Life History of Serge J. Lauper
Two of the general authorities have had more than ordinary influence in my life. I mention them because they were also presidents of the church in their day. One was Harold B. Lee.
I was going through a personal crisis. I had already left my parent company, Charles R. Hadley Company, after some twenty-five years, because some changes in policy and leadership upset me. The new management, who had been salesmen like us, were anxious to strengthen their position and tried to move some of us old heads around. I didn't agree with what was happening and I quit. I remember well the tragedy on my wife's face the day I came home and told her what I had done. We had two girls in college. I had no business quitting my job, but when the sales-manager came up from Los Angeles and told me that I was too old to quit, that made me mad and I said I'd show him. I mention this as preamble to what later happened.
We had a stake conference, and after the conclusion of it, I was sitting in my study and Elder Lee--then a long-time member of the Council of the Twelve--walked into my study. He said he would like to talk to me about myself and my family. This was no once-over-easy type of conversation. He enquired at length about each one of the girls. Then he got down to my business. He wanted to know how it was going.
I had come to a very critical time in my business. I had been off on my own for three years. I knew that I was just a single reed in the wind. If anything at all happened to me, there was nothing. There was no retirement, no pension, nothing. I was all alone, although I was doing some very good business. I had gone through the sad experience of hiring people and then having to fire them. It was my fault. I had failed to remember how long it took to learn what I knew of the business. When I tried to hire someone and get him into the system, it took two of us to do less than I could do alone.
In the midst of all this turmoil about my business, which was up and down too, the local sales-manager of the old company, Jack Barry, came to see me. John R. Barry was a man younger in the company than I was, but a Stanford graduate and very sharp. I had never had any trouble with him. He had arrived as sales-manager of the San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose area.
He came into my little office in the Hearst Building on the corner of Market and Kearney Streets and said that he had a proposition that I could not turn down. He had been trying for several months to get me to come back to the company, because too many times, when some of his younger men would come out against me, I would be fortunate enough to get the order. They would go back to the office and wonder who that so-and-so was who was always getting their business. Barry was all enthused about his deal. He said I should come back to the Burroughs Company, and they would give me twenty-five years of retirement pension credit. He said they really wanted me.
I was skeptical. The big Burroughs Corporation had bought the Charles R. Hadley Company because the original company had lost so many of their major salesmen. They had quit as I had. They had lost over 300 years of selling experience. I knew that Jack was a good friend and anxious to have me back, but I doubted that some of the heads at Burroughs would be as enthused. I told him some of my requisites. If I came back I wanted a weekly allowance. It would cost me something to make the move. He agreed to give me $200 a week, the best allowance he could offer, as an advance on my commissions. Then I said I did not want to be put in a corner. I had customers all over town and wanted a territory that allowed me to range all over. I did not want to be in a pocket without freedom of movement. He said he had five other men in these territories, but he finally agreed to that. And then I told him that I wanted to keep my own business. He got flustered and red-faced and cussed and walked out. He said I was impossible.
This had been on Wednesday on the week before conference. I told Elder Lee just a little bit about this. I told him that my brother had told me that the pension rights he had offered me were equivalent to more than $200 a month premium in insurance. I said I knew I was all alone with no backup and told him that I was really concerned that I had been unwise in leaving the company. Elder Lee got out of his chair and came over and put his hand on my shoulder, and said not to worry about it. It would be all right.
Monday morning I was in the office when I got a call from Jack. The office of the Burroughs Corporation, formerly the Hadley Company, was just downstairs in the Monadnock Building which adjoins the first building right on the corner there. So I was only two or three hundred feet away. Barry said that he'd like to see me.
I went down and into his office, and as I went in, he was shaking his head. He said he was wondering how my crazy requirements about coming back to the company could be worked out. I said that he would just have to trust me as an honorable man to give the Burroughs Company the business that should belong to them. I would be working under two hats: theirs and my own. If I didn't think that Burroughs could handle the business right, then I would take it. He said that he would go along with me.
So President Harold B. Lee's telling me not to worry about my problem worked out. For nine years, I carried on two businesses. When I told my customers, they didn't believe it. They said Burroughs Corporation would never allow a crazy thing like that. The switchboard girl had my separate phone on top of the switchboard panel. For three years she answered both the company's phone and my phone. Then Jack came to me one day and said that Si [Cy?] Miller, the vice-president of sales for the whole company, was coming out. He didn't know how he could explain the personal phone. I said OK and took the phone out and took it upstairs to an answering service. That's the way it worked for the next years until I retired.
