by Pete Earley
“Alice, you got to give me a couple of weeks,” said Jeffrey optimistically. “We’ll get it into shape. I promise.”
By the time they had unloaded the trailer, Bill showed up and quickly invited them to a backyard cookout that he and Eleanor were hosting the next day in appreciation of the four college students who had spent their summer as temple tour guides. Jeffrey accepted the invitation and then asked: “When can I start work?”
The question surprised Bill, who had figured that the Lundgrens would need at least a week to get settled. But Jeffrey didn’t want to waste time. “I’d like to learn how to give tours as quickly as I can.” At Bill’s urging, he agreed to wait for at least a day.
The next morning while Alice unpacked, Jeffrey took his children for a ride. Less than an hour later, he returned home and burst inside.
“I want you to go with me now!” he exclaimed. “You’ve got to see what I’ve found!”
They left Damon in charge of the others and drove to Chapin Forest. “Look at that!” Jeffrey said excitedly after he parked the car. “Over there!”
Alice saw a pond shrouded by trees and a footpath.
“That’s it!” Jeffrey said. “The path in my dream. The path that I walk down to get the plates. C’mon.”
He hustled her to it and then suddenly stopped. “Do you feel something?” he asked. Without waiting for a reply, Jeffrey told Alice that most of the rock used in the foundation of the Kirtland temple had been cut here in Chapin Forest.
“This feels like hallowed ground,” said Jeffrey.
“I was thinking the exact same thing,” Alice replied.
“Remember how I said the path was by a little stream, and a highway, and how there was a bar nearby? Look, look, look!”
The path in the park was next to a brook that ran parallel to Chillicothe Road. Through the trees, Jeffrey could see a building, which he told Alice was a local bar and restaurant called PJ’s Pub.
“Joseph left something for me here,” he said. “I’m sure of it.”
“Oh, Jeff, this is so exciting,” Alice replied. “Do you really sense that?”
The comment irritated him. Why did she always doubt him? They walked down the path for several minutes, but they didn’t find anything so they returned home for lunch.
Later that day, Jeffrey, Alice, and their children went to the cookout across the street at the Sidney Rigdon house where Bill and Eleanor Lord lived.
“I remember watching them as they came up the driveway,” Eleanor later said. “I remember thinking how happy I was that they had come. It was so unusual for someone so young to be able to work as tour guides. I felt they would bring a youthful vitality to the temple.”
Neither Jeffrey nor Alice mentioned their experience in Chapin Forest, nor did they volunteer much information about themselves. Instead, they quietly ate their hamburgers and potato salad and let Bill and Eleanor do the talking. They were a devout and kindhearted couple. Bill had worked for U.S. Steel and later as a maintenance supervisor at a college in Long Island, New York, before retiring in 1981. At age sixty-five, he was a small, thin-framed man with close-cropped hair, metal glasses, a quick laugh, and ready smile. His grandfather had been a fervent Methodist minister, but his parents hadn’t seen much use in religion and neither had Bill as a teenager. But when he was in his twenties, a friend gave him a copy of the Book of Mormon and he converted.
Eleanor had grown up in the RLDS and it was one of two great passions in her life. Her other love had been the stage. When she was twenty-two, Eleanor was living in New York and trying to decide whether she should be a music teacher or audition for roles on Broadway. During a prayer meeting, an elder told her that God had a message for her. God wanted Eleanor to use her talents in His service. Eleanor interpreted that to mean that she should forsake the stage and teach music. “From that point on, I offered my talent to the Lord and within six months all of that burning desire to be onstage was gone,” she recalled. “I felt a wonderful peace with God.” She and Bill had met shortly after that and married in 1953. The church had been the focal point of their lives, and after Bill retired they decided to become temple tour guides to, as Bill put it, “give something back to the Lord.” The Lords had studied their church’s history and were familiar with the stories about Joseph Smith, Jr.’s treasure hunting and alleged attempts to seduce Sidney Rigdon’s daughter. But such talk didn’t shake their belief in the validity of the Book of Mormon. “There is just too much in it to be the creation of a boy’s imagination,” Eleanor explained. Besides, she asked, who were they to question why God had chosen Joseph Smith, Jr., as His prophet? Hadn’t God blessed King David even after he committed adultery with Bathsheba and arranged for her husband, Uriah, to be killed?
