Lutheran dad acting like a Mormon
Six Degrees From Galesburg
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Friday, August 4, 2006
My dad got a part in a movie once. It was the winter I was in eighth grade.Normally, his announcement at the dinner table - "I got a part!" - would've been thrilling news. Especially since we couldn't have lived further from Hollywood, at least culturally speaking.
But this was to be no Hollywood movie.
"I wouldn't tell anyone at church about this if I were you," I said.
"I hope none of my friends find out that my father is ... converting," my sister said.
"Girls," Mom said. "Just because your father is going to be in a Mormon movie doesn't mean he's going to become a Mormon."
But lately he'd been making us nervous. Dad was supposed to be Lutheran, after all - a leader in our congregation, too - and he'd been spending all his time reading books about Mormons. And now he was going to spend all his time acting like a Mormon - an 1840s-era one, complete with top hat, cane and pancake makeup.
No way was I telling anyone about this at school.
Dad had read in the Hancock County Journal-Pilot that a film crew was going to arrive in nearby Nauvoo to shoot a historical drama. The movie, "Legacy," would be about the Mormon pioneers who settled in Nauvoo before being driven out by religious persecution. In the winters, with no crops to tend, Dad liked to work at part-time jobs or take on creative projects. The movie would qualify as both.
At first he was only going to be an extra. But when he showed up for work on the first day, they'd asked if he wanted a bit part, the role of Willard Richards.
After he got the part, I hardly saw him. He got up early and drove to Nauvoo in the dark to be on set by 6 a.m. He didn't return home until after we'd finished supper without him.
And when we did see him, it was weird.
" 'Confound it, Parley!' " he'd say, thumping his fist on the kitchen table, practicing the one line they'd given him. "Or ... maybe I should be more thoughtful," he'd say, looking off into the distance and letting out a sigh. " 'Confound it, Parley.' "
I worried that Dad had let the life of movie acting go to his head. But real life got in the way.
When he got the chance to appear as an extra in the climactic migration scene - when the Mormons move their wagons west over the frozen Mississippi - he had to miss it for a Farm Bureau meeting.
It wasn't until after the movie had wrapped that Dad found a Mormon history book that explained who Willard Richards was.
Like my dad, the real Willard Richards had been something of a writer. He'd been one of Joseph Smith's "scribes," in charge of writing down everything the latter-day prophet said. The book also said Richards had come from the East Coast.
"Now I wish I'd have said it more like 'Confound it, Paahley,' " Dad said, doing his best Kennedy.
In the end it didn't matter. Dad's line didn't make it into the movie.
None of us knew this, however, for years. When the film wrapped, it was never shown in the area, and Dad never got to see his work.
But last year - some 15 years after the fact - Dad met a Mormon couple from Utah at a Farm Bureau convention and they told him where to get it.
When he finally got his own copy, he paused the DVD to show me the scene where he appears. He stood in front of the screen and pointed out a small figure in the background.
"I can hardly see you," I said. Then he looked kind of hurt. I felt guilty.
"But you look really dignified in that top hat, Dad," I said. "And you can hardly even tell you're a Lutheran!"
Alison McGaughey lives in Galesburg and works at Western Illinois University. Contact her at alison.sixdegrees@gmail.com.
