers, Church women—just good, good solid women who were never looking for the limelight anywhere but just did their jobs so did what needed to be done.
JC: Tell us about your teenage years. What activities did you enjoy? I know you mentioned softball. Are there others?
SR: I grew up in a small town with a small school, which meant that everybody did everything. So I was involved with the school annual putting it together, the yearbook, the school paper, student government, class plays. I played the male lead once in Molière’s Imaginary Invalid because we didn’t have enough boys in my class to play all the parts, so I played the old hypochondriac grandfather in this story. I was in the marching band. It was a different era; we didn’t have women’s sports in high school, and so I played Church volleyball and Church softball that was organized through our stake.5 [I] spent a lot of hours shooting hoops, but never played much organized basketball, but there were ward talent shows and ward plays.6 And it just—everybody had the chance to be involved because they needed everybody to be involved. The surprise for everyone was when I was in high school and won the Betty Crocker Homemaker Award, and most of the people said this can’t be possible because she doesn’t do anything related to homemaking, and it turned out the teacher was really impressed that I could balance a checkbook and that’s why I won the homemaking award. (laughter)
MW: Jay, let me interject and ask a couple clarifying things. You were musical obviously; you played the piano. What did you play in the band?
SR: I played the alto saxophone in the marching band.
MW: Did you do band competitions? Did you go on to enjoy that in other ways?
SR: We marched in every local parade that you could possibly march in, and I think the highlight was the year our band went to the regional music festival, which was held in Flagstaff [AZ] at the time, and beat out—we were named the second best band of the competition, but we were the smallest school band in the competition. I was lucky enough that for two years I played in the Arizona All-State Band, which was a try out for all of the high school band students in Arizona, and that was a fun experience.
MW: What offices did you participate in student government? What did you do there?
5. A stake is an organizational unit in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Typically, stakes are comprised of several Latter-day Saint wards, which are the basic ecclesiastical units in the LDS Church.
6. A ward is the basic ecclesiastical unit in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Utah Women’s Walk: Sandra Rogers 5 SR: Often I was the class president or the class representative to the student council or a club president. I was the secretary to the student body association when I was in high school in Holbrook.
JC: Tell us about your young adult years, receiving your undergraduate degree. What were some circumstances that led you to pursue the nursing as a career. I know you mentioned your father.
SR: You know that’s an interesting question because I had a high school counselor who suggested that I go into nursing, and I said, “Not on your life.” (laughs) And so I went to BYU [Brigham Young University] and had thought that I wanted to teach English. I loved to read, and I thought that was a natural connection. As part of the required course of study for teaching English, I had to take a speech class, and in this speech class I discovered how poorly I spoke that I had a—I can remember the teacher telling me that with my accent everybody would think that I had very low IQ. It was a miserable experience, and when I nearly failed this English—this speech class—I came out of there thinking, Well if I can’t speak English, I guess I can’t teach English; I better think of something else. So I thought, I’ll teach biology instead. So I pursued a track in biology, a track there. And then one day I was sitting in the Martin building on the BYU campus, and I had this flashback to my high school biology class, and the way the guys would squirt water with the hoses and try to flame up the girls’ hair with the Bunsen burners, and all of that kind of thing, and I thought, I don’t want to do that.
So I went to my apartment; I prayed about it. I said, “Well I don’t know what to do.” And I started in the BYU catalog with A—I don’t remember if it was accounting or whatever—and I went through every major in the BYU catalog, turning pages until I came to nursing, and I couldn’t turn the pages anymore, and I said, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” Nope, that was it. Luckily enough, many of my science classes were applicable for the nursing program, and I got into the nursing program, and that was the course I took. So I hadn’t dreamt to be a nurse; I didn’t play with nurse kits when I was a young girl; I didn’t even read Cherry Ames student nurse books.7 I hadn’t really thought about doing it at all, and the interesting thing is, when I left the mission field, my mission president said to me, “I don’t really think you’re ever going to really be a nurse.”8 And by then I had graduated from nursing school, and I kept thinking, What kind of thing is that to say? But in the end I haven’t done a lot of what a person might consider traditional hospital, hospital nursing. But it’s been a very good field for me; I’ve been very grateful for that decision.
7. Cherry Ames is a series of hospital mystery books written by Helen Wells.
8. A mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is a geographical area to which Latter-day Saint missionaries are assigned. They participate in proselyting, church service, and humanitarian aid. A mission president oversees and directs the missionaries within a particular mission.
Utah Women’s Walk: Sandra Rogers 6 JC: You served as a missionary for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Philippines. What are some of your fondest memories there? What did you learn and how did these experiences impact your life?
SR: I think the most important thing I learned in the mission field is to do whatever you’re asked to do and things will work out. I had not had a really wonderful experience as a public health student nurse; it was probably one of the most difficult nursing classes that I took. And the Church had just come out with its health missionary program, and so I was dumb enough to tell my stake president to put on that application she doesn’t want to be a health missionary.9 You know, like I’m going to tell the prophet what I’m going to do.10
So I got the mission call, and I was called to Brazil as a health missionary, and I really struggled with that, but ended up finally feeling comfortable: I’ll go where you want me to go kind of thing. I had not received my visa by the time I finished the language training in Provo, so I was sent to the New York City mission to wait for a visa. I had a tropical Brazilian wardrobe, and it was January, February, and March, and I was in Manchester, Connecticut, and it was cold, but I learned a lot about domestic missionary experiences, and I gained a great appreciation for missionaries who serve in domestic circumstances or in places where people may not be excited to have their children hear missionaries speak English, and that’s why they’ve invited you to come in and teach them a lesson.
