General Conference Was Different in the 1960s (even setting aside the talks)

I recently flipped through reports of General Conference from the 1960s (to get lists of speakers for my last post, as they’re only listed on the Church website back to 1971). I didn’t read through the talks, but even just looking at what the men conducting each session said, several things struck me that are different from my experience watching Conference, which started in the 1980s.

  • David O. McKay used to conduct every single session. Starting from April 1960, the first time someone else conducted a session was in April 1962, when he allowed Hugh B. Brown to break his streak. And I didn’t check how far back into the 1950s it went. He might have been doing it for a decade. I have to admit that if, say, Russell M. Nelson had started doing this when he became Church President, it would strike me as overly controlling.
  • Through October 1962, all new wards, stakes, and stake presidents were announced in Conference. It’s striking how much smaller the Church was that that could even be a possibility. I remember as a kid, hearing the story of how Spencer W. Kimball was called from being a stake president to being a member of the Q12, and how amazing that was. He was called in 1943. Given the size of the Church at that time, that seems much less remarkable than I had thought (and than it had been taught to me).
  • The sustaining of Church officers included listing David O. McKay as trustee-in-trust for the Church. I don’t think I learned of the Church’s corporate structure until I read this series of posts by Daymon Smith at BCC a decade ago.
  • Conference used to take three days, and was timed to always have one of the days fall on April 6th, even if it meant having the days be non-consecutive.
  • The men conducting Conference used to often announce a rolling list of the next two speakers. For example, they’d announce that Elder A and Elder B would speak. Then Elder A would speak, and the man conducting would announce Elder B and Elder C.

  • The length of talks, and the fitting of them into sessions, clearly wasn’t planned as well as it has been in recent years. Because of how speakers were announced (see previous point), there are several instances of where a speaker was announced and then told that his talk couldn’t be fit in after all, and he’d be bumped to another day. Or sometimes they weren’t bumped, but told to hustle. In October 1961, David O. McKay told Sterling W. Sill, an Assistant to the Q12, to give the one-minute version of his talk rather than the fifteen-minute version because they were short on time. They were short on time because Ezra Taft Benson then stood up and delivered a really long talk (a diatribe about communism, of course), which McKay must have been anticipating.
  • Along the same lines, I found a few instances where men were called up to “say a few words” with no notice. I think once when McKay did this to someone, he announced that it would occur after a song, so the man could have a minute to think about what he’d say. I do wonder, though, given that it seems like this was a thing he did fairly regularly, whether men who might be called on might not have planned at least in their heads what they might say if it happened.
  • Twice that I saw, once in 1960 and again in 1961, McKay asked non-members to speak. The first was the US National Administrator of Veterans Affairs. The second was head of an architectural firm that had designed the London Temple and church buildings in England. I think it’s kind of fun that non-Mormons used to be invited to speak in Conference, but I also think it’s sad that this was seen as reasonable, but the idea of having women speak was just unfathomable. (Women started speaking in Welfare Session in the 1970s and in the Saturday and Sunday general sessions in the 1980s.)
  • Holders of prominent Church positions who weren’t GAs or General Officers were also sometimes called to speak. The head of KSL here, the Commissioner of Church Health Service there, positions like that.
  • Speaker’s names weren’t always standardized. The man I know as N. Eldon Tanner was frequently referred to as Nathan Eldon Tanner, and at least once, at least in the headings in the Conference Report, as Nathan E. Tanner. Also, the men conducting sometimes introduced speakers without using their full titles. For example, I found N. Eldon Tanner once introducing Bruce R. McConkie as “Brother Bruce McConkie.”
  • In April 1960, between talks, McKay read an urgent message from a bishop in Washington that he wanted a particular person (presumably in his ward) to call him. Of course this isn’t done now because communication technology has changed so much, but even if today’s Conferences had 1960s technology, I suspect it wouldn’t be done because Conference is Very Serious Business that wouldn’t be interrupted by such things.
  • David O. McKay used to read telegrams from groups of members or missionaries who were listening to Conference. Along the same lines as the previous point, I just don’t think today’s GAs would do such a thing even if today’s church only had 1960s technology.
  • The statistical report used to have a lot more line items in it.
  • Finally, this isn’t actually from the Conference Report, but I looked up Victor L. Brown on Wikipedia to get the dates he was called into different callings. Is it just me, or from this photo does he look a lot like Alec Baldwin?
Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

16 comments

  1. (I will repeat here a comment I wrote years ago when someone was considering the financial details that were previously reported in the General Conferences.)

