The birth of our sixth child

In honor of Camilla's 28th birthday, we share this account of her birth those nearly three decades ago. Happy birthday, Camilla.

On Wednesday, January 7, 1981, I wrote in my journal, "Claudia finished reading Camilla, the biography of Sister Kimball, which we received as a Christmas gift. I finished the book during the holidays while I was sick. If our new baby is a girl, we will probably name her Camilla."

We had actually made that decision a month earlier. During December Claudia and I had been at the Missionary Department Christmas dinner on the 26th Floor of the Church Office Building. President Spencer W. Kimball and his wife Camilla also attended, and we sat at the same table with them. Claudia was expecting our sixth child. She was about three months along, and we decided that evening if our baby was a boy we would name him Spencer and if a girl we would name her Camilla.

It would be another six months before we knew which one was coming.

Monday, June 15, 1981, was Claudia's parents' 32nd wedding anniversary. It was also three days after the due date of our sixth child. Early that day, about 3:30 in the morning, Claudia woke me up to say she was going to have a baby. Her contractions had started about 2:45, so she got up, washed two loads of clothes, showered, and washed her hair so she'd be ready to go to the hospital. We arrived there about 5:00, and Dr. Lewis delivered our sixth child and fourth daughter at 5:37. She weighed 8 pounds 8 ounces and was 21 inches long—our biggest baby thus far.

Dr. Lewis, who was leaving at 7:00 for a fishing trip in Alaska, said it was fortunate the delivery was fast. The baby was posterior, which made the very end of labor harder for Claudia. Also, because of the little one's position, the cord was pinched every time Claudia had a contraction. When Camilla was born, she was all purple and initially had a hard time getting her breathing started. Claudia was put on an IV before delivery but still bled heavily afterward. We were grateful for the blessings of modern medicine which the Lord has provided.

Claudia and Camilla were in the hospital until Thursday morning, June 18. I went to visit her early each morning, and the rest of the family came to see her and the baby each afternoon and evening. On one of those visits, six-year-old Rebecca gave Claudia a note:

I love you Mom. And Camilla. I like both of you. I think both of you are sweet. Here is a poem:

I like
Being in the hospital
With a babby.
The end.

Grandma and Grandpa Lange were in town visiting from California when Camilla was born. Grandpa and I were putting a new roof on our house.

The morning Camilla came home from Lakeview Hospital, all of the children were quite excited. We had a birthday party with gifts for each of the children: a soccer ball for Michael, roller skates for Rebecca, a dump truck for Talmage, and a doll for Anna.

Oh, what songs of the heart

This morning in our staff devotional I was assigned to give the spiritual thought. We sang the hymn "Oh, What Songs of the Heart" (Hymns [1985], no. 286), which was written by Joseph L. Townsend (1849–1942). I then gave a brief history of Brother Townsend's life, his conversion to the Church, a remarkable vision of the Savior he had after joining the Church, and quoted briefly from the nine other well-known hymns he wrote that are in our current hymnal:

"The Day Dawn Is Breaking" (52)
"Nearer, Dear Savior, to Thee (99)
"Reverently and Meekly Now" (185)
"Let Us Oft Speak Kind Words" (232)
"Choose the Right" (239)
"O Thou Rock of Our Salvation" (258)
"Hope of Israel" (259)
"Oh, Holy Words of Truth and Love" (271)
"The Iron Rod" (274)

And, of course, "Oh, What Songs of the Heart," which I want sung at my funeral. This is probably the least known of the ten hymns. I asked by a show of hands how many in our department devotional had known of the hymn before today, and fewer than half the hands went up. It is an upbeat, comforting testimony of what happens after we die:

Oh, what songs of the heart
We shall sing all the day,
When again we assemble at home,
When we meet ne'er to part
With the blest o'er the way,
There no more from our loved ones to roam!
When we meet ne'er to part,
Oh, what songs of the heart
We shall sing in our beautiful home.

Tho our rapture and bliss
There's no song can express,
We will shout, we will sing o'er and o'er,
As we greet with a kiss,
And with joy we carress
All our loved ones that passed on before;
As we greet with a kiss,
In our rapture and bliss,
All our loved ones that passed on before.

