Chapter 3: Larger than Life

President Gordon B. Hinckley stood to rededicate the Salt Lake Tabernacle in a General Conference the following spring. I turned to Jaedin and pointed to my computer screen. “Listen closely to this talk,” I told him, tapping on the screen, “President Hinckley is getting very old!”

Having forgotten about Jaedin’s standard of measure, I laughed when he asked, “Well, is he older than the Titanic?”

I wasn’t sure of the answer, so I popped up a search window right next to the streaming General Conference video and within a few seconds was browsing through an online biography. Sure enough, on the day Bryant and Ada welcomed their newborn son, Gordon, into the world, RMS Titanic’s un-christened hull was still being formed in the womb of her dry dock.

“Well?”

“Yes, Jaedin, he is older than the Titanic.”

“Wow, that’s old!” he remarked; he tuned in for a few minutes once armed with this astounding bit of trivia but soon got bored and stood up to leave.

“You know, your great-grandfather was born less than a year after President Hinckley,” I told him, trying find something online that might hold his attention a bit longer, “in the same year as Ronald Reagan, Roy Rogers, Lucille Ball, and Vincent Price.”

He gave me a blank stare in return; of course none of those names meant anything to him.

I gave it another shot, thinking perhaps Michael Jackson might do the trick. “Vincent Price is the one with the evil laugh in Thriller,” I continued, “Who knows, maybe he’s even related to your Great-Grandpa Price!”

“Cool,” he said, “can I leave now?”

I nodded reluctantly and turned back to the computer. The dedicatory prayer itself had only taken a few minutes, and the Tabernacle Choir was already punctuating the moment with the Spirit of God – that standard anthem of all LDS dedications. The Saturday afternoon conference session wound to a close, and the television cameras panned from the restored, rededicated Tabernacle to families strolling around the Temple Square grounds and relaxing on the lawns. As the Bonneville Communications credits began rolling, I kept scrolling through a timeline of milestones in President Hinckley’s online biography.

The year 1928 – the final year missing from the pile of Grandpa’s journals – jumped out at me in particular: “1928: graduated from Latter-day Saints College,” read the biography.

I poked around on my bookshelf and dug Hamp’s high school documents out of a folder. I knew he had attended L.D.S. High – which used to be located where the Church Office Building now stands along North Temple – and I wondered if it might be related to Latter-day Saints College. A bit of online sleuthing revealed that the term “college” in those days – as is still the case in the English-speaking countries of the Commonwealth – merely referred to a secondary school. As I discovered, L.D.S. College, a private secondary school operated by the LDS Church, comprised both L.D.S. High and L.D.S. Business College, the latter of which is still around today.

A few more clicks revealed that back in 1928, L.D.S. High was a three-year high school for sophomores, juniors, and seniors. L.D.S. Business College was at the time a one-year junior college vocational curriculum that could be appended after the senior year of high school – designed for those not quite ready to leave the campus for their chosen trades or universities.

Having learned that L.D.S. High and L.D.S. College were essentially one in the same, I went back through the names of the graduates on Hamp’s commencement program with renewed interest. Sure enough, I found “Hampton Price” and “Gordon Hinckley” among the list of high school graduates, confirming that they did, in fact, graduate together. I felt like a detective stumbling across new evidence in a case.

Looking through the evening’s agenda, I saw that Heber J. Grant, James E. Talmage, and a number of future General Authorities and history makers had addressed the graduates during a program held in the Tabernacle on the first day of June, 1928. One glance through the names of the other graduates revealed both the heritage and the future potential embodied by the students in attendance with them that night: Ashton, Cannon, Kimball, Monson, Nelson, Nibley, Osmond, Romney, Smoot, Snow, Taylor…

I’d love to hear the speakers and see the reaction of the audience members as they were advised concerning the open slate of their yet unwritten future. What advice, for example, did the young Gordon Hinckley take to heart as the speakers took to the pulpit? Could he have imagined – as he marveled at the technological miracle of the pulpit’s newly installed microphone – that he would be called to stand at that same pulpit hundreds of times over the ensuing years, addressing an ever-expanding audience?

What would he have thought if someone had whispered to him during the graduation ceremony that eighty years later he would stand at that very pulpit to dedicate a newly refurbished Tabernacle? And that in the process, his every word would be ciphered into fifty languages by an army of translators who would instantaneously send their signals out to space to be intercepted by manmade moons hovering overhead? Then, after being bounced from the satellites back to earth, that his words would be telecast, simulcast, webcast, and podcast at light speed around a global transmission network? And that the streaming video would promptly appear on thousands of computerized gadgets – some no larger than a pocket watch – each capable of storing an entire library of books within their microscopic circuitry?

“And by the way, young Gordon, you will be the hard-working man behind the scenes largely responsible for the Church’s media blitz!”

Unbelievable? Of course! Yet here I was in another century – another millennium, in fact – staring at precisely that real-time scenario on my computer screen. With my own mind boggled, I closed out a whole stack of search engine results that I had completely taken for granted, leaving only the lds.org media player on my screen. Having been too distracted to hear much of the dedication ceremony the first time around, I pulled the scrollbar on the internet video player back to hear it again.

“Every prophet since Brigham Young has spoken from this pulpit,” President Hinckley noted in his introductory remarks. He then spoke of the generations to come, but my thoughts went back in time. The video player’s scrollbar was stubbornly stuck within the two-hour conference block, but I pictured being able to pull it back even further to see the previous prophets speak. I imagined taking the video stream back through hundreds of general conferences and thousands of public speeches, concert broadcasts, Christmas devotionals, and funerals – all the way back to that June evening in 1928 when Hamp and Gordon were staring at the same stage I was looking at on my computer screen. The commencement program in my hands – the same piece of paper Hamp had held in his hands that night – was literally hot off the press.

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