The Mormon church now has a bigger Missionary Training Center in Provo. To hear tell, it's palatial, almost heavenly, in its heavenly sophistication.
News reports say it offers 200 spacious new classrooms, more than 100 practice teaching rooms and 13 computer labs, along with high ceilings, giant windows, natural light and "ponder spaces" — pools of water, a terrace, outdoor tables and inviting lawns.
This certainly was not the MTC I arrived at 44 years ago. Back then it was called the LTM, or Language Training Mission. It was located in Knight-Mangum Hall, which has since been demolished.
I arrived there on the evening of Wednesday, April 25, 1973. After five cloistered days in the old Salt Lake City Mission Home, my spirits were low. The LTM was dark, cold, and I was surrounded by what appeared to be hundreds of junior FBI agents.
The first thing I did was seek out what passed for a "ponder space" back then (behind the bus that brought us there) and fervently inquired of the Lord if he was actually serious about all of this.
Me • "I can't do two more months surrounded by the blissfully faithful. I can't do another five minutes. What am I going to do?"
Lord • [dead silence].
I might as well have been praying to the bus. All I got was diesel exhaust and a headache. It turned out to be the most spiritual experience I would have in the LTM.
Resigned to my fate, I wrestled my luggage up the stairs to a room I shared with three other missionaries. Our relationship lasted 24 hours before I was transferred (almost certainly per request of the others) to another room.
During the next few days, I tried lifting my own spirits. I told myself I could handle the LTM. I'd already been through Army basic training, advanced infantry training, spent a few nights in jail, lived in my car for a month and shared an apartment with Bammer. How bad could this place be?
%$@ awful is how bad. It wasn't the place itself. Even at its worst, the LTM was magnificent compared with places I'd already lived — and places I would live after leaving Provo for South America.
The beds, the bathrooms, the cafeteria, the classrooms — all of that was perfectly acceptable if a bit institutional. It was, after all, Brigham Young University.
What I found insufferable at the LTM was the constant throng. Everywhere I went there was … somebody. My head didn't work that way. It required frequent moments of everyone shutting the hell up.
Fortunately, for the health and safety of everyone in the building, I had an understanding companion.
Elder Richard Williams of San Antonio was terrified that I might get fed up and go home. He was right. I came close on at least half a million occasions.
When it got really bad, Williams would walk me around BYU's biology pond and not talk to me. It probably saved me — and a bunch of other people.
It certainly got me through the LTM. Williams went to Argentina, and I left for Uruguay. I wasn't out of the woods yet, but I had learned an important coping skill.
Fast-forward 10 years. I was home, married, a father and a cop in Springville, not far from Knight-Mangum Hall.
One evening, I was dispatched to a call of a drunk passed out in the doorway of a pizza parlor. A small crowd had gathered by the time I arrived. Sprawled in the doorway was a young kid wearing a white shirt, necktie, a missionary name tag and vomit.
I should have been shocked, maybe even a little angry. I wasn't. Dragging the kid to my patrol car, I said, "I know exactly how you feel, brother."
