{"id":110600,"date":"2025-06-05T11:48:00","date_gmt":"2025-06-05T17:48:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/?p=110600"},"modified":"2025-06-05T16:50:49","modified_gmt":"2025-06-05T22:50:49","slug":"an-autobiographical-fragment","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.patheos.com\/blogs\/danpeterson\/2025\/06\/an-autobiographical-fragment.html","title":{"rendered":"An autobiographical fragment"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<\/head>

\u00a0<\/p>\n

\"The<\/a>
While I was growing up in the greater Los Angeles area, this was \u201cmy\u201d temple. And this is where, finally, my parents were sealed together for time and all eternity, and where my brother and I were sealed to them. I\u2019m profoundly grateful for that. \u00a0(Public domain image from Wikimedia Commons)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Newly posted on the comatose and never-changing website of the Interpreter Foundation:\u00a0The Temple: Plates, Patterns, & Patriarchs<\/em>: \u201cAncient Israelite Temple Ritual through the Telescope of Restoration Scripture,\u201d<\/a> written by David M. Calabro<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Part of our book chapter reprint series, this article originally appeared in The Temple: Plates, Patterns, & Patriarchs<\/em>, edited by Stephen D. Ricks and Jeffrey M. Bradshaw. For more information, go to https:\/\/interpreterfoundation.org\/books\/the-temple-plates-patterns-patriarchs\/<\/a>. For video and audio recording of this conference talk, go to https:\/\/interpreterfoundation.org\/conferences\/2022-temple-on-mount-zion-conference\/videos\/calabro\/<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cOne of the most remarkable things about Joseph Smith\u2019s revelations of ancient scripture is how they embody a complex understanding that is consistent with what we know of ancient texts. Just as ancient libraries contained multiple versions of the same text, so do the scriptures of the Restoration. Just as ancient texts reveal multiple layers of transmission, so too do the scriptures of the Restoration. Nowhere is this complexity more clearly evident than in Joseph Smith\u2019s revelations corresponding to the first six chapters of Genesis. \u201cI wish to go back to the beginning,\u201d said the Prophet, \u201cto the morn of creation. There is the starting point for us to look to.\u201d This was in the King Follett discourse in Nauvoo, not long before his martyrdom. By that time, Joseph Smith had revisited the early chapters of Genesis no less than five times, each time yielding a different version.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"Rose's<\/a>
\u201cThe San Gabriel Mission,\u201d by Guy Rose (1914)
Wikimedia Commons public domain image<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019ve been feeling prompted lately to start jotting down notes for my life story, and I think that I may even share some of them here. \u00a0The notes below were written down swiftly, from memory, without any outline. \u00a0My plan is to assemble such notes together and to use them as the germs of an eventual more formally constructed autobiography. \u00a0(That sounds a bit more grand than I really have in mind!) \u00a0But the first task is simply to get some thoughts and memories into the computer.<\/em><\/p>\n

I was born in Huntington Hospital in Pasadena, California.<\/p>\n

My father was a native of North Dakota, a non-practicing Lutheran born to a Norwegian mother and to a Danish or Danish-American father. \u00a0My grandmother came to the United States on her own in her late teens. \u00a0There is ambiguity with regard to my grandfather because I, at least, am still not sure whether he was actually born in Schleswig-Holstein or immediately after his parents\u2019 arrival in America or possibly even on the boat in the mid-Atlantic.<\/p>\n

My father came to California during the Great Depression, following an older brother who had found work in the construction industry. \u00a0My mother had come to California from St. George, Utah, as a teenager. \u00a0She was an occasionally communicant, vaguely believing, but (I think) largely \u201ccultural\u201d Latter-day Saint at that time. \u00a0She married another nominal Latter-day Saint, originally from Idaho, and had a son by him, my ten-years older half brother. \u00a0But her first husband, Evan D. Walters, who worked as a conductor on the old Los Angeles electric streetcar system, died of a sudden heart attack in 1943, at the age of only thirty-eight; their baby was less than a year old. \u00a0(Evan Walters died on the job, and my mother always suspected that he had, in fact, been accidentally electrocuted. \u00a0But I can say nothing of that.)<\/p>\n

By that time, my father had been serving for several years in the Army of the United States. \u00a0He would close out the war in England, Germany, Austria, and France as a staff sergeant in the Eleventh Armored Division, a part of General George S. Patton\u2019s Third Army. \u00a0At the conclusion of the war, he returned home to North Dakota. \u00a0But there was little for him there. \u00a0While the other siblings had been otherwise engaged, the youngest brother \u2014 a kind man (as I recall him) with a weakness for alcohol (not altogether without precedent or parallel in the extended family) \u2014 had taken over the small family farm for his aging parents and had lost it. \u00a0Eventually, the entire family (save one sister) left North Dakota for the now booming state of California. \u00a0And my father returned to California, too.<\/p>\n

In partnership with another of his brothers, my father launched a small construction contracting business in 1949, specialized in paving and grading, asphalt and concrete, in South El Monte. \u00a0E. C. Construction Company \u2014 the name comes from Ernest<\/em> (my uncle) and Carl<\/em> (my Dad) \u2014 started off doing streets, residential driveways, and curb-and-gutter work but eventually came to specialize in larger roads, large commercial and public school parking lots, foundations for commercial buildings, and specialized factory slabs (including for Paramount Studios and other Hollywood filmmakers). \u00a0The company\u2019s work is located all over Southern California (and occasionally beyond); for many years, they were the go-to site-contractor for the scattered power stations of Southern California Edison. But, for obvious reasons, the company\u2019s projects were concentrated most especially in the San Gabriel Valley, including the parking lot and racetrack area at Santa Anita Park<\/a> and my own high school\u2019s parking lot and its football field and track.<\/p>\n

Two curious facts:<\/p>\n