Mormons' New Chief

Harold Bingham Lee

SALT LAKE CITY, July 7--The new "prophet, seer and revelator" of the world's 3,090,953 members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day· Saints drives to his office at 8 A.M. daily in a Buick, wears natty but not gaudy dark blue suits and lives in a white brick New England style home on Salt Lake City's treelined Circle Way. If those who meet Harold Bingham Lee for the first time mistake him for a businessman, the error is understandable. The newly chosen 11th President of the Mormon Church is known among his co-religionists as something of an organizing genius. To one member of the Council of Twelve Apostles who affirmed him· today as the church's leader, "it is as if the Lord called him at the precise right time. We are face to face with problems of streamlining and growth, and Harold B. Lee is the right vehicle."

Wrong Side of Tracks

The church's situation was very different in 1936, when Mr. Lee first came to the attention of Mormon leaders. He was born March 28, 1899 on a farm in Clifton, Idaho, and he was a grade school teacher and principal living on the wrong side of the tracks on Salt Lake City's west side when he won election to the City Commission in 1933.

Mr. Lee worked out a practical method of coping with the Depression that aided thousands of Mormons.

Henry Smith, a former neighbor, recalls that 80 per cent of the heads of families in their neighborhood were totally or partly unemployed when. Mr. Lee set up a work program.

"Trucks," Mr. Smith said, "took men to nearby Davis County farms where crops were rotting in the ground because no one would buy them. The men harvested the crops, put them in the Bishop's storehouse on Pierpont Avenue, and they were pooled, with workers reimbursed with food crops on a basis of need according to family size."

Watching Mr. Lee in action, church leaders· called him to fulltime duty in 1936.

In the decades that followed, despite many added duties, Mr. Lee built and sμpervised a church welfare program that now assists 96,500 Mormons each year and finds jobs for 9,000 church· members a year. The program utilizes 200,000 donated work days a year for raising crops, canning foods and mending clothing.

Mr. Lee was named a member of the Council of Twelve Apostles on April 6, 1941. It was as president and ranking member of that council that he succeeded to the church presidency left vacant by the death this week of Joseph Fielding Smith at the age of 95.

Investment Talents

Students of Mormon affairs who viewed the aged Mr. Smith as a doctrinaire conservative chiefly concerned with church history look upon Mr. Lee as an establishment leader whose talents have. been demonstrated on the board of the Union Pacific Railroad and the Equitable Life Assurance Society, where Mr. Lee has represented the Mormon Church's stock interests.

In the last three years much of his working day has been devoted to the Church Correlation program in an apparently successful effort to integrate the wide variety of Mormons' home studies, women's and youth organizations, publications and sports--endeavors that occupy the time and effort of some Mormons to such a degree that they complain of little time left for churchgoing.

Mr. Lee, whose age is 73, has given up gardening for desk work. He travels to church mission centers overseas rather than for pleasure. What little free time he has is spent with his wife, Freda, and with the family of L. Brent Goates, the administrator of Latter-day Saints Hospital, whose wife, Helen, is Mr. Lee's one surviving child. She was· borne by his first wife who died in 1962.

Briefing Missionaries

Mr. Lee has a particular penchant for the Scriptures. For the last dozen years he has met with young Mormon missionaries before they embark on their proselyting endeavors, answering their doctrinal questions. "I try to give the Lord's explanations, not my own," says Mr. Lee, who has met with virtually all the 15,000 Mormon missionaries now knocking on doors at home and overseas in their effort to find converts.

Politically a Republican, he counsels. Mormons "to vote for that which in your heart you feel is right. I pass these words to others in public office for what they are worth and strongly urge them to meditate prayerfully, and give the Lord a chance to aid in solving the problems of life."

Questioned about long-standing pressures to grant the Mormon priesthood to blacks, Mr. Lee refers to a policy· statement issued by David O. McKay, the church's ninth president, in 1969. "Some time in God's eternal plan, the Negro will be given the right to hold the priesthood."

Mr. Lee adds "if you are not a believer in modern revelation, I can't very well explain this to you. If you believe in revelation, you will see it is a matter of the Lord telling us in his time."