Every year, on his birthday, I send Jack Barry a letter or a card, and thank him for having the patience to insist that I come back to the company. He's been to the house and had lunch with Winifred and me; she likes him. Since then, his wife has died, and we've had letters and phone calls back and forth. I thank him because now I am under the retirement program of Burroughs Corporation which has changed over to Unisys. They take care of all my prescriptions and all of Winifred's, thousands of dollars by now with all her insulin shots and things. This last year, they advanced the amount of retirement which is unusual. Michael Blumenthal, a very smart Austrian Jew, is the head of Unisys. He was once a cabinet secretary in Jimmy Carter's administration. I've never met him, but I have read a lot about him, and he has quite a feel for people. He came over here without anything when his family was run out of Nazi Germany. He escaped with his life, and got to Shanghai, and was bombed by the Japs during the war. He escaped from Shanghai and came to America and put himself through Princeton. He wrote me, and all the other retirees, a nice letter saying that he knew that a good share of the success of the company was due to the retired employees, and the company raised the retirement.
President McKay and I had a very good experience when we came together in a close situation. He was then president of the Church, unlike others of the six last presidents of the church with whom I had good experiences before they took that office.
David O. McKay was the visitor for a stake conference in Stockton. The stake had just finished erecting a new stake meeting house, a very special and beautiful building. President Mendenhall, the stake president there, was a wealthy cattle man who later became head of all the church building program. Mendenhall had enough influence to get President McKay to come down and dedicate the building. The church had been growing so fast that it was a real premium to get the president of the church to come to a dedication.
The San Francisco Stake Presidency heard about this occasion, and we made the judgement that we would all drive up there, myself and my wife Jean, Wallace Allred and his wife, and Wilford B. Murray and his wife. We travelled up there for the dedication, and it was a beautiful meeting. On the way up we had talked about how nice it would be if President McKay would dedicate our new building in San Rafael.
After the meeting was over, we three went up to invite him. We said we were from San Francisco and we thought it would be wonderful if he could come dedicate our San Rafael building which was getting close to completion. He listened a little bit and said that we should write him a letter. So we did. We negotiated a little about dates, and when he was free, he agreed to come and the dates were set.
Then, as we approached that time, the word came to me that the Oakland Stake had some ambitious plans for President McKay to come and speak there. Oakland and Berkeley and all that area had a bigger population than we did and some pretty strong leaders. I was a little jealous of some of the things that happened over there, and I always had my guard up when I heard about their activities. I found out that they had planned, announced in meetings, and sent out some flyers giving the date and time that President McKay would be there to dedicate a ground-breaking for the Oakland Tabernacle and Temple site.
It made me furious. They had timed it so that they were going to pick him up after our dedication and take him over there for lunch and so on. I got to thinking about it, and I was afraid that we would be playing second fiddle to them. It bothered me a lot. This was about a week before our dedication. I was going downtown on Saturday to do some work at the office, and the more I thought about it, the more upset I got. When I got into the office, I picked up the phone, and called the church offices in Salt Lake and said that I wanted to speak to President McKay.
Soon his wife was on the phone, and I said I wanted to speak to President McKay. She called Da-vid, Da-vid, Da-vid. When I had him on the phone, I told him that we were so delighted and grateful to have him come to dedicate San Rafael, and we had some other meetings planned. Although at that time we didn't. And I was shocked to find out that the Oakland group had arranged to pick him up from San Rafael and take him over there. He broke right in and said that he had told those brethren to talk to me. Then I had the knife by the handle. I said that we would be pleased to see that President McKay had all the meetings that he could take care of on that day because we were so anxious to have him come. So we scheduled a meeting in San Francisco and changed things around so that he was the speaker. We had some people out from the Examiner and the Chronicle. The reporters heard about the president of the church coming, and they came out. We filled up the building. It was just packed. President McKay spoke in San Francisco for the morning meeting, and then we rushed over to San Rafael for the dedication.
On the way back, Brother Allred was driving the car, and we found out how very easy it was to talk to President McKay. We talked about lots of things, and then Brother Allred suggested that I ask him about marriages. I told him the following story. About a year before, a very distinguished and important-looking man came to my office. He came to see me because I was the head of the LDS Church in this area. He said he wanted to find out what was wrong with a man who was marrying his daughter. The young man was a member of our church; his daughter was not. The family did not oppose the marriage; they liked the young man very much. But he had told them he could not get married in his church, and the family wanted to know what was wrong with him.