Three months after being in Connecticut, I received a call one night from the mission president who said that the missionary department had contacted him and they were inquiring if I would be willing to change my mission assignment to the Philippines. And so I ended up transferring out of the New York City mission in Manchester, Connecticut, to Manila in the Philippines. I arrived there and thought I was going to be a health missionary; I was finally converted to the idea of being a health missionary; and our mission president had us proselyting almost all the time. Every experience was a good one. I learned a great deal throughout all of those transitions and wouldn’t trade any of them. If you just do what the Lord asks you to do, then everything will be okay; it really doesn’t matter, even if you’ve imagined something after He’s asked you to one thing, everything works out for the best if you do what you’re asked to do.
MW: I’m sorry to keep interjecting but I have to ask this, did you learn Portuguese first and then—
SR: Yes so I—well I wouldn’t say I learned it; I had two months of mission Portuguese. And at the time, there were two health mission places where you could speak English—so that I wouldn’t have had to try to learn a second language, and those two English-speaking
9. A stake president is an ecclesiastical leader who presides over several Latter-day Saint wards (congregations).
10. The prophet is the President of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Utah Women’s Walk: Sandra Rogers 7 health missionary opportunities were in the Philippines or in the Holbrook Arizona Mission, so.
JC: I’m assuming you feel strongly about education; you graduated from BYU, received a master’s degree from the University of Arizona and a Ph.D. from the University of California San Francisco, specializing in International Cross Cultural Nursing. Will you tell us about those experiences and why you felt a need to pursue higher education and how do you feel about women in education in general?
[24:58]
SR: I should share with you that I did have an aunt who was quite troubled about my graduate education, and so she used to tell my mother, “What kind of strange girl are you raising? Why doesn’t she just get married; instead she just keeps going to school.” And my mother said, “Well, what did you want her to do, become a ward of the state?” So my mother defended my educational choices. Is it possible to say you ended up doing something almost by accident?
When I graduated from BYU, I had no intention of going to graduate school; it didn’t even enter my mind. It was—I appreciated the education that I had, and I think I would have been a lifelong learner because I do like to learn, and I’m a strong proponent that women—I follow Brigham Young: if you’re going to choose who to educate, educate your daughters because they’ll educate your grandchildren. I really feel that it’s important for women to have an education and to be articulate about the things that are important to them, but I hadn’t planned on graduate school. So I am working nights at Utah Valley Hospital as a nurse, and the nurse’s aide I was working with, Susanne Carrol, was interested in going to nursing school, and so if it was quiet and all the patients were asleep then she would say, “Explain this, teach me about this.” So I would explain something or we would talk about a principle that you use in nursing care, and one night she said, “You would be a really good teacher.” And that was the first time I had even thought about teaching nursing instead of doing nursing.
I thought about it more and more and ended up deciding that that’s what I wanted to do and so went to the University of Arizona for my master’s degree, applied for positions at Rexburg at Rick’s College, at BYU, and at Northern Arizona University. Northern Arizona didn’t have an opening; I probably would have taken it if they had because they’re only seventy miles from where I grew up, and so I ended up accepting a contract at BYU. Two weeks after I’d signed, Northern Arizona University wrote back to me and said, We’ve got an opening, but by then I had already committed, and I came to BYU and enjoyed it.
I enjoyed teaching nursing students, liked having the clinical experiences with them, and one day the dean of the nursing school at the time, Elaine Dyer, came to my office and said, “Do you like what you’re doing?” And I said, “Yes.” She said, “If you want to keep doing that, you’ll need to get a doctorate.” And so that’s how I ended up making the decision to go for further education. So sometimes I don’t look like I planned it very well
Utah Women’s Walk: Sandra Rogers 8 because it just seems like at certain moments there was some sort of environmental personal interaction that kind of pushed me in the direction of graduate school.
JC: You served as dean of BYU’s College of Nursing for six years. Did that appointment come as a surprise to you? How have you felt about administrative work at the university level?
SR: It was a surprise. When I was in San Francisco, the dean of BYU at the time had suggested that I take administrative classes, and I said, “Well, that’s dumb because I’m never going to do that. I would rather be a teacher and have influence. Administrators don’t have influence; they just push paper; and I’d rather have influence.” When I finished my doctoral program, I taught one semester and became her associate dean. I did not have any administrative background or experience. And when I became the dean, I was called over to the president’s office at BYU and offered the position, and I could think of about ten people that would have been great deans, and so it was very humbling experience. It was a time I had a steep learning curve; I had a lot to learn. I made some mistakes; I had to overcome those mistakes. I had to learn and do things better, but I was very grateful for the experience.
One of my friends who is in administration said, “See now you’ve learned that administrators make it possible for other people to do good work.” And I think that’s what I learned about administration. When you’re in an academic environment, it’s your peers. It’s not the army; it’s not where you’re the general and you just command other people to do things. When you’re in academia, you have to try to move people together and have them come to common consensus and achieve goals that they all want together, not goals that you’ve imposed on them, and so you’re constantly balancing your commitment and set of standards and your values with the fact that you have to go together in doing it. You’ve got to bring people along together and help each person achieve success in what they’re trying to do.
MW: Jay, before we—I’m sorry to keep interjecting here, but before we leave this time of your life—so you left BYU to go to California to get your Ph.D.—
SR: That’s right.
MW: How long did it take you? Did you move there and stay there, not work?
SR: I worked at the University of California at San Francisco. I worked as an R.A. and a T.A., sometimes having two or three R.A., T.A. jobs at a time. I was there for about three and a half years. The last year I was not in San Francisco, but I was in Nigeria where I did the research for my dissertation. So I left in the fall of ’84 and came back in the winter of ’88.
MW: Was it difficult to leave and go on your own like that? You’d been on a mission; I guess you have that experience.