    Those old conference reports gave detail about a lot of things that get glossed over now. In the April ’48 report linked above, before J. Reuben Clark laid out the income, spending and assets of the church, Joseph Anderson named the two new missions, the four new mission presidents, the two new stakes, the eleven new stake presidents, half a page of new wards, the four discontinued wards, the three branches made wards, the nine new branches, and the one discontinued branch. The birth, marriage, and death rates of the church are given In other conference reports I’ve seen lists of the chapels dedicated in the year and ennumeration of temple ordinances for the living and for the dead. All anyone looks back and cares about, though, are the dollars.

  2. Ah-ha, John Mansfield! So since I didn’t even mention financial reports, then clearly I’m a counterexample. Or, perhaps, on second thought, I’m the exception that proves the rule. Or perhaps it’s moot, since the financial reports already didn’t have the dollars by the 1960s.

  3. Ziff, you are sui generis, a Russell paradox of an outlying data extractor.

  4. You can get text of talks going back to 1942 from scriptures.byu.edu. The stuff between talks hasn’t been of interest to me for my research so I don’t know whether they have any of that. I’m glad you took the time to read it because this is fascinating stuff.

    I personally remember a general conference moment from the mid 1990s that featured a non-member: someone from the international Boy Scouts came to priesthood session to give Thomas Monson some kind of award (one of those [precious metal][land mammal] awards, I think in this case is was the “bronze wolf”). Given how quickly the church ditched scouts after Monson’s death, it suggests he may have been far more attached to scouts than any of his colleagues.

    I recently discovered that while neither Russell Nelson nor Dallin Oaks were general authorities prior to being called apostles, both of them had previously given one general conference talk: Oaks as president of BYU during the 1970s, and Nelson as a stake president in 1969. By my calculations, Nelson will soon surpass Thomas Monson for the longest time span between first and last conference talks.

    I would be curious whether they were trying very hard to get conference sessions to be exactly 2 hours during the 1960s. It seems like the advent of satellite broadcasts and cable TV networks would have made it a stronger requirement to get the timing right. In the 1990s I sang in the Mormon Youth Chorus and we used to do the music for Saturday morning sessions. In rehearsal we would practice skipping verses of the middle and final hymns in case they were running behind schedule.

  5. Quentin,
    Your suspicion about Monson and the surprising longevity of Scouting are spot-on.

    Ziff,
    In the 1960’s, conference had a very different feel to it. While most could not listen to all sessions due to school and work, there was a “home atmosphere” about it and a collegiality between the leaders that was palpable. I prefer today’s church, but do have a bit of nostalgia about that era.

  6. Good info. A relative of mine read Greg Prince’s biography of David O. McKay and remarked that it felt like in that period the Church was moving from the feel of a family-owned business to a corporate or public business. It’s an interesting way to think about it, and General Conference probably illustrates it as well.

    And as to Spencer W. Kimball’s calling as an apostle from being stake president in eastern AZ, it is at least a footnote that his grandfather was Heber C. Kimball and his father’s twin sister was a plural wife of Joseph F. Smith, and Joseph Fielding Smith had been an apostle for 30 years by that point. It was a small church.

  7. Thanks for your comments!

    Quentin, I totally remember that award to President Monson in Conference too! And that’s cool that you were actually part of Mormon Youth Chorus so you were a small part of the timing planning. And thanks for the pointer on the old talks!

    Old Man, thanks for sharing your actual experience with Conference from decades ago. The “home atmosphere” phrase totally matches the tone I felt like came through in what the men conducting the meetings said. It was like “Hey, we’re all friends here who know each other well.”

    Dub, that totally makes sense about the shift during McKay’s tenure. And that’s an excellent point about how Kimball was on the GAs’ list certainly for his heritage even if for nothing else.

  8. Conference prayers used to be given by stake presidents and returning mission presidents and suchlike. When they reduced conference to two days in the 1970s, it was no longer possible for all GAs to speak, so they started assigning the prayers to 70s who weren’t scheduled to speak.

    Until my family moved to Utah in the early 1970s, I had no idea that conference wasn’t just the one session that a TV station would broadcast for public service credit.

    J. Reuben Clark was called directly into the First Presidency when he was Ambassador to Mexico and had no church calling. He arguably could have been classified as inactive when called to the FP. He occasionally visited a branch in Mexico City, but kept a very low profile because of the delicate church/state relationship in Mexico at the time. However, I believe he was another one who had spoken in conference before being called as a GA.