As the two couples became better acquainted that night, Bill asked Jeffrey how he could afford to work as an unpaid tour guide at such a young age. Jeffrey said that his grandparents were giving him $800 per month as part of his inheritance, and then he quickly changed the subject by asking Bill questions about the temple, visitors’ center, and tour-guide job. About 25,000 persons toured the temple each year, Bill said. No one was ever permitted to go inside unless a guide was with them. There was always a chance that some anti-Mormon visitor might deface the temple. Before each tour, visitors were shown a fifteen-minute slide show in the visitors’ center that explained the highlights of Joseph Smith, Jr.’s life and how the temple was built. After that, a tour guide led the visitors into the temple.
The tours always began in the temple vestibule, a narrow room in the front of the building. It was there that guides would explain that the temple contained three floors. The bottom floor, called the lower court, was used as a sanctuary; the second floor, which was nearly identical to the lower court, had been built as a school for priests; the attic story with its dormer windows made up the third floor. It was divided into a series of rooms, which could be used either as offices or for classes. There was also a steeple and belfry, complete with a weather vane whose tip was one hundred twenty feet above ground. One of the first features of the temple that the guides would mention was how the three floors were connected. There were two winding staircases on each side of the vestibule and there were exactly thirty-three steps between each floor—”One step for each year of Christ’s life,” said Bill.
The temple was a jumble of architectural styles: Greek Revival, Georgian, Colonial, Federalist, and Gothic. The most curious designs inside were the intricate decorative carvings on the columns, doors, and moldings. Guides often speculated about what these hand-carved designs represented.
The tours always ended exactly where they had started—in the church’s entryway, where visitors, if they felt so inclined, could make a cash donation to the temple.
When Jeffrey wasn’t giving a tour, he would sit inside the visitors’ center where souvenirs and religious books and pamphlets were for sale. The most expensive item was the Holy Scriptures, Joseph Smith Jr. ‘s rewritten version of the Bible, which sold for twenty-six dollars.
After the Lundgrens had gone home that night, Bill told Eleanor that he felt Jeffrey should be given some sort of responsibility besides being a tour guide because he was younger and eager to prove himself. “I think I’ll put him in charge of the financial records,” Bill said. The temple generated at least $20,000 per year in souvenir sales and offerings.
“Yes,” Eleanor agreed. “That would be a good job for him.”
The next morning, Bill gave Jeffrey a copy of the standardized speech that tour guides used, issued him a set of keys to the temple, and told him that besides his regular duties, he would be in charge of collecting the offerings left at the temple and keeping track of sales at the visitors’ center.
A few nights later, when Bill and Eleanor went for a walk after dinner, they noticed that someone was inside the temple even though it was closed. Bill was about to telephone the police, when he thought of Jeffrey. He decided to investigate and found Jeffrey inside the temp
le.
“I didn’t mean to worry you,” Jeffrey said. “It’s just that I want to investigate every nook and cranny in this place.” Bill didn’t complain. When he and Eleanor resumed their walk, Bill remarked that he had never seen anyone so enthusiastic when it came to learning about the House of the Lord. Eleanor agreed. “They are an answer to our prayers,” she said.
Chapter 14
FOUR days after the Lundgrens arrived in Kirtland, Cheryl Avery knocked on their front door. She and Dennis and their three daughters had come to visit. Jeffrey was not happy to see them, but Alice invited them in. The Averys were planning on staying the weekend. Cheryl was distressed. She and Dennis had gone to a Wednesday night prayer meeting at Slover Park and hadn’t felt comfortable. She still couldn’t get over the fact that the church had decided to ordain women. She and Dennis had talked about leaving the RLDS. But where could they go? No other denomination believed in the Book of Mormon except for the Utah Mormons and they were considered worse heretics than other Protestants.
