We entered the Mission Home Training Center for our two week stay prior to departing for our assignments. The mission home, made up of an old hotel near the corner of North Temple and State Street, was located across from Temple Square. My five room mates and I all shared a corner room overlooking State Street with a clear view of Apple Annie as she walked up and down the street in front of us taunting the missionaries as they came to and fro. I must admit some of us took to taunting her back and throwing apples at her from the windows on the second floor.
All six of us where departing for the same mission including Don. Don like myself was the youngest sibling in his family. We had fallen out of contact for a few years but upon both of our mission calls, discovered we were both being called to the same mission on the same day. Darn that Sister Kinnelly who predicted we would serve together.
Don was not quite as organized as the rest of us and never bothered to make his bed up. We took to helping him (sort of) by making his bed one day. We really short sheeted him, when he walked in on us and quested, “what are you guys doing?” I had the duty to inform him his bed was closest to the door and always looked bad so we, as his brethren, were helping him. After closing the day that eve and with the lights out, it took him a while to figure it out why he couldn’t quite fit in his bed and just stood there looking befuddled…. Until we all bust out laughing.
After the two weeks of training in the basement of the Old Hotel Utah, (now Joseph Smith Building) we returned to our Host family (Davidson’s of Millcreek) the evening prior to our departure for the mission field. The evening, with weather changing and while jogging along the street with Don, I stepped into an undulation, tripped and landed on my chin, splitting it open. Wow, with blood all over my clean white shirt they rushed me back to the Mission Home, in a vehicle with a snow plow attached to the front, where the Mission President (an MD as well as my girlfriend’s Uncle) stitched me up. I was destined to arrive the next evening in Vancouver with a huge bandage on my chin.
Much has changed in the 40+ years since those days. Salt Lake has continued to grow outwards. The distant suburbs are now close in and once country fields are filled with new homes. Salt Lake would host the world with the Olympics in 2002 and Downtown would grow upward with many new high rise buildings. The store on the corner and the Old Mission Home, as well as the Desert Gym up the hill are all gone, making way for the Church Conference Center. The Mission Home, now called the MTC is located in Provo. My chin healed up. Don and I returned home married and raised our families. My mission home companion, Elder McFarland passed way the next year a victim of an auto accident and I would later meet his nephew as he served in my home ward providing information and pictures to his family. Life doesn’t stand still and things change as life rolls on. Make sure you write these memories down so they can live on for generations to come.
