Life History of Serge J. Lauper
I have never talked a lot about my missionary experiences. Many ex-missionaries refer to their lives and the things that have happened to them as before or after their missions. I guess I've never done that because of the fact that I did not really care about going on a mission.
The ward, under Bishop John Collings gave me a wonderful party and considerable money when I left. I stopped off in Sugarville and had another party. Norman Johnson was going off on a mission at the same time, and we went on to Salt Lake City together. I was given a patriarchal blessing by Willis E. Robinson, at Hinckley, Utah on October 17, 1925 and the next day was ordained an elder by Wells J. Robertson.
We entered the Mission Home in Salt Lake City the first month it was opened, being in, I think, the second group to go through. I was sure at the time that this mission was ill-advised. I was not a missionary in any way and had agonizing feelings about going. On top of that, a medical check-up led to them taking out my tonsils. I was miserable the whole time. Visiting General Authorities gave us instruction on how to hold a fork and tie a necktie. Some of the young men had never been away from home or off the farm. They had a lot to learn.
I was older than all but one other elder. I was twenty-four then and had had a great deal of experience in the world. Twelve of us were to go to the southern states. They called me to be the group leader which was proof-positive to me that the whole thing was crazy. All the others were better prepared than I, and they were all eager to be missionaries. Elder Crawford, the one elder older than I, was in his mid-thirties and had always wanted to go. He seemed a poor specimen to me, bald, with several fingers missing, and with a hare lip. I later repented this view when I realized that he did better missionary work than I could. All the Saints in trouble called for him. He had a very sweet spirit and was really into the work.
Among the difficulties was getting to the mission field. We had our train fares paid out, but we were in chair cars, and the trip to the southern states took four days. We finally landed in Atlanta, Georgia, the mission headquarters. We were met by two missionaries who escorted us to the Terminal Hotel in Atlanta where we stayed for three days because President Charles A. Callis was out of town. Every day I fought with the idea of getting on the train and going back to Los Angeles. It seemed so crazy to be out there on that assignment.
The third day the elders came back to tell us that President Callis was in town and would see us. They instructed us to put on our dark suits and our most conservative ties because these things were important to the President. I put on a very light suit and my loudest tie, despite the urgings of the elders. This will do it, I thought, he'll send me back.
We were ushered into the president's house. He took our names and looked us over very carefully. He spent the whole day interviewing us and assigning us to various aspects of the work. I was saved for last. Finally I was called into his office and I can see him yet: a short man with a big head and a mass of gray hair. He had already been a mission president there for more than twenty years--he served a total of twenty-seven.
As I came into the room he was staring out the window, and he didn't turn around for the longest time. Finally he turned and asked, "Elder Lauper, do you pray?" "Oh, sometimes," I said. "Well, let's pray." He prayed as I had never heard anyone pray. He asked the Lord to take the rebellion out of this young man's life and help him to understand. He prayed a long, long time. In his prayer he told the story of my life, saying things that I thought no one could know anything about. But he knew. He said that he realized that I was more experienced and capable than the other missionaries and that because of my experiences, I had advantages over them. He said he expected more of me than any of the others. He spoke of the things that he had in mind for me, that I was to take over as one of the district leaders because of my abilities. He pressed all the buttons. After that I was his boy. I was ready to do anything he asked from then on. It was quite an experience.
I started out in Memphis, Tennessee, and that wasn't a very good reception. When I got to Tennessee, the rain had been falling for about a week. Wherever we went, everything was mud and water. It was still raining. This was in the year 1925, and the roads weren't all that good. Especially as we were working in the country.
It was intended that I was to be the district president there, but I stayed only a short time in Tennessee. Circumstances changed and I was sent to Mississippi. I started out by thinking that Mississippi was the bottom of the barrel for the Southern States, and then later I got to thinking that it was a pretty good place. I probably know Mississippi as well as I do Florida where I spent the last half of my mission.