Jeffrey took the Averys on a tour of the temple. Although he was only beginning to investigate the building, he said he’d already made two important discoveries. “God, Himself, was the architect of this temple,” he explained solemnly. “It is the only temple in the world that we know was designed by Him.” According to historical records, Joseph Smith, Jr., Sidney Rigdon, and church member Frederick G. Williams saw a vision of the temple while they were praying in the summer of 1833. The temple was constructed, under Smith’s direction, based on that vision. The fact that God had shown Smith how to construct the temple was extremely significant, Jeffrey said. “By studying it, we can see how God thinks.” It was the same logic that Jeffrey had applied to his studies of the Book of Mormon. Why had God decided to use a specific word in a parable? Why had God designed a temple with two separate front doors? “The entire building is a clue.”
Jeffrey’s second discovery was a carving in the temple. He had found it on a pulpit used by a priest. “This is the symbol of man,” Jeffrey said. “Every book about symbols says that this design means man. I have searched and searched and there is no symbol on any of the pulpits for woman. None.” To Jeffrey, the message was clear: “God never intended for women to be ordained as priests; otherwise he would have put the symbol for woman on a pulpit.”
Dennis and Cheryl were astounded. It was just like the Old Testament story in Daniel, Cheryl said, where King Belshazzar blasphemed God by using the Hebrews’ sacred vessels from their temple as wine goblets at a feast. The fingers of a man’s hand had suddenly appeared and the hand had written a strange warning to the king on the palace wall. Only the prophet Daniel could interpret the strange writings. In Cheryl’s mind the fact that God had once communicated with men by writing a message on King Belshazzar’s wall was prima fade evidence that He might have included a few messages on the walls and pulpits of the Kirtland temple.
The Averys’ reaction was so enthusiastic that Jeffrey decided to tell them about his dream and the path that he had found in Chapin Forest, but first he swore them to secrecy. When he finished, Dennis asked Jeffrey what the dream meant. “I’m not certain,” Jeffrey said, “but clearly the RLDS is without a prophet and God is going to bring forth a new one to preach the truth.”
Dennis and Cheryl asked Jeffrey to show them the path in Chapin Forest, so Jeffrey and Alice drove them to the park. But when they got there, Dennis began complaining about how cold it was outside and Cheryl slipped on a wet stone and fell, hurting her hip. Jeffrey grew impatient and the enthusiasm that the two couples had felt at the temple waned. They returned to the Lundgrens’ for dinner. After everyone had gone to bed that night, Jeffrey told Alice that he didn’t think Dennis’s chill and Cheryl’s fall were accidents. “God was keeping them from walking down the path,” he said. “The Lord doesn’t want them to know the truth.”
The rest of that weekend, as far as Jeffrey was concerned, was unbearable. “All the Averys did was complain about life,” said Jeffrey. “They were not people we would have sought out as friends.”
The relationship between the Lundgrens and the Averys had always struck people who knew them as odd. Behind their backs, Jeffrey and Alice constantly belittled the Averys. And yet the Averys often described the Lundgrens as their best friends.
To most, Dennis and Cheryl seemed strange. Dennis was mousy. Cheryl was uncomfortable around strangers. Neither dressed fashionably or was good at small talk. Cheryl had grown up in Centralia, Washington, a town of about 10,000 south of Tacoma. She had never really known her own father, Hiram Clisby. He had been in the merchant marine during the 1940s when he met and married Donna, Cheryl’s mother. At the time, Donna was working in Yakima, a town in central Washington, and living with her aunt. She had gone to college for one year, but was forced to drop out because she couldn’t afford tuition. Donna met Hiram at an RLDS church meeting. They met, married, and then just as quickly, Hiram left for sea, leaving his bride behind at her aunt’s house pregnant with their firs.t child. Lance Clisby was born in 1945. Two years later, when Cheryl was born, Donna was still living with her aunt waiting for Hiram to finish another one of his Pacific voyages. In January 1948, Donna filed for divorce and moved with her two children to Centralia to live with her parents. Cheryl was seven months old. Two years later, Donna married Howard Bailey, a carpenter and general handyman. They moved into a house just across the railroad tracks from where her parents lived, only a block away from the RLDS church. Donna gave birth to another son, Donald, in 1951. By that time, Cheryl was four. “We never had much money,” Donna recalled. “We were almost on welfare sometimes, particularly in the winter when my husband was off work. But Cheryl never seemed to mind.”
