Journal November 3, 1963

Le Palais du Louvre November 3—This has been one whale of a full week, by any standards. Cleaning, arranging, planning, and just plain running occupied the early part of it in preparation for the “descent,” as the French say, of a mighty illustrious slice of European Mormondom. If my memory serves properly, this was something like our guest list: President Theodore Burton of the European Mission; Presidents Hanks, Greene, Curtis, Knight, Covey, and Dunyon (of British-or-suchlike [256] missions), Moyle, Edmunds (French-language missions) and van Slooten (Netherlands), with most of their wives; Superintendent G Carlos Smith of the YMMIA; President Florence Jacobsen

of the YWMIA; Rulon Sperry and Sister Sperry; Lynn Richards of the General Sunday School Superintendency; Brother and Sister Waters of some General Board or other; together with numbers of largely-unnoticed and criminally-neglected staff members, random experts, and assorted hangers-on. President Petersen had convened all this high-powered gang with the idea in mind of exposing the General Boards in Salt Lake to the peculiar requirements of European converts struggling to build the Kingdom in this hemisphere—requirements in terms particularly of auxiliary programs and Church literature. This whole scheme qualifies as historic, since the Boards have always been under the strictest orders to keep hands off the Missions and to let each [257] mission president adapt all programs to fit local conditions. A propos, I doubt that anybody but President Petersen would have had the sheer, magnificent nerve to sent these people over here with orders to shut up and listen, for a change. Several (the Curtises and Waterses, and perhaps others) simply received telegrams from him the other day saying “CANCEL ALL PLANS—GO TO PARIS.” If the results of all this titanic string-pulling and authority-wielding turned out to be less than might have been hoped, the disappointment was due exclusively to the absence of the sharp tongue, the mailed fist encased in one millimeter of foam rubber, and the immense dedication of the man who engineered the whole thing. The mission presidents hit town Wednesday afternoon and got to their hotels by pre-arranged airport transportation, but this was their last displacement without the chauffeuring ministrations of Elder Derr and yours very truly. Wednesday night, we took them to see “Swan Lake” at the Opéra. They had second-balcony loges, and Elder Derr and I scurried up to nigger-heaven. That was by all standards the very finest ballet production I have ever seen. It’s been a while since Tschaikowsky has moved me to tears, and I’m sure that the effect this show had on me was at least as much the work of the choreographer and of the performing artists as of the composer. And it was terrific to get acquainted with these big wheels and to feel their spirit. 1We’d also invited our mission, district, and (I think) branch auxiliary leaders, so that they could benefit from exposure to the inspired folks from Salt Lake. Not sure whether we were instructed to do so, but we lived to regret it. Elder C. Brooklyn Derr on the Paris Métro

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