CHAPTER 35 - CALIFORNIA VENTURA MISSION OFFICE
From Richard's memoirs, recovered from his original WordPerfect files
On the 25th of October 1987 we attended a stake meeting where several older couples were invited to consider going on a mission. After the meeting we met with Bishop Blonquist and I explained to him that, not only was I over seventy years of age and that the Church did not recommend persons of that age to go on missions, but I also had to stay close to my doctor for the monitoring of my blood. I had already had two pulmonary embolisms and it is vital that I keep my blood at a thin enough consistency to avoid clotting. I must have it checked every three or four weeks. I also explained to him that I had been working in the Stake French Extraction program for nearly six years and that was equivalent to two missions. In fact church members are now called on Full Time missions in the Extraction Program.
On 18 December 1988 our Stake President, O. Don Hawkins, met with DeVonne and me and asked us to serve a Full Time Mission in the California Ventura Mission Office. He indicated that he was going to make it so easy for us that we couldn’t turn him down. We could be home ever night and we could set our own hours of work. We could work as little or as much as we pleased. We accepted the call and on 20 December we met with Pres. Hawkins and Pres. Oswald of the California Ventura Mission to discuss our calling. We agreed to serve for eighteen months and work three days a week; Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. My main concern was the Freeway drive each day from Westlake Village to Ventura. One reason I had retired from UCLA at age 63 was to stop driving the Ventura & San Diego Freeways each day to and from work. We agreed to start on 3 January 1989.
On 28 December we drove to Ventura and visited the Mission Office and met with Mervin and Afton Severinsen who were Full Time missionaries assigned to the Mission Office. He was the Financial Officer and she was the President’s Secretary. They appeared to be a nice couple, about our age, and we felt we could get along well working with them in the same office. They had attended the Stake meeting we attended earlier when we told Bishop Blonquist we could not accept a Full Time mission call. At that time the Severinsens explained their work and how much they enjoyed their callings.
President Hawkins set us apart on 2 January 1989 and we began our mission the next day.
From the beginning, neither President Oswald nor the Severinsens would accept us as Full Time Missionaries but designated us as Stake Missionaries serving part time in the California Ventura Mission Office.
I began working in the Commissary and DeVonne at the Referral Desk but we soon discovered that the jobs couldn’t be done by working only three days a week. President Oswald indicated he would like to have us work five days a week but I told him that I would not drive the Freeway that many days a week. One reason for my retiring early was not to have to drive the Freeway to work each day.
When President Oswald saw that the office Commissary and the Referral Desk would not function properly with our working only three days a week, he brought in an older couple who were Full Time Missionaries working in the field. Elder James Tidwell and his wife, Sister Gladys Tidwell were a very nice couple and easy to work with. Sister Tidwell was the Aunt of President Oswald’s wife, Leslie. Elder Tidwell took over the Commissary and Sister Tidwell the Referral Desk.
I took over handling the Medical costs for the missionaries. Elder Severinsen had been swamped with his work that he had just paid the medical bills but did not follow up in an attempt to get reimbursement from any insurance the missionaries might have. Most of the missionaries had an insurance policy with Murdock Insurance out of Salt Lake City that pays up to $500.00 for an accident. I had forms to be filled out and have signed by the missionaries for accidents and then I sent the form, with copies of the medical bills and the payment made by office, to Murdock. The office paid all the bills when they came in to maintain the Church credit properly and then sought reimbursement from Murdock. In cases of illness, we paid the bills and wrote to the missionaries’ parents, sending copies of the bills and our payment, to determine if the parents had insurance on their son or daughter. In case they did, we asked that they contact their insurance company and collect what they could from them and reimburse the Mission Office. We never asked that the parents pay any bills from their pockets.
In less than six months I had all the Medical files current and after that it was a simple matter to keep them up to date.
It was also my duty to keep and update name and address record of all the Stake Missionaries in our Mission area. There were 17 Stakes in our area and approximately 550 Stake Missionaries. This record was kept on an Apple Computer but the program was so bad I kept a separate record at home on my computer.
The main computer in the office was an Epson and it had several programs on it designed for the functions of a Missionary Office. It included the Financial Records, Automobile Records, Missionary Information including current addresses and home addresses, etc. The Severinsens were reluctant to teach me much about these programs as they seemed to want to maintain them for themselves. I was allowed to use it for mailing labels which I did each day for forwarding mail to the Full Time Missionaries. It also had the “WordPerfect” Program that I was familiar with as I have it on my home computer. I could use it in some work I had to do.
I put out a monthly newsletter that I mailed to all Stake Missionaries. It was entitled “The Finder” and its purpose was to encourage the Stake Missionaries to work closely with the Full Time Missionaries and to help the ward members seek out contacts for the missionaries. My job was merely the mechanics of putting out the newsletter. President Oswald always had certain things he wanted stressed and he had his two Assistants (Missionaries) write a piece each month for it. It included also the monthly report of how many baptisms were performed in each Stake. Short write-ups of Stake Missionary experiences with the family to family program for converting neighbors and friends of the ward members were included as they were sent in.
DeVonne typed up the best of the weekly letters written to President Oswald from the Missionaries and maintained a file for use in the “Standard of Truth” publication that the Office put out once a month and mailed to the Full Time Missionaries. She did a certain amount of filing, and sending out birthday cards to the Missionaries at the appropriate times. The Oswalds made up their own birthday card each year and that one was used to send to all Missionaries for the year. Then a new one was made for the next year. DeVonne addressed them and mailed them and it didn’t seem very personal to me. Still, we had over 200 Full Time Missionaries in the field at any one time and it would have been quite a chore for President Oswald or his wife to send them out personally.
