50 years ago today - Nov 18, 1975-Tuesday

[Leonard Arrington]

Grace and I went to Cannon-Hinckley [study group] this evening and heard interesting talks by Jim and Gloria Brown ... We sat at the same table with Olive Kimball Mitchell and her husband [Ira] (she's a niece of President Kimball), Fern and Harvey Fletcher of BYU (she was formerly married to Carl Eyring), and Ray and Elva Olpin. Interesting conversation. Fern and Elva said they remembered Susa Young Gates. She was an outstanding woman, they admitted, but nobody liked her. She was too loud, too officious, too pushy, too imperious, too crude, too aggressive. Too much the woman libber type, they said. She was a vegetarian, they said. When invited to a banquet, she took along a little paper bag with raw carrots and other things to eat. She liked natural foods, like her daughter Leah Widtsoe. She liked to talk, talked too long, was very anxious to give her opinion and her advice. They remembered her speaking to the girls at BYU and telling the single girls to get married. The principal
object of life. ...

I asked Olive about the reaction of the Kimballs to the J. Golden book by Tom Cheney. Basically very favorable, she said. She knew Uncle Spencer Kimball liked it, enjoyed it. She likes biographies that tell about the whole man, warts and all. Thinks she will approve of my Edwin Woolley [biography]. Thinks Uncle Spencer will not object. He doesn't object when people tell J. Golden stories.

[Former University of Utah] President [A. Ray] Olpin said that he and wife, Homer Durham and wife [Eudora], etc. were at an affair at which President [Ernest] Wilkinson was also invited. As soon as the girls saw him coming they removed their rings and got prepared for his bone-crushing handshake and jerking them forward. Eudora tried to avoid shaking hands with him, but he grabbed her and just about cracked her hand. She then lifted her shoe with high heels and put it down squarely on his foot. That night he had his first heart attack. She wondered if her action had any influence.

[Confessions of a Mormon historian : the diaries of Leonard J. Arrington, 1971-1997, Gary James Bergera, editor, Signature Books, 2018]