Personal Encounters with Elder Packer (Part 4)

I regret that I was unable to attend or watch the funeral services for President Boyd K. Packer on Friday.  He has been a titanic presence in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints for my entire adult life.

Fortunately, those services are online, and I intend to watch them when I get the chance.

Here’s another reminiscence of him:

The process of bringing what was then called the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, or FARMS — and, later, the Neal A. Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship — into BYU took a very long time.  It went through multiple phases, and I was chairman of the Board for most if not all of that process.  The negotiations and legal arrangements and financial decisions and meetings ate up several years of my life, and pretty well prevented me from serious academic research and writing in my field during that period.  (In hindsight, seeing how things turned out . . .  well, never mind.)

Anyway, at one point in the process, when we had arrived at a preliminary protocol of affiliation — much looser than the eventual agreement — I was asked to represent FARMS at a meeting of BYU’s Board of Trustees.  (BYU was represented by its then president, Rex Lee.  To show you how long this went on, the final agreement was reached under his successor as BYU’s president, Elder Merrill Bateman.)  The Board was chaired by President Gordon B. Hinckley, and it included the entire First Presidency of the Church, along with four or five members of the Twelve, one or two from the Seventy, and various auxiliary leaders.  (My memory is just a bit fuzzy as to precisely who was there that day among those other leaders.)

It was a fascinating experience for me, of which much might be said.  But I’ll focus on one very brief exchange.

President Hinckley was very actively in charge of the meeting, and, after we had discussed the proposed protocol, he turned to Elder Packer and asked — and I seem to recall his use of the first name — “Boyd, do you have any questions for Brother Peterson, any concerns?”

Elder Packer addressed me.  “You don’t have any plans to market FARMS keychains, do you?”

I was surprised at the question.  “No,” I said.  “Definitely not.”

“They’re a non-profit, non-commercial organization,” said President James Faust.

“Then I have no problem with them at all,” said Elder Packer.

It turned out, as I learned, that Elder Packer really, really, really disliked what he saw as commercial exploitation of the Gospel.  And, when people ask me “Well, what about Deseret Book?” I answer that, based on what I know, he had reservations about Deseret Book, too.