How we became pioneers for our family

I guess I should go back and rehearse my first contact with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints.

His name was Gawin Goodrich and he was the section chief of the Army Headquarters Supply section to which I was assigned. He was an Elder in the Church and very open about it. He had a small jar on his desk, it was his bad word jar. If someone said a cuss word or took the Lords name in vain they had to contribute a dollar to the jar. It worked to calm the language. He used to tell me: “Balluff the church would do you a lot of good”.

Another person I met was Joanie who was a good friend, a member of the church and a nurse at Letterman general hospital on base. In retrospect I think Gawin asked her to look me up because she approached me. Shortly thereafter she invited me to go to church with her because Gawin was going to speak there. After, I asked why the Bishop didn’t speak. She told me the Bishop is not a preacher he was the leader of the congregation. The members give the talks. I made a mental note to myself not to join that church because giving a talk to a whole room full of people was not something I could do.

You see, in our little one room school house, every Christmas we had a Christmas Pageant and all the parents were invited. When I was in kindergarten I was the opening act I was to step out in front of the curtain and say a little 1 line piece, about 4 or 5 words. We practiced for a week before the big night and I practiced at home with my mom. The big night came and I stepped out in front of the curtains and saw all those people and I froze. I couldn’t remember my line, I was a complete blank. My teacher opened the curtains a tiny bit and fed me the line and I still couldn’t say it. I was all alone with all those people staring at me. She finally came out and said it for me.

It was through Joanie that I met Patti and her best friend Mary Harris. As it turned out, Mary is a member of the church. I was surrounded by MORMONS. Just before I was to be discharged from the Army, Mary asked us if we would like to meet with the missionaries. We said yes and after that lesson they wanted to set a baptism date, well I wasn’t ready for that and we didn’t meet with them again.

After we got married, a few months later we found out we were pregnant. Mom said “we need to find a church to take our family to”. I said, “well, what church would you like to go to?” She said, “ the only one I want to go to is the Mormon Church”. We found that there was one a block away so we started going there. We went to sacrament meeting for about 4 months and someone asked us why they didn’t have our records. We told them we haven’t joined the church and they asked why not? We told of our experience in San Francisco, so they said they could have us take the lessons from the Stake Missionaries. We asked if we could have all the lessons before we committed to baptism and they said we could do that.

We were baptized May 25th 1963, almost a year after our first experience with the full time missionaries.

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