cc: file, Mom, Sara and Des, Lloyd and Luana Warner, Darrell and Nancy Krueger, Diane Cluff, Tony Hafen, Claude and Katherine Warner, Forest and Amy Warner, Ivan and Chell Warner, and Eric and Renee Miner
"The cover of the July-August magazine `The Futurist' shows a woman's arm coming out of a computer monitor scratching the chin of a man with body language signaling `come to me.' The two cover articles are titled `Sex in the Future: Virtuous and Virtual?' and `Impacts of Robotic Sex.'
As I (1) think back to the summer your Mom and I met, and then (2) compare those mild, wild experiences with the moral environment you kids are growing up in, I am glad (a) I lived my youth when I did and (b) I am worried for each of you. Continuing on last week's novel, the second fast food place I applied for part time work at was `The Red Barn.' I had spent all of the summers I remembered up to that point in my life making hamburger patties for Southern Utah fast food places and 4th and 24th of July celebration concession stands. Suddenly I found myself on the other side of the hamburger: cooking it rather than making it. The managers at The Red Barn started me in the back room cooking hamburgers and deep frying chicken, french fries, and hot apple pies.
I probably told myself I was in the back room so I wouldn't scare away the customers with all of my zits. In those days I had big (1/4"-1/2") boils on my face and back, and I was forever slipping off somewhere to pop them and drain them. I was very self conscious. However, as in todays setbacks and disappointments, I was also always optimistic about the future. If I wasn't optimistic I wouldn't have had the faith in myself and in you to become your father. One area I was not particularly optimistic in was money. Because of the Meat Packing Plant being shut down the previous summer I was very worried about money. I was particularly worried because I had never worked for a salary, had decided to go on a mission, did not believe Mom and Dad would be able to help make ends meet (which was a false assumption for they paid for most of my mission), and I had turned down the last two years of the Pan American Scholarship (the best one in the department) to go on my mission. Money (another word for power and control and in the negative sense of the popular use of the word sex) had excess importance and focus in my life.
One of the things I did to save money was to find a room-mate. It turned out one of my class-mates in Physical Geology had also accepted a job in Denver and we had decided to room together when still at the University of Utah. His name is Riley Skeen, who we visited a few years ago when we went to Yellowstone National Park and who has stayed with us several times over the last 20 years. Riley was working for Exxon as a geophysical assistant and I was working for what is now Amoco. We had met at a motel on West Colfax the first night we came to Denver, and then the next day selected an apartment downtown on Corona Street which was within walking distance of the oil companies. As I recall, I was driving the rust colored Rambler (American Motors car) called a Javelin. This is the car Uncle Chuck wrecked about the second year we lived in Dallas.
Riley was a member of the church, and was not as committed or as active as I was. I went to all of the meetings and sometimes dragged him along with me. Low and behold there was a very active Young Adults program, with about 25 kids in the Denver first ward. Because I played the guitar I ended up right in the middle of this group. We did service projects like taking handicapped kids to see farm animals and cleaning up church grounds. We had chaperoned campouts with folk singing and absolutely wonderful testimony meetings. We went on a river rafting trip. And we had a lot of firesides and fun parties. It was a great group of kids. Several of them were returned missionaries who kept the rest of us focused on setting an example for our non-member friends. Riley chose to serve a mission because of our example and the summer of 1969 in Denver. He served his mission in Spain. We will be the best of friends forever.
I spent a lot of my time at Pan American and at The Red Barn explaining why I was going on a mission and what the basic teachings of the church were about. As I look back on the summer, in the context of The Futurist magazine, I see sex could be seen as one of the themes of the summer of 1969. This was the time of `Free Love,' motor bike gangs with their `Mommas' (prostitutes), and my first exposure to serious pornography.
The guys at the oil company and the hamburger joint had the same basic language deficiencies as the guys in the meat packing plant had had. It kind of seemed like they never made it past `f' in the alphabet. It got so bad at Pan American that several of the summer geophysical professional assistants got together and decided to show these guys the end results of their language. We talked one of the guys into going to a porno shop, buying some lewd material, cutting up the pictures, and then scotch taping, mailing in intercompany mail, and hiding these pictures so as to provide appropriate embarassment to the worst offenders. It was funny, and I am not proud to have participated, even if it was only in the idea generation.