Mississippi had some solid members, and some that were very lukewarm, as always in the Church. But in those days, contrary to recent practice, there was no missionary work with the blacks. We did baptize some of them if they were conforming to the regulations of the Church, but we didn't invite any of them to join. And our rule throughout the mission was that we did not teach the blacks. If we paid any attention to them at street meetings, we would soon have a crowd of black people. Then the white people would leave, and we would have to break up our meetings and move along. If we held cottage meetings, the blacks were seldom included. Only a very few white families would include them at meetings. It wasn't so much that they disliked or hated the blacks, but they were definitely down the social ladder. Missionaries were not to cater to blacks, because if they did, and became "black lovers," that was the end of their ability to have anything to do with the white people. I think of this situation in connection with the present ruling in the Church where everyone, black, white or any other color, is eligible to join if they conform to the rules. I'm still repenting from some of my early training and thinking. I know that there are some very good black people, but back then, we were told not to work with the blacks.
I'll give you an example of one particular family in the south. The man was a mulatto, half-white and half-black. He had two daughters and they were beautiful, grown-up girls, quadroons, because the mother was only partly black, too. The man was one of the very few blacks I knew in the southern states who had a college education. He was a doctor, a very handsome man. He had belonged to the Church for many years and had brought his wife into it. One day when he was paying his tithing, and he paid it to me because the missionaries sometimes collected tithing when there was no regular church office, he said, "Yes, that's it. The tithing office is as far as a black can go in the Mormon Church." Many, many, many years later when I had married Winifred, after my first wife had died, I remember her saying that she was very glad when the blacks were given the chance to come into the Church with full standing, because that had been a problem to her in joining the Church. But to me, because of the situation in the mission field and circumstances in the Church, it was a big change, and I'm still readjusting my thinking.
In those days the Southern States Mission, which I was a part of, included Mississippi, North and South Carolina, Tennessee, Florida, and others to make up nine states in the south. Now there are many stakes in each state.
There was an area in Mississippi with Columbia, Mississippi at the center, where the missionaries had been driven out some twenty-five years before, and there were still plenty of Mormon haters about in the southern states. In fact, there had been experiences in the early days of the south of tarring and feathering some missionaries and of actually killing some. B. H. Roberts had made a daring trip down there dressed as a hobo to get out the body of one of the missionaries who had been killed. One of our own latter-day apostles, a member of the Quorum of the Twelve, with whom I later got quite well acquainted when he dedicated our chapel in Sunset Ward, was Rudger Clawson. He had been a very strong missionary there. He was a rather small man, not much of a platform speaker, but he had great spiritual strength. He had been persecuted in the south. So it wasn't an ideal missionary area.
Columbia, Mississippi, was closed to the church for proselyting work for several years. President Charles A. Callis gave me the assignment to go in and open up that territory. I was then the district president, the one in charge of a group of thirty-five or forty missionaries. We weren't sure, of course, what kind of a reception we would get or whether there were any members there. There had been no missionary work done in years.
My companion and I set out one day to begin church work there again. We first tackled the mayor's office. We introduced ourselves and told him what we were doing, and he said that he had heard of us. He gave us a good reception, and we were well-treated. But he said he was not sure about how the reaction would be in town. He didn't recommend holding meetings, but said he would not interfere. Something was said about checking with the chief of police, so we made contact with him. He listened to our story, asked a lot of questions, and said he knew about the Mormons. He had heard stories told him by his parents and by some of his associates. It developed that he was a pretty fair-minded fellow, probably as he had lived some time away from Mississippi. He said that he was a baptist, not a very good one, and that people were divided among several religions in that area. He told us to go ahead, and he arranged for us the use of the courthouse.
We had had nothing but success so far, so I said the next thing was to visit the newspaper editor in town. He was very cold at first as he didn't think much of the idea of bringing Mormons into Columbia. We talked with him, and he softened up some. He agreed, finally, to put an ad into the paper about our meeting three or four weeks later. I had in mind that we might be able to get President Callis to come down.
