Every boy needs a father he can look up to. And every man who has had a righteous father remains grateful all the days of his life.
President Gordon B. Hinckley will be 96 years old soon, on June 23. Despite his advanced years, he still looks up to his father, Bryant Stringham Hinckley. The love President Hinckley has for his father resonated in his voice and radiated in his eyes as he spoke of him with the Church News.
President Hinckley said that he still feels a yearning to please his father. "I have only the desire to honor his name," he said.
A plaster bust of his father, created by noted LDS sculptor Avard Fairbanks, sits on a credenza in President Hinckley's office. In order for a photo to be taken, the bust was moved to a table. As President Hinckley placed his hands on the shoulders of the image, it seemed — for ever so brief a moment — that father and son were reunited.
Without doubt, they are united in love of family, the gospel and in Church service.
Many members of the Church have heard President Hinckley speak of his father's influence, particularly when young Gordon Hinckley became discouraged while serving a mission in England. He wrote a letter to his father saying that he felt he was wasting his own time and his father's money. His father replied: "Dear Gordon, I have your letter. I have only one suggestion: Forget yourself and go to work."
President Hinckley, in telling of that experience, has said that he decided that day that he would try to lose his life in the Lord's service.
Such was the influence of a righteous, loving father who taught from afar a lesson that has been remembered and held close to President Hinckley's heart over the decades.
"My father was always active in the Church," President Hinckley said. "He served as a member of the general board for the young men's association. He was one of a committee of three who went back to New York and studied the Scouting program and made the motion to incorporate it in the young men's program of the Church. He served on the general board for many years. He served as president of the largest stake in the Church, which had 15,000 members. He served as a mission president and in other capacities."
President Hinckley is known by members, as well as many outside the Church, as a great communicator, an articulate speaker who has an extensive knowledge about many topics. He credits his father for much of his abilities.
"My father was a well-educated, refined, good man," President Hinckley said. "He taught at BYU. The Brethren sent him up here to preside over the LDS Business College, which he did for some years, and that's where he met my mother (Ada Bitner Hinckley), who was an English teacher. My love for literature comes from both my father and my mother.
"The home in which I grew up had one room reserved as the library. There were bookcases all around the room and in the center of the floor a big oak table with a lamp and some comfortable chairs. That's where we learned to appreciate literature. I have my father's set of the Harvard Classics. I still have those 50 volumes, tremendous books. They all came out of my father's library."
President Hinckley remembers his father as a loving, kind-hearted parent. "He never laid a hand on us. There was never any harsh discipline. He talked with us quietly," he reflected.
Bryant Hinckley was a good provider for his family, even during the Depression. "We raised a lot of our own food," President Hinckley explained. "He had bought a 10-acre farm down in Cottonwood, and there we grew wheat. I still remember going to the West Jordan mill with him to have the wheat ground into flour. In the fall we had enough flour to last all winter. We had pigs which were killed and preserved in the attic where it was cold. So we were well taken care of for food. I can remember he would bring home a big round of cheese. He provided well for his family, even during the Depression."
President Hinckley spoke of how his father taught him and his siblings to work, mostly on the farm. "We lived in town in the winter and on the farm in the summer," he said. "We enjoyed it. We went barefoot all summer. Every day in the summer he would give us work to do. We had to hoe a row of corn or pick peaches or whatever necessary. That would take all morning long, and then in the afternoon we were free to play, and we had a good time."
He said his father liked the family to do things together, and recalled a trip to Yellowstone National Park. "It was in 1917," he said. "He had bought a new Ford in 1916, a black Model T Ford."
They traveled on mostly dirt roads. "We camped out in Yellowstone. My brother and I slept in the car and my father and mother slept outside on the ground. In the middle of the night he heard a noise and he woke up and there was a big black bear with its nose right down in my brother's face. He struck a match and the bear ran away. That was the thing we talked about a great deal; again, and again, and again."
Asked if there were one particular example or lesson he learned from his father that he consciously tried to instill in his own children, President Hinckley said, "One thing was respect for our mother. He showed such tremendous respect for my mother. There was never anything that was disrespectful in any sense. She was a jewel in his eyes, all the time. And he never permitted us to speak disrespectfully of our mother. That lesson has come down to us. That's the way I feel about my own wife."
At the conclusion of the interview, President Hinckley summed up the essence of his father: "He was a good man, really, a very, very able and good man."
E-mail: gerry@desnews.com