One of the women workers at The Red Barn was shacked up with a guy who was mistreating her. She asked why I was working two jobs, learned a little about the church, and expressed some interest. Her name was Mary K. I ended up having long conversations with Mary about morality and other gospel principles. She finally agreed to leave this guy and actually went back to New York for a while. Your Mom decided to save Mary from me and set out to get me to quit preaching to her. It was Marti's first summer away from home. She was 18, was living with her friend and then later with Grandma Llewllyn, had just graduated from High School (The Ft. Collin's Lambkins), and was in the big city of Denver to have a good time and make some spending money. Then she met this guy (me) who was imposing his puritan ideas of sexual morality on one of her co-workers and she decided to save her new friend. So I invited her to come over to my apartment to meet two friends of mine and have a discussion about what I was talking to Mary about. She did and later said she was very disappointed there actually were two missionaries and a film strip in my apartment when she got there. A day later she stopped to see me at the apartment and I wasn't in. She got someone to let her in the room and she `borrowed' one of my Book of Mormon's to check it out for herself. She later went to some firesides, parties, and to the baptism of one of our new friends, Joan Dredge. As I recall there is a somewhat detailed description of the activities of this summer in my missionary journal. It was a fun summer. I remember jumping over every parking meter for a Denver block to impress a couple of girls living in the same apartments as Riley and I did. One of them, Jan, still sends a Christmas card to us each year.
I vividly remember some parts of the night I received my missionary call. I remember I was working at the Red Barn. I remember being really disappointed being called to go to England (I figured I had failed the language test). I remember going out in the yard of the Red Barn and calling Mom and Dad on the pay phone to tell them about my mission call. I remember there must have been a really wild concert at Mammoth Gardens (over the entire summer I wasn't interested and didn't go to one concert). I remember one of my biker friends (missing several teeth, usually high on dope, often fairly incoherent, and a friend because he often came into The Red Barn and we had spent some time talking over the summer, especially after the night someone came in and did an armed robbery just as I left the cash register to go cook some more hamburgers because someone else was too slow) cornering me before and after I called home begging me to get him a gun. It seemed someone had upset him and he wanted to get even and he was willing to do anything to get a gun. He wanted to know if I knew anyone who had a gun. Riley actually had some of his hunting guns in the apartment. However I told him I knew of no one who would let him have access to a gun. He offered me his `Momma' for free, and I remember feeling how stark the difference was between him, his language, his friends, and my friends at the ward, their parties, and the idea of going on a mission.
I remember how disappointed I was when I found out, a few days before I left Denver that summer, that Mary K. had come back from New York and had shacked back up with her boy friend. I indignently marched over to her apartment after I got off work at 2:00 in the morning, walked down the stairs, knocked on the door, and had this really big guy come and answer the door. I'm suprised he didn't floor me. I asked to see Mary. She came to the door in her panties and a nightie. When I asked her why she came back, she said she needed the money. I tried to talk her into leaving. She didn't. I did.
As I think of the pornography you have each already been exposed to, as I think of the movies your friends watch and the activities they consider to be `normal,' as I compare the activities of todays society with the activities described occuring at Sodom and Gomorrah in the Old Testament, as I think of the Saviors message to the Samarian woman at the well or the woman taken as a prostitute to `go and sin no more,' and as I read in a `respectable' magazine about how `robotic sex may become addictive,' I fear for your future. At the same time I continue to be an optimist. I have taught each of you correct principles. Frankly, it is now up to you to govern your self. I hope and pray for each of you.
I also fear for my future recognizing I am also in the same society you and my new marital status will also be tested. I dream about your Mom every once in a while. However, I have no desire nor intention to develop a desire to have sex nor to consciously `do anything like unto it' (D&C 59:6) with anyone other than the person I am legally and lawfully married to. As a funny aside, I got a fortune cookie at a Mexican Restruant recently which said `You or a close friend will be married within a year.' I continue to hope this will be to your Mom. And yet I recognize it might not be. I am also coming to recognize the wisdom of the words in the scriptures where we are taught that `it is not good for man to be alone' (Genesis 2:18). For what it is worth, unless it is to your Mom I have no intention of remarrying for at least a year.
I recognize there will be disappointments. I have done things which have disappointed each of you. I am sorry. Some I could have helped. Some I did not have the tools to do differently or circumstances conspired against us. A few weeks ago I wrote about how excited I was about the opportunity to take our Knowledge Backbone concepts into Covey. In the business world words of today we were: `getting in bed with The Covey Leadership Center.' This week the opportunity evaporated. We had serious internal miscommunication errors between the guys on our end. Our Covey contact waited too long to make a fiancial commitment. We wrote a letter saying we could not meet having a working prototype for their sales meeting on the 20th-23rd of August. They were offended (for good reason), and there has not even been a return phone call since discussing our e-mail last Tuesday. If our technology truly is better, someone from Covey will come back at some time in the future. Hopefully when mutual deadlines are more in sync. If you choose to go different directions than what you have been taught, I hope the lessons you learn are not as painful as the story of the prodigal son, and yet I will always hope and pray for the same outcome. I love each of you. I hope and pray we all have a great week."