It worked out well as the newspaper man finally put the notice in the paper. I sent a letter, special delivery, to President Callis, saying that we were holding a meeting in Columbia in the courthouse, and that as we had taken the initiative, we really hoped that the mission president would be able to come. And he did.
At the meeting that morning, we had a fair-sized crowd. I still remember seeing Charles A. Callis, the president of the Southern States Mission, a little short, heavy-set man with a very big head, at that meeting. He had been a county or district attorney before he was a mission president, and before that, he had been a coal miner. As soon as his name was announced, he rushed up to the judge's spot in the courthouse on his little short legs. And he said, "The Bible says to come up higher." And from then on, he had the attention of all those southern sinners. He blasted away at them in his old southern style of preaching.
Among other things, he said, "Now what I told you this morning is good--something you should remember. When you come back this afternoon, I'll tell you how thirteen dollars saved two nations." I can still see some of those southerners who were good Bible readers. They said there was no such text in the Bible. He said, "I realize that you're not convinced that I am taking the text from the Bible, so I want you to come back this afternoon and see how it was that thirteen dollars saved two nations."
That afternoon the place was filled. They came back, and he preached a sermon about how Joseph was his father's favorite, and his older brothers were jealous of him. Callis told how Joseph was blessed of the Lord to be able to interpret dreams and all the other reasons he was his father's chosen son. His brothers were so jealous that they conspired to get rid of him and soon arranged for him to be sold into Egypt. When he arrived in Egypt, he was sold into slavery, to Potiphar, captain of the king's guard. "And his master saw that the Lord was with him, and that the Lord made all that he did to prosper in his hand." (Genesis 39:3)
Later through arrangements of friends, Joseph was taken out to interpret a dream of the Pharaoh, saying that it foretold seven plenteous years of rich crops to be followed by seven years of famine when there would be no rain and people would starve. Joseph became the right hand of Pharaoh and prepared for bad times.
The story is true, Callis told them, because the money exchanged by those traders who took Joseph into Egypt would be equivalent to about thirteen dollars in modern money. And Joseph, sold into Egypt, put away crops for seven years, and later on, the story is told, he not only provided the food that saved the Egyptians but also his own people when his father and his brothers came from the land of Canaan to be given or to buy grain to save themselves. Two nations were saved. Callis was a great speaker.
I still have a newspaper account from a Ku Klux Klan funeral in Mississippi. The deceased was an officer of the Ku Klux Klan clan, and he had been killed in some kind of scrape with the Negroes, at least that was the charge. They hung the Negro, whether he was guilty or not. The Klan was strong down there in those days, and to kill a Klansman there was pretty heavy stuff. That was a funeral that was a funeral.
The Klansman was associated with the Church through his wife, and the funeral was held at our little church which could only partially contain the crowd that came. The interesting thing was that I, as the district president, was in charge of the funeral services. The other members of the family were Baptists, and they had their minister, and he had his assistant there. So there were these two Baptist preachers. I remember realizing quickly that I ought to take charge or they would shove me into the background. So I stepped out to the pulpit and took over. I got written up by the reporter as presiding, with the other ministers assisting me. The other ministers weren't too happy about it, and I heard about it. We had a big crowd, and there was quite a bit of publicity.
During my Mississippi career, I travelled from the Tennessee line on the north to Biloxie and Bay Saint Louis on the south with Jackson, Meridian, Hattisburg, and others in between. One time we were holding a two-day conference in Sarah, Mississippi. The church officials from Salt Lake would come out, and President Callis would call in the missionaries. Sarah was a very small community with about twenty houses, but it had the unusual characteristic of being 50% Church members, a pretty strong area. They had plenty of food after every meeting, and there were two or three a day.
The conference visitor this time was Elder David O. McKay, whom I had met briefly in the mission home. He was a handsome, tall, wonderful-looking man, and he was immediately at home with all the southerners. He had a very good way of meeting people.