Oh, the visions we'll see
In that home of the blest,
There's no word, there's no thought can impart,
But our rapture will be
All the soul can attest,
In the heavenly songs of the heart;
But our rapture will be
In the vision we'll see
Best expressed in the songs of the heart.

Oh, what songs we'll employ!
Oh, what welcome we'll hear!
While our transports of love are complete,
As the heart swells with joy
In embraces most dear
When our heavenly parents we meet!
As the heart swells with joy,
Oh, what songs we'll employ,
When our heavenly parents we meet.

The hymn and the thought were timely. Just after our devotional we learned that the nineteen-year-old daughter of one of our coworkers had been killed earlier this morning in a car accident near Sugar City, Idaho. She was a student at BYU-Idaho.

The birth of our fourth child

In honor of Talmage's 32nd birthday, we share this account of his birth those three decades ago. Happy birthday, Talmage.

Talmage was born on Thursday, June 2, 1977. It was a beautiful sum­mer morning. Grandma and Grandpa Lange were visiting us from California. Grandpa had helped us build a brick-and-picket fence in front of our house in Rose Park to help keep nearly-two-year-old Rachael from wandering all over the neighbor­hood.

I was at work at the Church Office Building, and Claudia had gone to her doctor for her weekly visit. He thought she would be having a baby very soon.

Sometime between 10:00 and 10:30 that morning, she called me at work to say she was beginning to feel something, she thought. She was never sure about these things. I had the car and agreed to come home at lunchtime.

A little after 11:00 she called me again to say she thought I should come home right then. I excitedly hopped in the car and hurried home in less than ten minutes. No one was there.

The neigh­bor lady from across the street yelled that everyone had gone in Grandpa's car to the hospital in Bountiful. It was an exciting ride for the children as Grandpa slipped in and out of traffic trying to get to the hospital as quick as he could. Claudia was busy doing her panting exercise to try to keep something from hap­pening in the car.

When I got to Lakeview Hospital, probably not many minutes afterward, I went racing into the hospital, tearing down the hallway, when it occurred to me that I didn't have the fog­giest notion of where the delivery area was.

After helpful hospital people kindly directed me where to go, I scrubbed up and was coming into the delivery room through one door just as the doctor was entering through another. A nurse was pre­paring to deliver our baby and I guess would have done so had the doctor not arrived just in the nick.

In a special Christmas issue of the Cleverly Newsletter sent to non-family members in December, I recounted the official con­clusion of the story:

"Talmage John Cleverly was born at noon on Thursday, June 2, 1977, in the Lakeview Hospital in Bountiful, Utah—about forty minutes after Mama decided she was in labor, about ten minutes after she arrived at the hospital, about three minutes after the doctor reached the delivery room, and about a minute and a half after Daddy arrived from work. He was a healthy 3580 grams, 52 cm long, with lots of dark hair which is now a little lighter."

Talmage was our fourth child, our second son.

When I brought Claudia and Talmage home from the hos­pital on Sunday morning, there were Michael, Rebecca, and Rachael standing in the front yard to greet us. Rachael, of course, was on the outside of the closed new fence we had just built to keep her in.

And here we have Idaho again

A month ago I posted about my learning the Idaho state song in elementary school and singing it every time I enter the Gem State. I am not alone in that ritual. I was intrigued by this Family History Moment, written by Alaura Ramsey of Eagle, Idaho, on the back page of last weekend's Church News:

"My sister Debbie and I picked up my father from the airport. He was coming to town to attend his extended Mink family reunion. As he walked out the doors into the open air he began to sing loudly, 'And Here We Have Idaho!' It is the state song he learned in elementary school. I smiled. I turned my head, looked at him and thought, 'I love you.' . . . (Church News, May 16, 2009, 16).

Brrrrr . . .

It's springtime. The temperatures are rising. The air-conditioner is on. And I'm freezing. Time to get out the sweaters and mittens.

Ben makes front page of newspaper

Splashed across the front page of this morning's Deseret News [May 16] is a picture of Ben and his mom. It accompanies an article on online schooling.

The picture was taken by Kristin Murphy of the Deseret News. The caption read: "Ben Cleverly, 8, cuts out a drawing of a horse to make a jigsaw puzzle as his mom, Carisa Holden, watches in their Lehi home."

