Miracle and Disaster

Just then, at 2AM on the 16th of June, President Boyd Packer of the New England Mission woke me up with a phone call: “Brother Anderson, this is President Packer. I’d like you to come to the Mission Home.” “President, it’s 2 in the morning.” “Brother Anderson, this is President Packer. I’d like you to come to the Mission Home.” “Yes, sir.”

So I got up and dressed and drove to the Mission Home on Hawthorne Street in Cambridge, where the President met me at the door, sat me down in front of the lovely wooden mantel that he and his sons (Kenny and Dave, my Seminary students) had recently refinished, and broke the news that my mother had been killed in an auto accident in France.¹

President Packer was marvelously helpful and supportive through that whole time of transition, as we brought Mammy and Pappy back to San Bernardino for burial and restorative surgery, respectively.

¹This was a blow to each of us, as it turns out: she had been his teacher in second and fourth grades in Brigham City, and they had worked closely with Paul Dunn and other worthies in the invention of early-morning Seminary in southern California, back in the Fifties. If you want the story of the accident, you’ll find a version in the Gedenkschrift.
²Click to view the second of Ron’s set of two videos:

Disaster

1967-68:

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