Utah Women’s Walk: Sandra Rogers 9 SR: It was probably—I would have to say one of the more challenging things. Going to Tucson didn’t seem to be a challenge because I was going home to Arizona, even though northern Arizona is about a five-hour drive between where I grew up and Tucson, I felt like I was going home. It seemed familiar to me. But when I contemplated doctoral work, a faculty member gave me good advice. She said, “You should think about the thing you’ve enjoyed most in nursing and pursue that for your doctorate because that’s what you’ll be doing for the rest of your life.” And when I thought about it, the thing that I had enjoyed most was the work I’d done as a health missionary in the Philippines, and so I wanted to go to a location with an international focus, and at the time in nursing school, that left me with two options: the University of Utah or the University of California San Francisco. I was not married, and so I didn’t have a circumstance where my family was sort of here in Utah County, and I had learned from an accreditation experience that it’s good for there to be diversity among faculty members and their educational backgrounds. And so I thought—and besides that, I’m Cougar Blue through and through—and so I thought San Francisco’s the better option. But I can remember driving to Wendover and then to Battle Mountain, and then on to the coast, and the feelings that were inside [were], this was going to be a very new and interesting thing.
I didn’t know if I was going to be capable. I didn’t want to embarrass my family, and I also didn’t want to embarrass BYU who was giving me a leave of absence to go. And I had, I think, heavenly intervention. I was at a get-together before school started and a fellow student in my class came up and said to me, “Would you like to be part of my study group?” And I thought, Sure. And it ended up this was a great study group. We really helped each other; we read each other’s papers; we talked over principles and things; we were learning in class; we worked through things; we practiced giving presentations to each other. That study group made it so much easier, and I ended up enjoying my experience at San Francisco. They were a WHO Cooperating Center, so we had lots of international nursing experts and international students who went to school there. We had a visiting professor whose family had been Christian missionaries in India; she’d been raised in India, but her parents had sent her back to Columbia University for three degrees. She knew more about international nursing and development than anyone on the faculty. I happened to have a faculty member there who connected with the International Council of Nurses; that’s how I got the opportunity to do my research in Nigeria. So everything came together, but I have to admit I felt like I was far away from anything familiar when I left to go to San Francisco.
MW: Tell us about your dissertation and that work in Nigeria. Would you like to tell it later or is this a good time for you to tell us about that?
SR: At that particular time there was a great interest among world healthcare organizations on something that was called primary healthcare, and the idea was that perhaps developed nations were pushing an acute care model. I think if you look at statistical reports of where healthcare dollars are spent in the United States—we spend an inordinate amount of our money on acute care in the last two weeks of life or the first two weeks of life with major intensive care kinds of operations for both infants and adults, and the idea behind primary healthcare was that this might not be a model that translates well for other
Utah Women’s Walk: Sandra Rogers 10 countries, instead we should be focusing on prevention. We should focus on treatment of endemic diseases that are common in that particular area, and that really intrigued me. It had a lot of principles with it that sort of fit what we had done as health missionaries— worked a lot with prevention and public health and epidemiology and those kinds of things. And so I wanted to do my research work on this concept and how nurses fit into the primary healthcare. And it just so happened the dean of the nursing school became an officer in the International Council of Nurses. She recommended one of her faculty members who was an expert in evaluation research as a consultant; he was a great evaluation research methodology expert, but he didn’t know anything about primary healthcare, and the dean said, “We’ve got a graduate student who’s been studying primary healthcare for two years; you two should get together.”
We did. It was magic. He helped me write a grant to NIH [National Institutes of Health], and I received a graduate research grant from NIH to fund the work I did in Nigeria, so I went off to Nigeria to study how nurses integrate in primary healthcare and prevention. We had a quasi-experimental design; we compared two villages: one where the nurses had a constant presence; they were making home visits; they were doing teaching; [and] one where the nurses came at the beginning of the project and didn’t show up again until the end. So I did the work to compare the data that we had on individual families, and what my work showed was that we could see progress and indentified health problems when the nurses were regular visitors with families. We didn’t have any money; they didn’t distribute any food supplements; they didn’t distribute any pharmaceuticals; they didn’t have anything that they could bring to the table except their experience and their knowledge in that they could make a difference without having to have a big huge outside budget in this little test village where they were. So that was the work that I did in Nigeria. It was a great experience. Nigerians believe in federal character; that means your work has to represent different portions of the country, so I spent time in the north, which is a basically Muslim part of Nigeria. I spent time in the west, which is about half Christian and half Muslim and then a lot of time in the east, which is more predominantly Christian. I learned a lot about colonial Africa. I learned a lot about dedicated people. These nurses really did an incredible, incredible job. They weren’t bringing extra things; they were just being who they were with the education that they had.
[42:12]
JC: With your massive humanitarian aid work in countries like the Philippines and Nigeria, what other countries were there that you did that and are there particular people that you have served that you have become close to?
SR: Yes, I keep in touch with one of my nursing friends from Nigeria quite often. I keep in touch with several of the nurses that I worked with in the project. I did some evaluation work for USAID [U.S. Agency for International Development] in Jordan, which was another marvelous experience. Jordan was a small country, still is a small country. When I first went there, I was probably able to become acquainted with most of the significant nursing leaders in the country. So several years later, when President Rex Lee at BYU signed an agreement with the University of Jordan, and he was looking for BYU people
Utah Women’s Walk: Sandra Rogers 11 who could sort of follow up on that agreement in Jordan—we had a cooperative agreement for quite some time between the College of Nursing at BYU and the University of Jordan. We had faculty who did joint research with their faculty. We had some student programs. And I came to really appreciate my Jordanian colleagues like I came to appreciate my Nigerian colleagues. We’ve stayed in touch; we commiserate about conditions in the Middle East. And if our hope is—halfway through the time I had been in Jordan, Jordan and Israel signed a peace agreement, and all of a sudden the Palestinians who lived in Jordan could easily go back to the West Bank. They didn’t have to drive up through—my friends who were from Lebanon didn’t have to drive through Syria to get to Lebanon; they could go through the corner of Israel to get home. There was so much hope, so much hope—is just the future could be better; we don’t have to be constantly at ill will with each other. And then we’ve watched the slide into the much more combative situation with a great deal of mistrust on both sides. But it’s been good to stay in touch with them, watch their children grow up, watch them marry, learn what good people they are, how much they care about their families.