Elder Severinsen had a lot of check writing, receipts to make out and posting to be done each month and DeVonne was helped him considerably in this part of the work. He seemed reluctant to teach her much about it and only gave it to her a portion at a time. She was eventually posting Missionary checks, balancing the bank account, and preparing money and paperwork for bank deposits. For all her posting work she had to run two tapes on the adding machine as a check. As a result it took some time before she could see the whole operation and know and understand what she was doing.
Each month a new group of Missionaries would arrive and the President would have them all up to the Mission Home for lunch on the day they arrived. DeVonne and I were always invited to attend and enjoyed the luncheon. Our biggest problem was that we never knew when things were going to happen. Sister Severinsen, who kept track of all meetings, the comings and goings of the President and the Missionaries, would just not keep us informed no matter how often we asked for a calendar of events. The office issued a missionary newsletter entitled: “The Standard of Truth” that included a monthly calendar but we did not receive one as we were only Stake Missionaries. Usually we brought our own sack lunches from home and we would come to the office expecting to go to the nearby park for lunch and then find out that it was the day for us to go to the Mission Home for lunch.
Sister Severinsen was the type of person that felt the office was hers and it should be run just the way she wanted it to be. She was a very capable person and had worked most of her adult life in offices of one kind or another. However, she would not allow anyone to help her, despite how swamped she was. Even when she would not be feeling well and DeVonne or Sister Tidwell would offer to take some of the load off her she refused. If she was in the office she answered all the phone calls and did not like it if someone else picked up the phone ahead of her. When she and her husband were out of the office it was left to the rest of us to answer the phones and attempt to answer questions that people might have. But, because Sister Severinsen would not keep us informed of things about the office we felt like dummies because we could not be very helpful to those calling in for information.
After about six months in the office DeVonne and I were both pretty well caught up on the work they would give to us to do and we found ourselves just sitting around the office waiting until it was time to go home. After a while we got so we would leave early if there was nothing for us to do. Although we would remind the Severinsens to have some work for us on the next time we came to the office, which was always at least two days later, we would come in and find they had worked half the night before and had not planned anything for us to do.
The Severinsens had a small apartment in Ventura, without a TV or some other things one would expect to have in the home. So it seems it was just as easy for them to come in early in the morning, maybe take off for lunch, go to dinner and then return in the evening to work for as long as they felt like it. President Oswald was out in the field most of the time during the day and he would come in late in the evening and do some of his work. He liked to have Sister Severinsen there so she could get things out for him and, all credit to Sister Severinsen, she loved being there to help him whenever.
With President Oswald everything seemed a crisis. He would never plan ahead to get ready for an important meeting coming up. At the last minute he would descend on the office with literally tons of items to be typed or photocopied, etc. The Severinsens and the Tidwells and the Assistants would work until the early morning hours getting it out so it would be ready for the following day. DeVonne and I would not work that way. We left our home about 8:00 AM each Monday, Wednesday and Friday, arrived at the office at 8:30 AM, took an hour off for lunch and left the office at 4:00 PM, arriving home around 4:40 PM.
The Tidwell’s mission time was up on 6 September and President Oswald had to figure out what he wanted to do to fill their places. He called DeVonne and I in and we discussed what we felt about it. We told him we knew we couldn’t do their work when we were only working three days a week and suggested that he get another Full Time Missionary couple to replace them. We also told him that with the Severinsens not keeping us busy we were wasting our time now. He suggested that maybe we shouldn’t come in so often and that maybe we should take some time off. He said he hadn’t made up his mind yet what he would do but he thought he would bring in two Full Time Elders to do the Tidwell’s work.
Friday, 8 September President Oswald came into the office, spoke to everyone, including DeVonne and me, and left shortly after that. Then in the afternoon he telephoned me while I was in the office to say DeVonne and I should take a month off, that he was going to bring in two more Full Time Elders, besides the two he brought in to replace the Tidwells, to pick up our work and see how things would go. He also said he might send some work for me to do at home, such as “The Finder” and for me to push the Stakes’ Public Communication Directors to get newspaper publicity in the local small town papers. We said our goodbyes to the Severinsens and the Tidwells and left. Before we went Elder Severinsen stated that he didn’t like the idea of two more Full Time Missionaries coming into the office to do the work we had been doing. He said he felt he would just be a nursemaid for them.
Sunday, 10 September at our Ward Conference after the Officers and Teachers of the Ward were sustained by the congregation, Herb Marston of the Bishopric read the names of the Full Time Missionaries and the Stake Missionaries serving from our Ward and neither DeVonne’s nor my name was mentioned.
After the day’s meetings were over we met with our Stake President Hawkins and reported the status of our Mission and filled him in on the problems we had been having. He informed us that the program we had been called to had changed just about the time we were called. The Church considered that if older couples were called on a Full Time Mission to work part time, the Church still might have to furnish insurance, etc., for them. By having the call come from the Stake, the responsibility of insurance, etc., would be left up to the Missionaries. We told him we felt we had completed our assignment to help in the office until things got caught up and he agreed. We told him we were on a month’s leave and we probably would not go back. He said he would talk to President Oswald and get back to us.
We saw President Hawkins at the “Know Your Religion” lecture on 13 October and he asked me if we had heard from President Oswald. When I told him “No” he said President Oswald was going to telephone us. I told President Hawkins that we probably would not go back and he said to see what President Oswald had to say and then make our own decision about what to do.
As I finish my personal history in the later part of November 1989 we have still not heard a word from President Oswald and DeVonne and I consider our Mission completed.