I told President McKay that I had done my very best to explain to him why we believed that couples should be married in the temple, and that chapel weddings were not approved. The bride's father did not accept this policy and was very upset about it. The couple was actually married at a Methodist Church on Junipero Serra; I was invited to the wedding. I told President McKay that I wondered what we should do about such situations which I saw as very critical.
President McKay asked some questions, then he said that he did not think the wedding policy was right. He said, "Now President Lauper, you have my authority to have official weddings in the chapel. You are not to ape the pattern of the world in ostentatious weddings, but, in your judgment, if it is best to hold weddings in the chapel, you have my authority to do it." I knew immediately that this would cause a question mark in a lot of places, and I asked him if he would put that in a letter to me. He said he would, that I should write him a letter about it and he would respond. I got a nice letter from him. I always felt bad that I didn't keep that letter. I let it go with all the other stake papers.
Not too long after that we held a wedding in the chapel. David Haight was among those who called me to know what in the world we thought we were doing and wondered how we got away with it. A man from Arizona called me. Two calls came from Idaho. About a month, maybe five or six weeks after the letter came, we got a directive from the Church presidency. It said, in effect, what President McKay had already said in his letter to me, that we were to use judgement in doing what was best for all concerned. We had permission to use the chapel, and we were not to have big spreads of flowers or candles or any of those things.
I thought that was kind of a ground-breaking for weddings. It worked for a while, but President Kimball did not approve of this new scheme and so the program was slowed down. I think for most cases, the way it is now is the best.
President McKay sent me a letter dated September 12, 1956, asking me to offer the closing prayer at the morning session of General Conference in Salt Lake City on October 7. Of course I was delighted to be part of the meeting.
This somewhat completes my experience with the general authorities. I knew six of the last presidents of the church. I knew President Grant in the sense of shaking hands with him. I have an uncle who married one of his daughters who died early after having had three children, among them a man who has gotten quite a bit of publicity in the church, Truman Madsen. Axel Madsen is my uncle; his mother is my grandmother. I spent a whole day with Truman and his two brothers and Axel Madsen the father just after his mother died. I stayed over a day in Salt Lake after conference. Axel was very courteous in taking me to Bingham Canyon and some other places. He was in real estate, an easy-going kind of business, and he could take time off.
Axel told me some interesting things that day. One was that at the graveside of his wife, President Grant's daughter, President Grant came over and put his hand on Axel's shoulder and said, "Now, my boy, you are to go out and find yourself a wife to be a mother to these boys. It's not good for a man to be alone." So Axel went out and got a housekeeper who took care of the house for over twenty years. After that, he married her. I think that it is strange that he did not do what the president of the church told him to do.
There's something else I might say about President Grant. Another of his daughters married a man, and the two of them joined the Christian Science Church. They lived in Pasadena. They definitely withdrew from the Mormon Church, a pretty heavy blow to the president of the Church. Axel said that he used to make more trips down to Pasadena than he did to some of his daughters right there in Salt Lake. President Grant would go to the Pasadena daughter as the father, and she would receive him that way. He kept the relationship going. He knew her decision, she knew what he wanted her to do, and they kept their relationship alive right to the very last, even though they were very different on the church affiliation. I thought that was a pretty special situation. My uncle Axel became much more approachable as the years went by. He died, not too long ago, in his 93rd year.
I remember an episode during the war years concerning Ezra Taft Benson. Of course, in those days, he was not president of the church. He had a major position with an organization in the east. He was well-known around the capitol.
We had in our stake at that time a young man named Vocal Benson. He was a much younger brother of Ezra Taft Benson. He may have been the youngest son. Vocal came to our area with his family and was later given the position of counselor in the bishopric in the Mission Ward. During the war years, the draft was in effect. But we didn't know any of the circumstances surrounding Vocal's personal life until one day we had a call from his wife that he had been missing for three days. The stake presidency and I, as a neighboring bishop, were advised that Vocal had disappeared.
One ward member, Jerry Barton, perhaps a relative of our later stake president J. Bryan Barton, was a member of the FBI. We enlisted his services to find out where Vocal might be. The stake president Howard McDonald and I discussed the matter in some detail with Barton. We found out that Vocal had been working at a defense plant in the area. Right after closing time, the local police swooped down on some of the workers. They had also gone through pool halls and other gathering places of young men looking for draft dodgers. The police gathered up about eighty of them that night. Vocal was among them.