That’s the thing I’ve noticed wherever I’ve been. People want good things for their families; they want them to be educated; they want their children to be educated; they’d like a peaceful circumstance so that their children and their grandchildren can have economic opportunities and take care of each other. I think it showed me that across cultures and languages and religions, we really do almost always want the same kinds of things for our families.
JC: Where do you feel the greatest humanitarian need [is] in the world today and why and what can regular people do to relieve suffering of those in foreign countries?
SR: I don’t believe the greatest humanitarian need is more money. We have a lot of good documentation [on] almost how poorly the millions of dollars that have been given, not just by the United States but by other developed countries—how it really hasn’t changed a lot of what we call the vital statistics, so I go back to principles that at least in my faith tradition I think work a lot better. We’re not going to have change until people’s hearts change, until we don’t have selfishness, until we don’t have a feeling that some people can be exploited and that some people are entitled to exploit others.
I see a much greater effort in sustainable things. When I was in Nigeria, we went to a location near the capitol, and this beautiful bridge extended out over the water, I don’t know, one hundred yards. I don’t know exactly how far it was, and then [it] just dropped off; it was a bridge to nowhere. And I said, “Well, what about this bridge?” Well, it was started through a development project funded by a foreign government; it ran out of money. The Nigerians couldn’t continue to take care of the costs, so it just sort of stood there—a bridge to nowhere. And I think we’re learning that sometimes when we put a lot of money into something—a lot of outside funding—we didn’t have buy-in from local people or what we were trying to do was contrary to local tribal conditions, those kinds of things, things didn’t happen very well. But I see now a greater attention to working with people, to doing sustainable kinds of projects that involve local people, and it’s more
Utah Women’s Walk: Sandra Rogers 12 empowering. It’s—and I think that’s working a little bit better, and that’s been good to see.
One of my professors in San Francisco said, “Well, the best thing we could do would be to have forced redistribution of wealth.” I don’t believe that that’s true, but I believe that when people feel like they’re making a contribution to their own development, they’re invested in it, and they work harder at it, and it starts to make a difference.
JC: Currently and not surprisingly, you are serving as the international vice president at Brigham Young University. What does this job entail and how has it been rewarding to you?
SR: Well, it’s another one of those accidents you wonder how you get [into]. I was just minding my business in the nursing school when I was asked to take the job that I have now at BYU. I’ve had professors in other disciplines wonder why a nurse was put in charge of that because usually it’s political science people or language people, and I think the only thing I bring to the table is my experience as a welfare missionary. And I’ve found that the principles of sustainability, those kinds of things that I learned in my work in the welfare program, are pretty good for universities too. So my current position, I’m responsible for BYU’s activities outside the country with the exception of the Jerusalem Center; I’m not responsible for the Jerusalem Center. But this includes all of our study abroad programs, ever since 9/11; it’s included travel security. We’re preparing people. If we’re making good assessments about the security and safety situation when our people travel—it includes performing arts management, which is the office that does the logistics for the BYU performing groups who go out on tour, and then we’re responsible for international agreements with other universities with exchange programs, and we also host international guests to campus. And then in addition to those international things, I have the division of continuing education.
JC: Wow. You have served on the LDS General Relief Society Board with two presidencies: Sister Beck’s and Sister Burton’s.11 Will you talk about this experience and what you have learned? What have been your responsibilities on those boards?
SR: I think there’s a verse in the Doctrine and Covenants section 1 about the weak and simple.12 My service on that board is a demonstration of how the Lord will sometimes call the weak and the simple to do things that are—I was the weak and simple one, but I
11. The General Relief Society Board is comprised of Latter-day Saint women who help carry out the worldwide responsibilities and duties of the general Relief Society presidency. The Relief Society is the official women's organization of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Julie B. Beck was the general Relief Society president from 2007 to 2012. As of the date on this transcript, Linda K. Burton is the current general Relief Society president.
12. The Doctrine and Covenants is part of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint’s scriptural canon.
Utah Women’s Walk: Sandra Rogers 13 can see how the mantle of responsibility was on Sister Beck in her administration and fell then on Sister Burton as she began her administration. They are remarkably dedicated women. It is a learning; it’s like being at the Oxford University of learning about service to work under their direction. Basically the great assignment in Sister Beck’s presidency was her assignment to get Daughters in My Kingdom, the book about the history and the work of the Relief Society, published and out in I think about twenty-five languages. About 98 percent of the women of the Church could read it in a language that they speak, and this is a marvelous contribution for the women of the LDS Church to have this wonderful volume available to all of them. Sister Burton has built on that stage that Sister Beck laid in that work and is doing a marvelous job. Her focus is not on Daughters in My Kingdom because it’s there, but her administration is now picking up and emphasizing principles that I think will bless the lives of women in the Church. And as board members we do whatever they ask us to do. (laughs)
[54:34]
MW: Tell us about when you were called to the general board and then what work you do for the Relief Society. Is one of the assignments being a liaison with the university and the Church with the women’s conference?13 It seems like there was a shift at some point where the Relief Society general presidency became more involved with women’s conference?