And here we have Idaho

I learned the Idaho state song during the spring of 1959. We had moved from Oregon to Idaho in the end of February, and I was a fourth grader at Scism School, a three-room country school south of Nampa. The fourth, fifth, and sixth grades were all in the same classroom with the same teacher. I learned the song in this classroom as we studied the history of Idaho.

And here we have Idaho
Winning her way to fame.
Silver and gold in the sunlight blaze,
And romance lies in her name.
Singing, we're singing of you,
Ah, proudly too,
All our lives through, we'll go
Singing, singing of you,
Singing of Idaho.

That is the chorus of the song. I never lived in the Gem State after I became an adult, but like a true Idahoan, I always sang the chorus as we crossed the state line into Idaho on various visits through the years. As I sang it, the words gradually morphed into this slightly alternative version:

And here we have Idaho
Wending her way to fame.
Silver and gold in the sunlit plain,
And romance lies in her name.
Singing, singing of you,
All proudly too,
All our lives through, we'll go
Singing, singing of you,
Singing of Idaho.

My family heard me sing my garbled version of the song enough times, almost as a rite of passage into the state, as it were, that some of them can sing some of the lines. I'm sorry that I taught them the wrong words.

I vaguely remember the lyrics of the first verse, although my singing the song as we entered the state did not include the verse:

You've heard of the wonders our land does possess,
Its beautiful valleys and hills,
The majestic forests where nature abounds,
We love every nook and rill.

I did not even remember, if ever I knew, that it had a second verse:

There's truly one state in this great land of ours
Where ideals can be realized.
The pioneers made it so for you and me,
A legacy we'll always prize.

Interestingly, I never learned the Oregon state song during the nearly four years of school I attended in the Beaver State.

The great depression

Yesterday I finished reading The Forgotten Man: A New History of the Great Depression, by Amity Shlaes. The policies of the New Deal, which Franklin D. Roosevelt pursued throughout the 1930s, never did bring unemployment down or otherwise resolve the Great Depression, and yet it is scary to observe the parallels between what was tried and failed then and what is being proposed in our own time.

Several weeks earlier I finished reading FDR's Folly: How Roosevelt and His New Deal Prolonged the Great Depression, by Jim Powell. "In the minds of historians and the American public alike, Franklin Delano Roosevelt was one of our greatest presidents, not least because he supposedly saved America from the Great Depression," explains the back cover of the book. "But as historian Jim Powell reveals in this groundbreaking book, Roosevelt's New Deal policies actually prolonged and exacerbated the economic disaster, swelled the federal government, and prevented the country from turning around quickly."

"The next time economic cataclysm looms," wrote the National Review when this book was first published in 2003, "leaders should read Jim Powell's book." Well, the economic cataclysm is upon us again. I really hope President Obama and his advisers, along with our elected officials in Congress, have read the book. And heed its message. Or the days ahead could be nastier than they really need to be.

As George Santayana (1863-1952) wrote in 1905, more than a century ago: “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it" (Life of Reason, Or The Phases of Human Progress: Introduction and Reason in Common Sense, 1:284).

Swimming

When I was a boy we lived within a mile of the Snake River, which curved to the south and west of our farm in a great bend that gave the area its name, Big Bend. We never went swimming in the river. Mama always warned us of its treacherous undertows and cur­rents. Plus I always secretly knew it had snakes swim­ming in it, and snakes and I respectfully kept our dis­tance, thank you.

We did swim, however, in a swim­ming hole a quarter or a half a mile south of the farm house. The swimming hole was at the junc­tion of a couple of drain ditches and had a culvert, a small, moss-covered cement thing, we used to slide down into the water, a welcomed relief on a hot summer afternoon. (I visited the spot after I was a grown-up and was utterly amazed at how much smaller it was than when I was little.)

At other times we would drive to a place called White Rock, located somewhere on the Owyhee River, a much smaller and evi­dently less treach­erous stream, since Mama let us swim there.