At the close of the meetings, Charles A. Callis sent for me, and said, "I want you to meet Elder McKay." Then he said to Elder McKay, "This is the man I was telling you about. I want you to know President Lauper, the district president." President Callis told me that he had talked to Elder McKay, and that he had approved sending me to Florida, the cream of the Southern States Mission. For the next thirteen months I was in Florida.
Our headquarters in Florida was in Jacksonville, which was in the northern part of the state of Florida, not too far from the Georgia line. It was a big change from Mississippi. The Church was flourishing in Jacksonville, Florida, even in those days of 1925 or 1926. We were strong. We had a beautiful brick chapel. The elders had rooms upstairs in the mission headquarters which included my headquarters as the district president. We had very modern facilities, a kitchen where we could cook our own meals, an office, and a bedroom. We had a very luxurious chapel compared to what we had been used to. My job was to travel all up and down Florida, from Miami in the south to Palatka, Orlando, Tampa, and St. Augustine, the oldest city in the United States.
One of the members of the Jacksonville Branch was a man by the name of Jenkins, who owned seven branches of the Duval Jewelry Stores up and down the state of Florida: Palatka, Ocala, Sanford, and as far south as Miami. We really liked him, even though we had a lot of trouble getting him out to Church and keeping the Word of Wisdom. He had a wonderful mother, and his wife was a very solid member. Old Jenkins really paid his tithing, though, and I was told, at one time, by someone, that he was the biggest tithe payer in the Church. I don't know whether it was true for a short time or at all, but he paid a lot of tithing. It was my experience to send in many thousands of dollars of the tithing he paid.
He had started out carrying a pack of jewelry on his back and working the Negro crowds. He had built his business up, and he was a very successful man. I'm mentioning Jenkins because he was a very good friend of President Callis. All the family members were good friends.
Charles A. Callis would come down there as often as he could, more often than he would go to other areas of the mission. He kept very close touch, and one of the reasons was that, he would visit the Jenkins family. They had a room done up especially for him. The Jenkins family had two or three black servants including a very dignified butler. Whenever President Callis would come, the butler would say, "Oh, Dr. Callis, Dr. Callis," and he would get the V.I.P. treatment.
The southern Church members used to count the days until President Callis would come visit, just as kids count the days until Christmas. The members almost worshipped him. At this time he was down in Jacksonville staying at the Jenkins' house. I insisted that he go with me to see a faithful member, a woman who was in her later years. She lived alone in the Piney Woods, in a shack without a roadway to it. Horseback and walking were the only ways to get there. This good sister hoped she would see President Callis again before she died, and he agreed to go.
As we were walking out in the Piney Woods, and I remember this very, very well, I said, "You know, President Callis, these people around here think so much of you, they would do just anything if you would spend a night or even a little time with them. But you don't. You stay at the Jenkins'." He was a little shorter than I was, but he turned and gave me the hard eyeball treatment. I can see him being outraged at first. Then he let a little smile come up on his face and said, "Ah, we're just clay, aren't we!" Anyway, words like that.
Some years later when I visited him in Salt Lake after he had been made one of the Council of the Twelve, he suggested that I stay over so he could show me where he sat in the Temple. We went into the Council room, and he pointed out each place. He also pointed out where James Talmadge had written Jesus the Christ.
Many years later when Callis visited in San Francisco, his visit was not a great success. His style of southern preaching, with colorful rhetoric and many raisings of the voice and dramatic inflections did not impress the local people. I was sorry that others did not take to him.
He wrote me a letter in 1934 at the time of the birth of my second daughter. Among other things, he said, "I value your opinion highly and feel that you are always sincere in what you say; for you and I have labored together in the mission field; we have solved problems and our friendship has been tested and tried by experiences which have only cemented the bonds of brotherly love that exist between us." He was always a hero to me.