SR: The BYU Women’s Conference began as a student-designed and run program, and as it grew, it went through a variety of homes at BYU until it landed in the division of continuing education. It was in—I’m thinking early nineties, give or take a little bit, late eighties—that the Relief Society became a cosponsor. So the cosponsorship and the relationship between BYU Women’s Conference and the Relief Society began long before I was asked to chair the BYU Women’s Conference Committee. And I had worked—I had been on the committee for four years prior to being asked to take the chairship, and I had been the chair for about seven years before I was asked to—called to the Relief Society General Board, so I had worked with Sister Parkin and her presidency, had worked a little bit with Sister Smoot and her presidency.14 You’re called just about like—you get a phone call to come to the Church Office Building or now it’s the Church Administration Building, 47 East South Temple, to visit with one of the members of the Twelve who invites you to accept a calling on the Relief Society board.15 So Elder Hales
13. Michele refers to BYU Women’s Conference.
14. Bonnie Dansie Parkin was the LDS general Relief Society president from 2002 to 2007. Mary Ellen Wood Smoot was the LDS general Relief Society president from 1997 to 2002.
15. Sandra refers to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles; the Quorum of Twelve Apostles consists of twelve men who constitute the second-highest presiding quorum in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Utah Women’s Walk: Sandra Rogers 14 was the member of the Twelve who called me to Sister Beck’s board, and Elder Andersen was the member of the Twelve who called me to Sister Burton’s board.16
JC: What is it like to chair the massive BYU Women’s Conference and how long have you been over this conference and what are some of the rewards and challenges that have gone along with this responsibility?
SR: Well, we’re preparing the twelfth one that I’ve been the chair of; we’re working on that right now. If you didn’t know that you were going to have about seventeen hundred people work their socks off, you wouldn’t take the job. So first of all, you assemble a committee of remarkable women who are willing to make all kinds of sacrifices, to come to meetings, to do work outside the meetings, to help generate a program, to make recommendations for people who would be speakers, and you take this group of say fifteen to twenty women, and you just work them into a state of near exhaustion, and they pull together a program. And then you have about two hundred people who are willing to be speakers, and they’re willing to do all the preparation and take all the time and effort to prepare to be speakers. Then you have about fifteen hundred people who help to carry off the work of the conference; they either help prepare the service event or they help host people and show them around and take care of them while they’re at the conference. And then you add all of the BYU people who have to go out of their way like the grounds people and the guy who puts in more toilet paper and paper towels in all the bathrooms during the conference and the police who help keep women from parking on people’s lawns next to campus and all those kinds of things. And so in the end, you feel like a miracle happened. But you know that it happened because of the work and the faith of all of these other people who are associated with it, and sometimes it’s like an out-of-body experience. You just stand back and sort of like Moses with his staff at the Red Sea, and you just sort of stand back and see the glory of the Lord revealed and how these people make it work, and I just sort of push paper and answer the telephone once in a while, and all of these other people make it work, and they’re dedicated enough and loyal enough and want to serve enough, that they’re willing to do all of that work, and then we give them a canvas bag and say, Thank you very much, and a coupon for some fudge. And look what they’ve done; they’ve just done magic. It’s really incredible, and it’s a tribute to the women that we have here along the Wasatch Front; that’s what I really believe. They’re the creative muses; I ran out of creative ideas about ten years ago; and if it wasn’t for the women who serve on that committee, the men and women who are willing to speak, the sisters who do the preparation for the service event, it wouldn’t come off. So I give all the—I give the credit to heaven, and I give the rest of the credit to those good women who are willing to help.
JC: How do you balance your Church callings, career, and personal life? And do you ever feel overwhelmed?
16. As of the date on this transcript, both Robert D. Hales and Neil L. Andersen are members of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Utah Women’s Walk: Sandra Rogers 15 SR: Mostly I feel overwhelmed and inadequate, and what are all the other words that we use to describe our circumstances? And so I tell people that I try to keep the sieve from having too wide a gauge so that the really important things fall through; I try to have the sieve tight enough that I catch the most important things. I’ve learned to live with a lot of dust; I’ve learned to live with a lot of cobwebs. I don’t ask anybody to eat off my floor because it could be a public health circumstance, but I remember President Eyring saying that you wake up in the morning with a prayer for help and you go to bed at night with a prayer of thanksgiving and you did the best you could and you leave the rest in the Lord’s hands and that’s about how I feel.17 I miss things; I don’t get everything done. And even what I get done is sometimes not done in a timely fashion. Let me put it that way, but I feel blessed because I feel like my capacity has been increased, but that’s heaven working on my behalf. It’s not because I’m any smarter; it’s because I feel like I get a lot of help. And you asked me what I did for fun?
JC: Yeah.
SR: I read, I yell and scream at sporting events; I do enjoy that. I’m reasonably good at taking care of a yard. I have a little puppy who thinks that I’m pretty good no matter what. I think I was raised by parents who had the philosophy that if you’re bored, it’s your fault, so I’ve been able to find a lot of pleasure in pretty simple, pretty simple things.
MW: Are there any favorite books that you’ve had that have changed your life or that you’ve really enjoyed?
SR: Once we had a Relief Society social where we were supposed to share one of our favorite books, and the book I took was The Hiding Place by Corrie ten Boom. I read a lot of history; I read a lot of biography. I just finished a book about the queen mother, Queen Elizabeth’s mother who is also an Elizabeth. When I was growing up, my—we’d discuss something in the news, and I would ask a question, “Well, why is it this way?” And my parents would say, Well why don’t you look that up in the encyclopedia? And it’s still something that happens a lot. I went to see the airplane version of The King’s Speech, and I was so curious about all of that, when it was over I read about four books on George VI and how he had come to the throne and his circumstances. It’s hard for me to pick a favorite, but I read Corrie ten Boom’s book The Hiding Place when I was quite young, and it was an impressive book to me. I loved David McCullough’s John Adam’s biography; I think that’s a great book.