Some­time in the summer of 1955, just after I turned six, I nearly drowned at White Rock. (Mama mentioned in her diary our going to White Rock three times during the summer of 1955: July 23, July 25, and July 28. She did not mention my near-drowning, but she did record on July 28 that while up swimming she shut her little finger in the car door and "it sure hurt.")

Anyway, back to drowning. I was wad­ing along the side of the river in shallow water, stepping among the rocks that covered the bottom in the spot where I was. Some of my older bro­thers, swimming farther out in the stream, had seen some fish and were trying to catch them with their hands.

The next thing I remem­ber was standing or sitting on a rock that was slippery, with my body mostly under the water, when a fish splashed right in front of my face, just inches away. It startled me enough that I lost my balance, and I slipped out into the water, my head underwater, and I started drifting down­stream. I didn’t know how to swim, and I don’t think anyone had noticed me go under. It seemed like I floated along under­water for the longest time, as my brief little life passed by, although I was probably under only a few seconds.

As I floated by my brother Kay, who was thirteen, he saw my foot in the water. As he grabbed for it I remember his yell­ing something like, "Hey, here's that fish!" And he pulled a cough­ing, sputtering little brother foot first out of the water.

The whole experience scared me terribly. For years I had a great fear of any water I couldn’t see the bottom of, such as a lake or a river. A few years later, when I was a teenager, this fear kept me from earning the Eagle rank in Scouting. By the time I quit Scouting, I was only two merit badges short of Eagle—swimming and lifesaving.

By the summer of 1967, just after I graduated from high school, I finally worked up the courage to try water skiing for the first time. And I actually survived.

My earliest memory

Water is a part of my very earliest memory. We were out on a lake in a small motorboat. It started raining, and I must have been absolutely terrified. All I can remember is water. Water everywhere—water in the vast lake, water falling out of the gray sky, water spraying on me from the noisy motor. And, most likely, water streaming out of my bawling two-year-old eyes.



According to my mother's diary for July 1, 1951, we were with my grandparents on an outing at Jenny Lake in Wyoming's Teton National Park. That would have been two and a half weeks before I turned two.

Move from Oregon to Idaho

Fifty years ago today my family moved from Oregon to Idaho. Dale and I, who were seven and nine years old respectively, actually moved a day later. We stayed overnight at our old house on the Oregon-Idaho border so we could finish out the week at our grade school in Adrian. Dale was a first grader. I was in the fourth grade.

Our older brother Gene, who was fifteen, came sometime in the middle of the night, after returning from a basketball tournament in Baker, Oregon, to also be with us. Gene and Kay, who were both in high school at Adrian, would actually not move with us. They stayed with a ward member in the Adrian area, Ad Salter, to finish out the school year.

Say what you mean, mean what you say

People who are in the business of communicating with the public ought, it seems to me, to be able to communicate. They ought to be able to say what they mean and mean what they say.

A recent example from one of the weather forecasters on a local television station. Commenting last night on the unusual 69-degree high for the day, she affirmed that we would not be seeing 69 degrees again. Never? Are we in for perennial winter? What about global warming? Where is Al Gore when we need him?

Surely she meant there were no 69-degree temperatures in the immediate forecast. None in the five- or ten-day forecast. But never?

Now, of course, we are all human and are surely entitled to an occasional misspeak here and there, but I observe little such inaccuracies all the time in the broadcast media. The broadcasters should be somewhat masters of the language—it is their business after all—they are supposed to be professionals—but too often, painfully so at times, they speak without precision, without really saying what they mean, sometimes without being consistent.

Another recent example. A week ago a newscaster was doing a little feature on increasing car thefts in the area. She observed that it didn't really matter what make or model or year of car you happened to own, pretty much all were at risk. And then not more than two or three sentences later, she said that recent-year Hondas were most at risk. The two affirmations didn't seem to match. So, do I need to worry at all about someone breaking into or stealing my eleven-year-old Ford Ranger pickup or my eleven-year-old Ford Windstar minivan? I would not if I were any sort of self-respecting car burglar. Certainly not the Windstar. The Ranger perhaps.

Another of my favorites is the misplaced modifier—words or phrases that modify or describe or give meaning to what is being talked about. Yet, if misplaced (and we're not talking here about losing our modifiers but placing them in the wrong part of the sentence, making them seem to modify something other than what they were meant to), they can create quite a different meaning than the one intended. Sometimes the result is humorous. Sometimes confusing. Sometimes misleading.