In his home ward in Idaho, some of the neighbors were on draft boards. Vocal was on the draft list, but he had not reported, filled in any paper work, or given any information. He had moved to San Francisco to escape the draft, but he had finally been located. He ignored all the notices to him, thinking that being a member of a bishopric was sufficient to exempt him. At least that was his later excuse. He was a draft dodger.
We were casting about as to what we could do. We decided that our best approach might be to call Vocal's brother Ezra Taft Benson in Washington. He had some influence and might be able to help. I was the person who made the calls, though I don't really know why it fell to me. I got through to Benson, explaining the problem, that his brother was a draft dodger now in custody. I asked him if he could use some influence in Washington and have Vocal given the benefit of the doubt in this case. After Benson had enquired in detail about the problem, he said no. He would not want to intercede in any way. Vocal must take his own chances. Benson was sympathetic to his brother's foolishness in not registering with the draft board, and he said he would welcome anything that we could do to help, but he would not interfere.
We found out where Vocal and some others were being detained, and when he appeared before the federal judge, Justice Fox, we appeared there with him. Jerry Barton, our FBI man, noted that Benson was in big trouble, and that the best thing he could do was to volunteer for the army. His enlistment might mitigate some of the charges against him. So Vocal joined up. It was very encouraging for me to know of President Benson's fairness in not asking for special treatment. Later on, Benson was called to be a member of the Council of the Twelve and now is president of the church.
I had an early association with Henry D. Moyle due to the fact that he was the member of the Council of the Twelve in San Francisco when I was called to be the president of the stake. We had many conversations.
After I had been released, I had a call from a man I knew who had been in charge of the stake farms and was stake president in the Sacramento area. He knew me and that is probably why he called me instead of calling the local stake president which would be the protocol. On one early Sunday morning, he told me that Brother Moyle and his wife were staying in a hotel in San Francisco. He also knew that there was a stake conference being held in Oakland, and that Brother Moyle would be interested in going. My friend suggested that I call the Moyles and offer to take them there. So I called Henry D. Moyle and his wife at their hotel and invited them to go to the ten o'clock session.
My wife and I called for them and drove over to the inter-stake center in Oakland. We found the parking lot filled up, so I drove them as near as I could to the entrance and told them that I would park the car. When I got to the door, I found that President Moyle had seated the women and that he was standing there in front of the stake center. The people were streaming past him on both sides, no one paying him any attention as far as I could see. I walked up to him and I could see that he was already in bad humor. He said we should go in and sit in the back; nobody knew he was there anyway. I said that I knew he was there, and I just could not help being amused. He had been newly appointed as a member of the presidency of the Church, an assistant to President McKay, and he was very disgruntled at being ignored. I thought to myself, that it did not matter how important a person was, he always needed attention.
So I took him up to the stand. It was empty because all the officers were in a meeting and just beginning to come in. Brother Moyle very graciously asked me to sit on the stand by him. Pretty soon the seats were all filled. Later on Brother Bruce McConkie came in, and he immediately made complete deference to Brother Moyle, the senior authority in charge. Brother Moyle, in a nice polite gesture, insisted that I speak too. So one time I spoke in an Oakland conference.
San Francisco is a transient city. We have to call new officers all the time. A bishop and a stake president in a city like San Francisco find a major responsibility in calling new officers because people are always on the move. They come and go for various reasons. It's hard to find a permanent home. People rent for a while and then move on. We had lots of changes. One time we had nine changes in the high council in an eleven month period. We got a call from the general authorities who, reading the reports, wanted to know what was wrong with us that we were making so many changes. I explained to the authority, that one had become a bishop, another was in the army, a third was sick, this one took a new job, and we had learned long ago to catch them on the fly and use them if they were eligible.
We have a lot of people coming and going who are looking for handouts. Many have fringe memberships and only joined the Church for the loaves and fishes. One time as we started our stake presidency meeting, a new car drove up in front of the stake office. A man and his wife came in and said that they had been directed to the stake presidency. They were looking for the loan of a couple of hundred dollars to get to another area where he had a job waiting. There were two children in the car. The man had a polished look to him. He was of German background and from Argentina. He had joined the church there and had later been helped by the elders to come to Miami. He got to Salt Lake and worked for a short time for the Deseret Book Company. Now he was heading for work on the Pacific Coast. I had told the bishops to direct any strangers needing help to the stake presidency.