  9. Thanks for the additional information, Left Field! On the point of who gave the prayers, I remember when Let Women Pray was a thing nearly a decade ago, there were at least some people arguing that giving Conference prayers was the Seventies’ job, and how dare women try to take it away? I guess it wasn’t that way from time immemorial after all!

  10. The worldwide Church has lost the personal touch and is now more of a corporate entity in terms of size and Bureaucracy. I remember things as they were in the 60s and 70s. Attending general conference then was a treat in terms of atmosphere and the ability to actually get to know some of the authorities. Affects many other areas of the Church as well. I’d give up my soft Conference Center seats for the hard tabernacle seats and accompanying nostalgia.

  11. On of the earliest technologies to regulate the speaker’s time was a red light on the podium that would blink then flip fully on when the speaker’s time had ended. LeGrand Richards was famous for speaking, and being frustrated by the annoying light. He once complained out loud (during a talk) that he couldn’t turn the light off (something like that) and then placed his hand over the light and kept talking.

    I am sad that we no longer allow extemporaneous speaking. Why did we ever tether ourselves to reading talks verbatim? Even our prophet won’t allow himself to be carried away in the moment, to react to the audience. The canned talks given today feel so robotic, so cold and impersonal.

    On one hand- without the review process we got anti-communist rants.

    On the other hand, when Elder Kearon (70 from UK) spoke about the Syrian refugee crisis a few years back, Elder Uchtdorf (conducting the session) was inspired to give him an “amen”. But if he could have, I highly suspect he would have continued testifying of charity work for refugees. I like to believe that this theme would have also struck a chord with the remaining speakers would have similarly testified. Maybe we (the saints) would have also caught that fire too. Jana Reiss wouldn’t have needed to write an essay the next day about the church’s inability to react to massive current events due to it’s stodgy protocols.

    Maybe if the speakers could look into our eyes and connect before talking, we’d feel that SL really did care, and wasn’t so out of touch.

    Right now, in our urgency to do nothing evil, we have turned SL into a blind, deaf monkey speaking to a mute monkey, the rank and file.

  12. Mortimer – I would guess that the reason for reading scripted talks is the translation. My BYU roommate was a Gen Conf translator, and she would get a copy of the talk at least a few days before Conf so she could start working on translation. I believe the meetings are simultaneously broadcast in several languages.

  13. Thanks for your comments. jc, thanks for sharing your memory and preference. It makes sense to me that the older Conferences felt more personal.

    Mortimer, thanks for your thinking through of the pluses and minuses of a more scripted Conference. I especially appreciate your final summary line.

    Melinda, that’s a great point about the need for translation. Certainly it makes sense that the need for translation has increased dramatically since the 1960s, when so much of the Church was in the US and/or English speaking.

  14. Melinda,
    I see your point, translation is important and I know that the translators treat talks as scripture- carefully interpreting every word and phrase for clarity and posterity. But, I don’t think this logistic should hold us back. If the UN can translate extemporaneously and not cause WWIII with too many communication errors, we can translate live as well. I was a crappy linguist on my mission, but translated on the fly all the time. Real linguists would find conference talks a breeze. Now that Elder Maxwell is gone, the reading level of the talks has lowered significantly. I had no technology, but today we can throw the world’s best tools at the problem. The translators can always clean up the translation for the printed edition too. Besides, we as a community (or at least many among us) have the gift of tongues. We can bless the translators and the listeners to convey and receive the spirit of the message. Heaven knows there are many talks that I would have appreciated more if I could have somehow only heard the main message and not a pesky detail or two that become a burr under my saddle. Shifting out of focus might help us all be less pedantic and more sympathetic. I will try anything.

    I don’t mean to push back, I’m just drowning in the status quo, and am desperate for solutions .

  15. Speaking of non-member speakers, sometime in the 1950s Alexander Fleming (discoverer of penicillin) was in Salt Lake City at conference time, was invited to a session of conference, and President McKay invited him to say a few words.

    Also, as to the “smallness” of the church in the 1960s, I remember going with my parents to Temple Square on the Sunday of General Conference, where it seemed that they knew most of the people there. I know that’s an exaggeration, but it did feel a bit like a huge family reunion—maybe you didn’t know all your third cousins twice removed, but you knew somebody that they were close friends with.

  16. Thanks for your reminiscence, Mark B. That does sound a lot more fun, and a totally different feel, from how I’ve always experienced Conference as someone a decade or two younger.

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