My trip into cyberspace

Now that all of the children are grown and married, Claudia and I have appreciated reading everyone's blogs as a means of keeping up with what everybody is doing and thinking. Claudia doesn't blog herself, but she is an avid reader.

My blogs rather exploded once I expanded beyond this initial one, although a majority of them (15 of the 23 I currently have) are devoted to various bits of family history (my mother's diaries, my missionary journal, family newletters, historical sketches of ancestors, and collections of stuff from our own thirty-six years of family history). Blogging seemed a reasonable way of organizing and disseminating a lot of historical information, of making sure any of you who wanted the various pieces of history would have access to it if our house burned down or I were hit by a bus on my way home from work or any of a number of other things that could happen.

A few of my other blogs are private (such as my current journal, my planner, and my random info keeper, for example). Doing them as blogs gives me immediate access to the information from any computer anywhere I can connect to the Internet. It's pretty handy.

And now, as of last night, I've taken the next step. Thanks to Rebecca's help and the encouragement of several others, I now have a Facebook account. And more friends already than a person should ever expect to have. Is this great or what!

Happy birthday, Claudia

In honor of Claudia's birthday today, I share this tribute that originally appeared as a part of the preface to the book Claudia: An Elect Lady, which we published in May 2005. The sentiments expressed then are still every bit as true today.

The Lord blesses us, collectively and individually, with many gifts. The scriptures affirm that every person is given at least one spiritual gift (see D&C 46:11). Some receive many.

Some years ago Claudia gave a sacrament meeting talk on gifts of the Spirit. She quoted Elder Marvin J. Ashton of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles (1915–1994), who pointed out some less con­spicu­ous spiritual gifts that we may enjoy: "The gift of asking; the gift of lis­tening; the gift of hearing and using a still, small voice; the gift of being able to weep; the gift of avoiding con­tention; the gift of being agreeable; the gift of avoiding vain repeti­tion; the gift of seek­ing that which is righteous; the gift of not pass­ing judgment; the gift of looking to God for guidance; the gift of be­ing a disciple; the gift of caring for others; the gift of being able to ponder; the gift of offer­ing prayer; the gift of bearing mighty testi­mony; and the gift of re­ceiv­ing the Holy Ghost" ("There Are Many Gifts," Ensign, Nov. 1987, 20). Just consider how many of these gifts Claudia enjoys.

Claudia is a genuinely gifted person. Chief among all her many spiritual gifts is the gift of charity. I have known few, if any, people who have more consistently felt for, reached out to, lifted up, and blessed the lives of those about her. She has been generous in shar­ing her means. She has been tireless in serving others, particularly her family, neighbors in the ward, children and adults who have been in classes she has taught, the numerous children she has tended through the years. It has been a blessing indeed to be the beneficiary of such Christlike love through so many years.

Just a single illustration of her Christlike thoughtfulness and charity. Last Saturday, between the morning and afternoon sessions of general conference, we learned that Pope John Paul II had died after leading the Catholic Church for some 26 years. She had plenty to do that afternoon, after the afternoon session of conference was over and before the family gathering she was putting together for after the priesthood session, but she took the time to go out and buy a nice picture book on the Pope, wrote a little note, and walked it down to express her sympathies to Stephanie Smith, our Catholic neighbor down the street. And spent an hour talking, crying, laugh­ing with her.

Another illustration. There is a couple in a neighboring ward in our stake who are mildly handicapped. They are the nicest people and do what they can to keep body and soul together. They sell Fuller products, brushes and cleaning supplies, things like that. Claudia tries single-handedly to keep them in business by regularly buying all sorts of products she’ll never be able to use in a dozen years.

It's the same with cub scouts selling Scout-o-Rama tickets. Or the girl scouts selling their high-priced cookies. Or the neighbor­hood school children selling their wrapping paper or greeting cards or tulip bulbs or whatever is the fund-raiser de jour.

"Charity," Mormon taught, "suffereth long, and is kind, and en­vieth not, and is not puffed up, seeketh not her own, is not easily provoked, thinketh no evil, and rejoiceth not in iniquity but re­joiceth in the truth, beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, endureth all things.

