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Show in my father's house/ 2 blissful ignorance could not last. In those early 1950's, when the Korean 'police action' raged and someone named Harry Truman was U. S. President, my father's household was mostly oblivious to the tumultuous world beyond the veil of poplar, pine, and black walnut trees that protected us from prying eyes. The mothers said --in all earnestness -- that the world would be a far better place if my father headed the nation, and added -- still in earnest -- that he might have been president of the Mormon Church and even president of the nation if he hadn't been born of polygamous refugees in Mexico and then decided to live the Principle of Plural Marriage himself. And so we spent an inordinate part of our young lives yearning for the riches and fame we had sacrificed to society, circumstance, and God's Law. Such mourning periods were usually curtailed when we were encouraged to make the best of our much smaller 'white house' with its surrounding buildings, and to forget the outside world and its wicked ways. My father rarely spoke of world events, but when he did -- usually while towering over his congregation of fundamentalist Mormons drawn together by the doctrine of polygamy - he thundered that the communist threat to freedom only proved we were living in the Last Days and that prophecy was being fulfilled before our eyes. As he warmed to talk of tyrants and of how Satan had infiltrated even |