There were many new and interesting things to eat in the south. Among them was what they called chicken gumbo with okra which you never see out here except once in a while. Okra is a very sticky, gummy type of vegetable that grows in the south. The southerners eat so much pork and biscuits that they certainly need okra to balance their diet. But that was one thing that I never did like. I learned to drink buttermilk, and I enjoyed the sorghum or molasses made from sugar cane. They didn't have sugar beets down there.
Another very common food was sweet potatoes. Everyplace you'd go, in the country anyway, you would see a bowl on the table, very much like a bowl of flowers or a bowl of fruit, and it would be a bowl of sweet potatoes. A whole pile would be cooked in their skins and people would eat them as they eat apples or oranges now. They had the sweetest watermelons. I've never had any to compare with those from Mississippi. They were really sweet. Grits, ground up corn or ground up grain, were a part of the regular diet. Some of the poorest white trash in the world, people who had nothing else, always had hot breads or biscuits. They were kind of doughy, but they had to be hot. It was a matter of prestige. This was true of all the homes that I ever visited; they had hot breads to eat.
Then there were oysters. You'd buy a whole gallon of them and you'd fry them and boil them and stew them and make gumbo and even eat them raw. In Florida we had swamp cabbage, the heart of the palm tree, maybe only four or five inches thick, all down the trunk. The whole tree would be cut down to take out this little handful of leaves which would be similar to cabbage. It wasn't as tight as cabbage, but when it was cooked up, it was very good.
I served a total of twenty-six months on my mission, and the last half of it was in Florida. I went down there to take over the district, but as it turned out, I didn't take it over. The previous district president had been released and was on his way home, and one of the short-term missionaries, who had come out for four or six months, assumed that he would be the one in charge. I don't know what his reasons were. He acted without Charles A. Callis' knowledge or approval, and just took over. They even announced his new position to the members of the Jacksonville Branch.
When I got down there, I found out what had happened, and I immediately advised President Callis about it. He was so upset that he was down on the next Jacksonville train. My friend Callis was furious about this takeover, but he felt the mistake should not be publicized. This man was twice as old as I was. So President Callis let the older man stay in office for about two months and then released him, and I was officially in charge. I was also upset at the time, but in the long run, it didn't matter much.
In our district we had thirty to forty missionaries. We also had one pair of elders who had an automobile. They were given special assignments to go visit people who were hard to get to.
We also had a few of the short-term missionaries, I think maybe a total of a dozen while I was there. We had Brother Alonzo Hinckley as a short-term missionary. He was one of the officials of the Church, and he had also been the stake president when I was called on my mission. It was interesting to see that President Callis was very concerned about having such an important man in his mission. He knew of Hinckley as a leader in the community around Delta and Hinckley, Utah where he lived. President Callis wanted to know what I knew about Hinckley. He not only sent me letters, but I remember him phoning me. But, Hinckley was a good missionary, there was no trouble, and it all worked out very well.
Rather an upsetting thing happened in that mission when we had a great storm. This wasn't just rain, but a tornado or a typhoon. I was in the northern part of Florida when the storm hit, and although we knew there was a storm, we didn't suffer any severe damage. But Miami was exposed, and it suffered a great deal. Strange things happened such as a piece of two by four piercing a telephone pole; the velocity of the wind had somehow driven that piece of wood right into the pole. There was a terrific amount of debris. Even months afterwards when we arrived there, they hadn't cleaned up the place.
A year later, you could still find a four-masted schooner about four blocks into the town. It had been blown in on the highway and stranded there. Swarms of bees were poking around this schooner which had been used to haul molasses from Cuba to make rum in Miami. The kegs had split open. Those bees came from miles and miles around to get that molasses. They came in swarms. And then when the molasses was finally gone, the bees had forgotten how to gather honey from flowers, and they just died by the millions. President Callis preached a sermon about that, that when things were too easy we fail to learn how to overcome difficulties. People become helpless at learning how to take care of themselves.