"Wherefore, my beloved brethren, if ye have not charity, ye are nothing, for charity never faileth. Wherefore, cleave unto charity, which is the greatest of all, for all things must fail—

"But charity is the pure love of Christ, and it endureth forever; and whoso is found possessed of it at the last day, it shall be well with him" (Moroni 7: 45–47).

Inauguration day

I am grateful today to be an American.

On the little TV in my office most of my staff and I watched the historic inauguration of our 44th President. Aside from the miracle of such a peaceful, seamless transition of power from President George W. Bush to President Barack Obama, and aside from the historical significance of the first African American now occupying the White House, I was impressed with the sense of hope and courage and optimism and willingness to tackle the hard issues facing our nation that President Obama verbalized in his inaugural address.

Claudia and I prayed for our new President and his family and associates in our family prayer this morning. He will need all our prayers on a continuing basis as we seek to work through the problems facing our country.

A merry Christmas from Dixie

It sounds like we made it out of town in just the nick of time, if news reports are to be believed about a major winter storm that slammed most of the state of Utah on Christmas day and evening. We had a nice visit with Chris, Camilla, and Sam inside the airport. They had arrived from Seattle just before 10:15 Christmas morning, and our flight was scheduled to leave at 12:45. They had not expected to get out of Seattle, whose airport had been closed a couple times earlier in the week, because it was snowing heavily in Everett as they left home. As they headed south the snow turned to rain and, by the time they reached the airport, the rain had stopped altogether.

Mom and I flew out of Salt Lake International at a little after 1:00 Christmas afternoon and made good time to Chicago's Midway Airport before immediately boarding our second flight from there to Birmingham, Alabama. Conditions in Chicago had been terrible both before and after Christmas Day, so our window of opportunity was particularly narrow and fortunate. We then drove a rental car from Birmingham the 165 miles to Paul and Eliza's place in Duluth, Georgia, where we greeted them and saw our new little grandson for the first time. We encountered a little rain, but our trip east on I-20 and then northeast on I-85 was without incident, precisely what you want a road trip to be.

Season's greetings from the land of Dixie.

Aaron arrives

A new little one begins his journey through mortality. Aaron Marvin Challis was born a little after 7:00 this morning (Georgia time) to Paul and Eliza. Today was his actual due date. We understand he weighed 8 pounds 4 ounces. In her initial call this morning, Eliza did not know how long he was.

We anticipate that either Paul or Eliza will post more details, including pictures, concerning the arrival of their new child. Our congratulations to them all.

Elder Wirthlin's funeral

For those of you who may be interested, the funeral services for Elder Joseph B. Wirthlin will be held in the Tabernacle on Friday, December 2, at 12:00 noon. The services will be broadcast live on KSL, BYU-TV, and lds.org.

The Church Office Building and all other downtown Salt Lake City Church facilities will close at 11:00 a.m. on Friday and will be closed for the rest of the day.

Elder Wirthlin dies

Elder Joseph B. Wirthlin, a member of the Twelve since 1986, passed away during the night. I had the privilege of working closely with him for many years when he served as a member of the Missionary Executive Council. A great and honorable man.

As he taught us at this last conference, "come what may, and love it."

What's in a name?

There has been recent chatter on some blogs I happen to read concerning which school qualifies to be called the Lord's university. It seems to me the issue really has little to do with who has attended which school. It clearly has nothing to do with athletic prowess in any particular sport.

Both schools were established under the direction of a prophet of God. Both schools employ faithful members of the Church among faculty and staff. Both schools enroll faithful members of the Church as students. Both schools boast talented, faithful, distinguished alumni. And both schools have areas of academic excellence that are worthy of serious institutions of higher learning.

And, unfortunately, both schools have their share of those among students and alumni who bring discredit to their institutions and tarnish the good reputation each enjoys.

But only one of the schools is sponsored by the Church. Only one of the schools receives any of its financial support from tithing funds. Only one of the schools has prophets and apostles serving as its board of education. And only one of the schools has a currently serving General Authority as its president.

Hmm. Perhaps only one of the schools qualifies for the title.