Brigham D. Madsen, Salt Lake City, Utah: an interview by Winston Erickson, January 21, 2003: Saving the Legacy tape nos. 546 & 547

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Bri ham D. Mad en 21 Janua 2003 You might be interested, J. Golden Kimball s t me apart fi r my mi i n and fiv of us went over one day to the mission home to be set apart and he had us fill our nam out on a card and he got to mine and he says, "Brigham Duane Modsen.' I said ld r Kimball that's not Madsen, that's Madsen. That's not an 'o' , that's an a' ." Then he said "If that's an 'a' I'm cockeyed." I thought I ruined my mission right there (laughs). So I remember him just from that one meeting with him. In my mission in those days, in the summertime we traveled without purse or script to save money. My whole mission only cost me about $600, which was, of course, a lot of money in Depression days. So it was a good experience for me to travel for those four months, my first year, without purse or script. The people of the mountains were used to this. It was the Bible Belt. They were used to ministers going around asking for a place to stay at night and for a meal. We had trouble sometimes. I vowed that I would never sleep out. I never did, although I went once till three o'clock in the morning. If you can imagine knocking on somebody's door at three o'clock in the morning asking for a place to stay, but I did it. I would not sleep out; I vowed I wouldn't. So I had some interesting experiences that way, saved some money and learned to deal with people. After a year there I was made a district president and sent to eastern North Carolina. North Carolina was divided into two sections and I had twelve missionaries to supervise and five branches. The branch presidents were men in their forties and fifties, and here I was twenty years of age and I was their superior. I learned a lot about diplomacy and how to work with people and how to be an administrator, really. It was a good experience for me. WE: So you stayed in the mission field for two years? 10