JC: Okay. Are there any words of wisdoms, scriptures, mottos, or maxims that you have lived your life by?
SR: It’d be hard for me to pick one. It would be hard for me to pick one. What seems to happen to me is that I could have read, say the scriptures—let’s pick the scriptures— several times, and then I’m in the middle of some kind of circumstance, and I’ll be
17. As of the date on this transcript, Henry B. Eyring is a member of the First Presidency in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Utah Women’s Walk: Sandra Rogers 16 reading along, and the answer or the advice or the encouragement will be there, and I thought—and I will think, I never noticed that before; I never noticed that before. And I think there is a verse about the Lord will give us what we need in the time that we need it, and I really believe that.
When I became the dean and I thought a lot about what was facing me, I thought a lot about words; I thought about words like courage, about consistent, about congruent. I taught Sunday School to teenagers one year. It seemed like every lesson was about stay away from hypocrisy, and it was really interesting to me how important it is to have your behavior be congruent with your belief pattern—so courage, consistency, being congruent, being willing to work hard—but it’s hard for me to say that I’ve had a particular motto or a signature verse of scripture. I do believe the—I do believe that if we’re—maybe the signature scripture that I have turned to most often—I love Isaiah 53: All we like sheep who have gone astray and yet he’s taken our stripes upon him. I love that whole chapter, Isaiah 53; I love Isaiah. I think it’s sixty-one; it’s the same set of verses that Jesus uses to introduce himself as the Savior where He says He’s come to free those that are in bondage, to set the captives free. I’ve thought about all the ways that we become captive: sometimes by our own choices, sometimes by the choices of others, or circumstances that we’re in. I love 1 Nephi 14:14 about the covenant people of the Lord being armed with righteousness.18
So there are a lot of them and they, I seem to find more of them when I’m facing a certain circumstance that—for example, my mother is declining with Alzheimer’s, and so we’re losing her, piece by piece. It’s not just her memory; as you know with Alzheimer’s, it’s starting to take away her personality. I have read the Book of Mormon a number of times about the Resurrection about everything being restored to its perfect frame, and all the years before when I had read it, I saw as that well if you lost your leg in the war, great, if you lost your hair—I came from a family of men who have lost hair—but this time when I read it, it was the reassurance that my mother’s personality and everything that she is, that has been taken away because of the Alzheimer’s would be restored. And it was just a comfort, a comfort to me like you couldn’t imagine, that I could trust, that this circumstance my mother finds herself in now is not an everlasting circumstance.
[01:12:17]
JC: If you are comfortable sharing with us, what do you feel has been the most significant trial in your life? How have you worked to overcome it?
SR: The trial or the thorn in my side, which one? (laughter)
JC: I’ll let you pick.
18. Sandra refers to verses found in the Book of Mormon; the Book of Mormon is part of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saint’s scriptural canon.
Utah Women’s Walk: Sandra Rogers 17
MW: Both, both.
SR: I think I have the same thorn that a lot of people have; we feel sometimes inadequate to face our circumstances. And no matter how many times we get bailed out of our previous circumstances or we can look back and feel that we’ve been helped, feel that our prayers have been answered, feel that if we worked hard, that combination of help from heaven and our own work, and then we turn the corner, and we face a new one, and then suddenly we’re thinking, Well, you know, I guess maybe I’m not worthy of help this time. I think we all—I think a lot of people struggle with that. I didn’t feel adequate to be an associate dean, so you can imagine what I felt when I became a dean or when I became a vice president. I thought, I’m just “Peter Principle-ing” myself right out of my competency zone here. And so you have to go back and sort of recenter on the very principles that got you through the first time, but there isn’t a new challenge that doesn’t seem to resurrect in your mind, Well, I guess this is the time I’ve finally reached the end. I can’t ask for help; I’ve asked for help too many times before. So I’m coming to understand grace a lot better because of that, and I think because of that I’m willing to extend my own personal grace so to speak, and I don’t equalize that divine grace, but I’m more willing to work with other people, to not have a judgment or an expectation that is—and to be willing to say, “I think you tried hard, and that’s good and keep working on this.” And that’s been a blessing, but it’s been slow in coming. I feel bad that I had to— it’s taken me sixty-one years to come to that place, but I feel that—I feel that that’s probably one of the most important things I’ve learned, and it’s handling my own thorn so to speak. You know, I go to 2 Nephi. Is it chapter 4? Psalm of Nephi: O wretched man that I am.19 I hit that on a fairly regular basis, but like Nephi—but at the end I have to say He’s helped me out this time; He’s going to help me out again if I just work on it.
I think in terms of an outside circumstance, I’ve had some circumstance where relationships that are important to me between people that are important to me, have been difficult and strained, and I find that the challenge of work, the challenge of service, the challenge of a dissertation, the challenge of women’s conference, any of the kinds of things that we’re trying to do, pales in comparison to the energy you expend worrying about relationships between the people that you love and care about. You want them to be healed up; you want them to be good whether it’s relationships in your family, relationships with other people that you love and care about. And yet they have agency; they can make choices. You can’t force them into healing their relationship; we sure spend a lot of time and hope and prayer because of the desire that you have for those relationships to be healed. The rest of it’s easy; I’d do a dissertation five hundred times before I would, oh.
JC: You gave a talk at BYU’s Women’s Conference where you were talking about how women often magnify their weaknesses and how through the help of the Savior they can be made into strengths. Have you been able to turn a weakness to a strength in your life?