As a youngster, Cheryl’s closest friends were her two brothers. “Cheryl was very loyal to Lance, in particular,” her mother said. “They’d walk to school together even when both of them were in high school. She helped out Donald too, even though he was younger. She was almost like a mother to both of the boys.”
Cheryl didn’t participate in many high school activities after school. She didn’t date, didn’t give a hoot about being popular, and really had only one close friend: Barbara Carter. “Cheryl wasn’t ever a goofy person—even as a teenager,” Carter recalled. “She didn’t go crazy over the Beatles and didn’t care a bit about boys, like most of us. She was uncomplicated, stubborn, modest, and serious.” When Carter had a slumber party for her sixteenth birthday, she invited Cheryl. It was the first sleepover that Cheryl had ever attended. No one had ever invited her before.
Carter knew that Cheryl was deeply religious although she rarely mentioned it. She didn’t drink alcohol, didn’t smoke, never used profanity, and considered makeup, trips to the beauty parlor, and fancy clothes to be worldly vanities. “I remember when all the girls began wearing nylon stockings and flats in high school,” Carter recalled. Cheryl continued to wear white bobby socks and saddle oxfords. “She simply wore what she wanted to wear, without being influenced by others’ opinions,” said Carter.
When Cheryl graduated in 1965, a teacher called her by the last name of Clisby, not Bailey. Carter was surprised. “Although I was her closest friend, she had never told me that Mr. Bailey was not her father. Even after this revelation, Cheryl supplied no details and was very angry that her real name had been divulged. She was a very, very private person.”
After high school, Cheryl enrolled at a community college in Centralia, but didn’t like it. She was even more out of sync in college than she had been in high school. It was the dawning of the Age of Aquarius, the antiwar movement was just getting started, feminists were burning their bras. By contrast, Cheryl’s favorite movie star was John Wayne. Her favorite song was Tennessee Ernie Ford’s “Sixteen Tons.” She had never been out on a date. Cheryl stayed in school one semester and then transferred to Graceland, the RLDS’s conservative college.
Located about four miles from the Iowa-Missouri state line in tiny Lamoni, Graceland had a
n enrollment of eight hundred, nearly all white students from middle-class homes. Cheryl arrived for the spring term in 1966 and was assigned to a room in “Kimball Manor,” a fancy name for the third floor of the women’s dormitory. At Graceland, each floor had its own name to give the dormitory a more homelike atmosphere. Ann Sherman, a shy freshman from Independence, lived down the hall, and the two women became friends. During spring break, Ann invited Cheryl home with her. Cheryl had never been to Independence. She loved it, and Ann’s parents, Robert and Velma, adored Cheryl. Ann was an only child. “We liked to joke that we were the sister that neither of us ever had, but both wanted,” Sherman later remembered. “We both felt the same way about most things.”
The Shermans were not wealthy. Robert made his living by refinishing furniture. Velma was a secretary. But they were devout RLDS members, and when the spring semester ended and they learned that Cheryl might not be able to return to Graceland in the fall because of money problems, Robert and Velma decided to help. They invited Cheryl to spend the summer with them and Robert found her a job as a clerk at a Montgomery Ward store. Cheryl faithfully saved her earnings, but when it was time to enroll at Graceland, she still was short of cash. The Shermans wanted to help her, but they couldn’t afford to pay for both girls to attend Graceland. Ann unselfishly suggested that she and Cheryl transfer to Central Missouri State University in Warrensburg, the same school that Jeffrey and Alice would later attend. Cheryl agreed and the Shermans had enough to pay for both women’s tuition. Ann and Cheryl roomed together. “The school cafeteria didn’t serve Sunday supper and neither of us had much money so we would buy a can of spaghetti and heat it up and for dessert we would have baby food—a little jar of pudding or peach cobbler,” Ann Sherman remembered.