Read Oral History #138. Available in English.
In Fargo, when I was maybe about the age of seven, my mother was introduced to the Book of Mormon by the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. She read the book and immediately, to her, it was true. She joined the RLDS church and had wonderful friends. We weren’t old enough to be baptized yet, so I must have been about seven when that took place.
Then one day she was grocery shopping and she heard one of the clerks say that there were Mormon missionaries in town. My mother perked up and asked where they were. I’m not sure how she found them, but I want to say here that my mother was a seeker of truth.
She had joined an Evangelical church, I think, in Canada. She was very religious. Prayer was what got her through, she always said. So when she found the Mormon elders, who came over and taught her the lessons, for her it was a defining moment: who had the authority? So she left the RLDS, with much pain and anguish, because she had so many friends there and they told her that she didn’t know what she was getting into. I remember, I was around eight, because I was just going to get the sacrament from the RLDS church—they had grape juice—and I was disappointed. Darn! Now we would be going to join the LDS Church and they just had water. I was baptized into the LDS church on February 28, 1949.