19. Sandra refers to verses found in the Book of Mormon.
Utah Women’s Walk: Sandra Rogers 18 SR: I think that I’ve been able to manage one. I’m very—do you know about the Meyers- Briggs personality inventory? Have you heard of it? One of the things I liked about it is that its introverted-extroverted scale is more about where you draw your energy from than whether you like people or not. I’m a very introverted person on the Meyers-Briggs scale; I score about as far out on the introverted scale that you can score and still be a talking, breathing, human being; I’m way, way out there. So my natural preference is to be very unpublic, and I just keep getting these assignments that are quite public. I have gradually been able to manage that. It’s a tendency—my tendency is to stay introverted, but over time I’ve been able to manage it. I also believe that sometimes things that you think are strengths if you focus on them so much or you rely on them so much or you build them up so much they become a weakness.
I think Elder Oaks gave a talk about that very topic.20 I’m a very responsible person; I’m an oldest child. I think a lot of the self-esteem that I experienced early in my life was for being responsible, and so I have had to learn to weigh out of sometimes feeling responsible because I might take on responsibilities that I shouldn’t have. I can remember a friend telling me once, “I know you’re trying to protect me; I know you’re trying to help me; but you, as you try to assume—you can’t be responsible for me; you have to give me space for me to be responsible for myself.” And so when my assignments in my working experience, I’ve had to learn to dial back my personal sense of responsibility, that everything that I couldn’t automatically fix something if I just figure out how to do it in the right way, but somehow I could have forty people agree with me when I was the dean if I just figure out how to present it in the right kind of way. And so I have had to sort of dial back, keep all the good parts of being responsible, but dial back the part that says well if they’re unhappy or they don’t like that then you must need to fix something because if you could be magically perfect, no one would ever have cause to disagree or something like that.
Or like I said, these relationships that you pray so much about, I’d like to be responsible and go in there and have it magically all work, but I’ve learned that I can’t. I can’t do that, and so in having patience, that develops a different type of strength where being responsible is a strength, but being supportive of other people while they learn their own sense of responsibility becomes maybe even a greater strength at some time. I think that’s pretty philosophical. (laughter) I wish I could tell you that it was climbing Mount Everest or yanking a handcart across the plains.
You know, there was one time when I was facing a really difficult circumstance, and I can remember thinking, I was born in the wrong era, if only I had been born during the handcart era I could—because my mother always said, “You’re a big strong girl.” I could have yanked that handcart all the way across the plains. And I was thinking that during this awful time just, you know, I was born one hundred years too late or something like that. And I had a dream, and I’m standing in the crossbar of the handcart, and I looked back and in the handcart with these labels on them were all of these things that I was
20. As of the date on this transcript, Dallin H. Oaks is a member of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Utah Women’s Walk: Sandra Rogers 19 worrying about, and the answer in the dream was, “You are pulling a handcart; it just looks like that stuff instead of—you’re not pulling a Dutch oven and blankets and things like that in your handcart; you’re pulling all of these other things.” So there were times when I thought, Oh just give me physical labor; I’ll take physical labor. (laughter) That didn’t seem to be the answer; the answer was you have to face what you’re facing; that’s the stuff in your handcart today.
MW: Have you always had really good health? Always been strong and healthy? Have you had any challenges?
SR: The only health challenge that I think is enough to worry about—I have familial osteoarthritis. We have a long history of osteoarthritis in my family, and you add that to I have a number of injuries as I played softball, volleyball, basketball, you name it, as a kid, and then I got a very sedentary job and put on a lot of weight, and I just wore my knees to pieces. There was a time when I would measure everything I did by how many steps I had to take because they hurt so much. I was taking so much Celebrex and then it went off the market, and I was taking twelve to sixteen aspirin a day, and I just felt really limited, really limited. The best thing I did was have my knees replaced, and that gave me a new lease on life I’ve probably. I don’t think I’ve taken an aspirin since then for my knees. I don’t count how far do I have to walk anymore. The surgery and the first few weeks I thought I’d made a terrible mistake; I wanted to give up. I thought, This is it. I don’t—I made the dumbest choice I could have made; I should have stayed with what I had. And then it sort of came up over the crest and things started working, and I thought, How blessed I am to live in an age when they can dream up things like total knees. So other than that, I think my health has really been pretty good.
[01:26:47]
JC: If you have any free time—you most likely don’t have much—what do you like to do? Any hobbies or things you enjoy? I think you already mentioned reading books—
SR: I like to read; I like music; I like plays and movies. I have several families who are close to me who allow me the privilege of enjoying their children, so I can be an aunt and a grandmother. And it’s—I’m really grateful to people who have let me into their family circumstances so that I can have some of those opportunities. That’s probably what I spend my free time doing. I do yard work not because I’m a real green-thumb gardener type, but because I do like to—I do really well with the yard work until about August and then it seems like I just fall off the table and things get busy. But I can contribute to some missionary funds. I have some kids who come and help me do that, but it’s good—I like to be out. I really like ironing; of all the household chores there are I would iron. Dishes are still hard, but I’ve learned that if I get up from the table and go right in and do the dishes, it works a lot better. But of all the household chores there are I think ironing is my favorite.
JC: What would you like to accomplish or do in the future?
Utah Women’s Walk: Sandra Rogers 20 SR: I have—Elijah’s bothering me so I think I have a lot of family history things that I need to do. I want to write about my hometown, sort of in an Anne of Green Gables kind of way: some interesting characters and old traditions that existed when I was younger that time has changed them, but I want to document them and write about them. Almost all of my ancestors come from England. I have one lone Swiss great-grandmother, so I would like to see the part of Switzerland where she came from, and then I would like to spend some time in England seeing those places. I’d like to—I think I could be really good at running a mission office somewhere. I’d like to—but I’ll do whatever they need me to do. I’d like to serve a mission when I retire; maybe more than one, I think it would be fun.
