The Lead-up to a Mission

Grandpa A. M. Seely and his fellow missionaries in Alabama, circa 1898. Amazing photo, yes?
I turned nineteen in the middle of my sophomore year. Discussed the subject of a mission with the folks and with the bishop in San Bernardino and the branch president in Cambridge. It became clear that the sophomore year wasn’t a good time to interrupt my studies, but that after the junior year would work much better. I’m grateful that everybody involved showed enough flexibility to go along with such a plan. Particularly the National Merit Scholarship Corporation: they kindly granted me a leave of absence without prejudice or subsequent disadvantage.

MIT was also very understanding: as far as they were concerned, I was welcome to return for my senior year, upon completion of my mission. Actually, as I’ve learned since, various imperatives lead a goodly fraction of Tech Tools to graduate in years other than the ones engraved on their Brass Rats. Burnout being among the more common.
As one unintended but valuable consequence of this timing, I was a year or so older than my cohort-mates in the mission field. Just the inverse of the situation I lived with in primary and secondary school. Surely a factor in my ability to learn and exercise leadership as a missionary.

Valerie and I also discussed mission plans, extensively. In the summer of 1961, I asked her to be my eternal companion, even as it became clear that I would be away for the next thirty or so months. In the face of universal prophecies about dearjohns and such, she agreed to wait. And, bless her heart, to be the custodian of my missionary journal. We agreed that I’d write it in letters, and she’d copy it into the bound book. What a sweetheart!
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