Mr. Hughes Goes to Salt Lake City

The street in front of the Temple in downtown Salt Lake City that evening was not only clogged with fresh snow,  but getting through each stop light required waiting for a clearing in the streams of pedestrians that were crossing the boulevard to the see the holiday lights in the square.

Unfortunately that's exactly where my route took me. Even though my hotel was right next to Temple Square, it was on the wrong side of the street, blocked by the UTA Trax light rail line. It took about twenty minutes just to circle around a few blocks to get to the parking garage.

But my patience was well rewarded. The Plaza Hotel, at first glance from the outside, was everything I wanted it to be. I had booked my three nights in Salt Lake City with the explicit purpose of being as close to Temple Square as possible. The hotel even advertised that it was directly next to the Latter Day Saints family history library, for convenient research. To paraphrase a famous Utahan, this was the place.

When I was growing up in the Midwest, my family was very left-wing and progressive, especially for that era. As such, political correctness was a family rule. There was no tolerance for any kind of speech that might denigrate any group of people---with one solitary exception. In my family it was allowed, even encouraged, to hate Mormons. My parents even had special derogatory names for them.

There were always a few Mormon kids in class, and as such it was a little bit tricky making friends with them. They seemed to live in a closed world, at least in my imagination. But I never had any bad experiences with them. The worst incident, if you could call it that, was in fifth grade when I moved to a new school. Back then I was active in Boy Scouts, and so I had to look for new troop in my school.

One of the kids in my class---a Mormon---said there was a troop that met at his church and that I was welcome to join. Meeting in a church was normal for Boy Scouts, so I went along to a couple of the meetings.

But the meetings were not like the ones that met in the basements of Lutheran or Episcopal churches. We didn't talk about camping and hiking much. Instead we met in a conference room in the church and basically learned LDS doctrine. I wasn't put off so much as bored by it, so I quickly found another troop.

But the good part was that I got to learn a little bit about the religion, not only the doctrine itself, but the way the Mormons sell their religion to others. It can feel as if you have walked into a used car dealership, as when I was accosted my some missionaries in downtown Austin and patiently gave them my ear while waiting for the bus. Or when I visited the Mormon Handcart Historical Site in Wyoming, which is run by the Church.

But I was always free to terminate the interaction and leave, of course. They didn't try to stop me. I've been subjected to much worse.

It's easy to make fun of the Mormon mythology---it sounds a bit like the origins of Superman---but who hasn't joked about how there should be a religion based on celebrities or fictional characters? The Mormons actually pulled it off, in some ways. The fact that it is fused into Christianity is the problem for many folks. Those who hate Christians hate the Mormons especially as "super-Christians," while other Christians hate the Mormons as a supposed perversion of Christianity.

Now in the Internet age, where everything is exposed on Wikipedia, it's especially trendy to mock the Mormons. But isn't that what the great counterculture hero Blake said we should do---creatively invent new mythologies to replace the old, and stale (and thus oppressive) ones?

All of this has made me more curious about the Mormons in a contrarian way. In recent years, during a phase in which I immersed myself in a study of American history, I became fascinated by the LDS Church as the manifestation of a uniquely American type of religion. It seems to be particularly indicative of the time and place at which it sprang into being---the 1840's in western New York State, the cradle of many offbeat American phenomena (that's partly why it often strikes me as an offshoot of Freemasonry).

Of course the history of the LDS Church isn't always stellar. And I am aware that many people have terrible experiences with the Church---young folks who have a hard time breaking away, for example. The Mormons also have a tendency to take over entire communities when they start moving in, and the results are always happy. But like I said, I've been fortunate to have had only positive or (at worst)  mildly annoying experiences with them.

So in a way I count myself a "gentile" friend of the Mormons. In this regard, the aspect I tend to admire most is their unabashed and practical approach to worldly success. This to me is Exhibit A in the "Amercian-ness" of their religion. They have made a literal doctrine out of the kind of practical self-help that goes back to Benjamin Franklin and runs up through Andrew Carnegie and the modern-day infomercial prophets. I figure there are worse things than having some of that rub off on me as inspiration.

This was especially true a couple years back when I was working at a tech start-up in Fort Collins, helping to develop a cutting-edge biodata collection and analysis system. It was an incredible piece of technology, and at the time I thought it should have made all of us multi-millionaires.

But the owners and founders had a vision of how the product should be marketed, and it simply wasn't working, after several years of frustration. The founders were Tibetan Buddhists, as it happens (there's a substantial community in northern Colorado).

I have nothing against that per se, but I learned along the way that because the founders believed in re-incarnation, they seriously didn't mind if they failed in business in this lifetime. They would reap the rewards in the next one, or down the line.

Really it was a classic case of company founders being unable to let go of the reins when it was time. But because of this floundering of marketing, a civil war erupted within the small firm. The dissident faction was led by an elder LDS member and his ex-Mormon daughter. They wanted to find a way to make money on the technology right now. Guess which faction I sided with?

Despite the similarities, I am manifestly not the reincarnation of Howard Hughes

At the time I used to joke to myself that I felt like Howard Hughes, the eccentric billionaire who in his later years holed up at the top floor of the Las Vegas Hilton surrounded by Mormon bodyguards. They were the only people he trusted.

Unfortunately this insurrection in our start-up was not enough to save the company from going bust. It was just as well. The technology was a little too much spyware-ish for my ethical qualms, even at the time. I decided I'd have to make my fortune some other way.

So when I got to the Salt Lake City Plaza that evening, I was looking forward to a few days of urban winter relaxation, and soaking up the vibe of the LDS Church in my own particular way of travel osmosis. I could use the inspiration. I figured there were worse kinds of influences, heading into the new year.

The folks at the front desk were very friendly and efficent. It took only a few seconds for them to process my reservation and send me on my way to my room, which was on the thirteenth floor of the hotel.

They pointed me to the elevators, and after retrieving my bags from the Bimmer, I went back inside and pressed the button to open the elevator doors. On the inside panel were the buttons for the floors, as usual. The highest floor number was 13. I pressed it.

When the elevator doors opened at the top floor, I began searching for my room. As I did I became a bit excited. Could it be that they have given me the top-floor corner room, the one that looks right down into Temple Square?

Yes, in fact they did. When I opened the door to my room and saw the view---the brightly lit Temple and the Tabernacle next to it, as well as the Utah capitol dome up on the hill, I dropped my duffel bag on the floor and raised my arms with delight.

"I AM Howard Hughes!!" I said to myself, with a big grin on my face.

Minus the long finger nails, of course.