JC: We want to thank you for your time.
SR: Thank you, Jay.
[01:30:19]
[01:31:19]
MW: There are a couple of questions that we ask everyone. One of them is what advice would you give to younger women in Utah, not just in the nursing field. You could give specific advice to those who are nurses or in administration or higher education, but just in general with all the perspective and experience you’ve had over the years with women’s conference—if you could give any advice what would that be? It’s a hard question I know; you probably have a whole litany of bullet points you’d like to make.
SR: I would like to see them get in touch with the strengths of women who have really contributed in our history here in Utah, and you think about the ones we know and the ones we don’t know. I used to tell people in the nursing school, “Better keep a journal because the only thing we know about the trip across the plains came from Patty Sessions’s journal, but she can only have one opinion about what happened, but because no one else kept one, we have Patty Sessions’s journal.”21 But I think about the early women who settled here, not just LDS women—the sisters who ran St. Benedict’s for example in Ogden—so not just LDS women, but they seem to know who they were. They had a great understanding of who they were; they had a great understanding of what they wanted to accomplish like the sisters who got together to start the Cottonwood Maternity Hospital. They saw a need, and they figured out how to meet the need. I think about our early Utah sisters in the LDS Church who were mocked and made fun of, especially by the eastern press and who stood up in articulate ways and said, This is who we are; this is what we believe; this is what we’re going to accomplish. I think about the women who started hospitals, and they started schools, and they went off to colonize in really interesting places—not exactly the beauty spots of the western United States, and they did it, and they raised families, and they contributed to their communities, and I don’t know if they spent whole lot of time thinking, Well, I just feel inadequate. Some of
22. Patty Sessions was a Mormon pioneer woman who kept a meticulous journal.
Utah Women’s Walk: Sandra Rogers 21 them became physicians; some of them became business people. I mean even the Relief Society ran its share of businesses and enterprises in the old days. But they just sort of rolled up their sleeves and went to work and tried; they made a difference in their communities; they—where else did you find community Shakespeare in the late 1800s in the United States on tiny little dusty stages in places like Parowan, and they had a sense of refinement, but they had calluses on their hands from the hard work. And so I would say to young girls in Utah today, get in touch with that kind of strength.
It’s not an—it’s empowered, but it’s not a power kind of thing. It’s a sense that we can do what needs to be done; we can figure out a way to do it. I think about the women who sent their quilts that the men put under the wheels of the wagons to get through the snow when they were bringing the lumber in to build Southern Utah University; there’s a sculpture on the campus. I think about the women whose names we don’t know who sent their polygamous sister wives off for higher education, and they took care of things at home. They felt they had purpose, and they did what they needed to do. They had courage; they were faithful. That’s why I mentioned the good sisters who ran the St. Benedict’s Hospital. They were many denominations, many different religious traditions, but they weren’t too worried about whether—they just didn’t seem to be caught up in themselves so much; they just seemed to be really dedicated to their families and their communities, and so they made things work.
MW: That’s great advice, thank you, and that’s part of what we hope this project will do: inspire younger women and other people to do what women like yourself have done, just work hard and make a difference—
SR: Well, you just—I look at women that I’ve met here and in Utah, in and out of the Church; they’re not spending too much time obsessing about their inadequacies; they’re just taking steps to try to do the right thing to make improvements, so.
[01:37:59]
[01:38:19]
MW: You were obviously inquisitive as a child; your parents encouraged that. Did you have a self-awareness that you were bright? That you could learn and contribute? Did you sense that early in your life or did that come as you grew older? I don’t know why I’m curious about that; I’m always—where did this sense of you can do hard things come from?
SR: I think the best I can say is that I had a sense that I liked school. And—but I don’t—I felt like I grew up with a lot of smart kids; I don’t—
MW: Who gave you the sense that you were capable?
SR: My parents, and to be honest my mother had her role in that, and my father had his role in that. My father never seemed to think that anything was beyond—I’d go to him for advice, for example, “Well, what should I do?” And sometimes I was frustrated because
Utah Women’s Walk: Sandra Rogers 22 his advice was, “We have a lot of confidence. We’re sure that you’ll make the right choice.” And I’d come out of those meetings thinking, Well, that was really helpful. But I think he—he gave me the sense—my parents gave me the sense that I was capable; they asked me to do things. When I was just started babysitting, my father, who worked at a bank—and had started there as a high school senior and so had worked his way up from filing checks to posting entries to being a teller to all of just step by step through the bank—so when I started babysitting, he had me open a checking account in addition to a savings account, and the whole purpose was so that I could learn to balance a checkbook. So I was surprised when I came to BYU and I have roommates who don’t know about balancing a checkbook and who bounce checks and those kinds of things because I’d been balancing a checkbook since I’d been about twelve. But I—there were plenty of things that I didn’t do very well, and I think that’s probably good too. I was a horrific dancer, and I take miserable photographs. It takes like I said at least six or eight rolls of film usually to get one photo. (laughter)
MW: No way. All right, one last question and this is a hard question for everyone, but we ask everyone. What would you like to be remembered for or remembered—what would you like people to remember about you? What’s important that you leave?
SR: I remember this joke; I think it was in Reader’s Digest about the woman who wanted it put on her headstone, “I tried.” I’m not sure that’s what I want to be remembered for. I think—I hope that I could be remembered for being congruent, that what I did and said matched what I believe. I think that’s probably one thing that I would really like: that my behavior, my actions matched, matched what I espoused. I think that would—I’d like to hope that that would happen.
[01:43:43] End of interview
Utah Women’s Walk: Sandra Rogers 23