Personal encounters with Elder Packer (Part 1)

Last updated on: July 4, 2015 at 1:47 am by Dan Peterson

Personal encounters with Elder Packer (Part 1) 2015-07-04T01:47:38-06:00 Dan Peterson

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The Zürich stake center
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The first time I met Boyd K. Packer was sometime in the first part of 1974, when he came to Zürich for a stake conference. He had been an apostle for about four years by that point.

Upon arrival, he took a tour of the mission home at Pilatusstrasse 11.

I had a fairly large basement office. On one wall, it had a bulletin board. I was standing in the room across a large table from that bulletin board when he came in to look around. Suddenly, I recalled that, in the lower right corner of the bulletin board, I had posted not only a portrait of Jesus but a small photograph of the then-reigning pope, Paul VI. I decided, at that very moment, that it would be advisable to move around the room and place myself in front of that photograph.

But I wasn’t fast enough.

He looked at the bulletin board. He walked closer to it. He bent over and looked right at the photograph of Pope Paul VI. Then he turned around and said, very quietly, “I bet you wish you’d taken that down yesterday, don’t you?”

That evening, the mission home staff had dinner with Elder Packer along with my mission president and his wife in their living quarters.

While the dinner was still being prepared, we sat in the living room and spoke with him. When the president came out to tell us that dinner was ready, he asked Elder Packer, “Are you getting to know the elders?” “I know them better than they think I do,” Elder Packer responded.

During the meal, sitting at the table, my mission president, who was extremely kind and quite funny, made a crack about my precociously receding hairline. I don’t remember what it was, but it didn’t hurt my feelings. I’m not very sensitive on this issue. We all laughed, and then I realized that Elder Packer wasn’t laughing. We all calmed down, and then he said, very quietly, “When I was a mission president, we didn’t permit humor at the expense of the missionaries.”

It was, frankly, a bit embarrassing. I hadn’t been embarrassed by the joke, but I was a bit embarrassed for my mission president.

Years later, though, I either read or heard about an interview with Elder Packer in which, asked about his childhood and what he had wanted to be when he grew up, he replied that he had wanted to be good.

I believe it, and I believe that that’s a key to understanding him. He was really serious about being good.

For stake conference that weekend, I was assigned to translate all of the German talks into English for Elder Packer. (He had an earpiece, and I spoke into a microphone.) I can’t quite remember how many sessions there were, but I think there was a Saturday session, followed by two Sunday sessions. Anyway, it was exhausting. I recall, toward the end, being so tired that I simply paraphrased rather than translated. I’ve had enormous respect for simultaneous translators ever since.

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