We were not in a position to give handouts to everybody who asked, and I was immediately suspicious of this couple. I have always felt that I had the ability to make a judgement of character and personality of people as I meet them. In this case, it proved that I was right. Among his first activities was to pull out one of these folding card cases showing all his church credentials and swish it across the desk in a dramatic way. I didn't like the way he did it. He said a few more things, and I told him that I thought he was a phony. He bristled and said that I was no Christian. He was ranting around there in mixed languages. My counselors, who were listening in, had never seen such an abrasive confrontation. One of them, Ira Somers, got me out of the room and told me that I was treating the man wrong, that there were two little children in the car. But I said they were phony. I came back in and told the woman that I would give them $10 and no more money.
The man had made one statement that we could verify, that he had worked for Deseret Book. I called the company, and after some trouble, got through and found that the man had actually worked there. But he had been an unsatisfactory employee, working a very short time and refusing to do some jobs. Within three weeks, maybe less, we had a detailed description of this couple and their car from Salt Lake. We were told to watch out for these people and not to give them any help. They had made a business of working the bishops across the country and imposing on the church. The man had been baptized and brought to the country by missionaries, but he was not a good member. I give this as one incident.
We received a letter one day addressed to the stake presidency of the Mormon Church in San Francisco. The letter was from an African country, from the chief of a village of six or seven hundred people. He wrote to say that the group had become acquainted with the workings of the church and that they wanted to join en masse, with the chief to be appointed as one of the officers. The whole community would join. We did not know what to do about the situation, so we sent the letter to Salt Lake. They sent the letter back to us, saying that it was addressed to us, and that we should answer it and explain to them that people came into the church one by one in Africa the same as anywhere else.
It is commonplace now to have large movie theatres and big screens, but we were involved with one of the first pioneering efforts: Cinerama. This great big show had had one performance in Los Angeles which had been partially supported by the LDS church because various church members had Hollywood affiliations. After a big success there, the company in Los Angeles contacted me to meet with certain officials about sponsoring a performance here. We arranged to meet as a stake presidency with some of the bishops at a hotel here to sponsor the San Francisco premiere. We were given the option of selling the tickets. We agreed that we would work with them and began to sell tickets and to use the profits as a building fundraiser. We made over $5,000 out of the program. I had the fun of meeting with them and negotiating.
My wife was the stake chorister and was in charge of the music. We had a great group of people from all over the stake, but I think it was she who suggested that we should invite J. Spencer Cornwall, the conductor of the Tabernacle Choir, here for the occasion. I told the Cinerama officers that we wanted Cornwall brought here. That meant that they would have to pay his expenses. They grumbled at that, but finally agreed. We brought Brother Cornwall down, and he conducted a San Francisco group of singers, and we raised the money and put Cinerama on the map. We put the church right on Market Street; Cinerama was presented by the Mormon Church at the Orpheum Theatre in San Francisco. There were church placards up and down the street that the Mormons had bought out Cinerama. It was a first.
We did very well. There were just a very few seats left to sell at the door at the time of the presentation. We had had the film executives over to our home for dinner. My wife Jean had fixed a very good meal.
We like to do things nicely in San Francisco. That makes me think of our former Young Women's president Veda Bramwell. She had good ideas, sometimes with high prices. Nothing was too good for the Mormons, that was her credo. As a part of the regular MIA season, she would arrange to have dances in the major ballrooms of the area. We had dances at the Palace Hotel; we had dances at the Fairmont Hotel; we had big events of that kind every year. It meant buying the facilities for that particular night. Some of the ward bishops who had to help underwrite these events grumbled that we had a stake center where we could hold dances without any extra expense. But these were to be party-dress-up affairs with the atmosphere of the finest hotels. Of course the union waiters who had to bring in pitcher after pitcher after pitcher of water and no liquor or coffee showed some consternation. Those were lovely affairs.
My wife Jean was interested in music. Before we were married she played the violin. Later, she organized choirs. She had ward choirs wherever we went. She had stake choirs wherever we went. Her groups would perform in the dark when service men would leave for the South Pacific. When the temple was dedicated in Oakland by President McKay, her choir was called for the first session. She was also the PTA choir leader for eleven years and performed at many events in hospitals, other churches, and many other places. She had a great part in bringing music to the Church and to San Francisco. When she brought her PTA singers to our own stake center and ward building every year or so, it was very strange to have some of the husbands, who had been assigned as ushers, usher our own ward members to their seats. Music was a major part of her life, her many, many choirs. There were only two kinds of people in my wife's opinion: those who would sing in the choir and those that wouldn't.