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A Miracle Remembered

A Miracle Remembered

Last updated on: April 13, 2022 at 4:17 pm by Dan Peterson

A Miracle Remembered 2022-04-13T16:17:07-06:00 Dan Peterson

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Official film poster for T. C. Christensen’s 2015 film “The Cokeville Miracle”
(Wikimedia Commons fair use)

***

I’ve been deeply saddened to hear the news that Laura Harris Hales, the wife of Dr. Brian C. Hales, passed away this morning. She had been ill for a relatively brief time with a grievous form of cancer. She and Brian have been associates, allies, and friends for a long time. She will be greatly missed by many.

***

I’m just a bit behind in announcing them, but there are some new items on the website of the Interpreter Foundation:

Audio Roundtable: Come, Follow Me Old Testament Lesson 17 “All That the Lord Hath Spoken We Will Do”: Exodus 18–20

The discussants on the Interpreter Radio Roundtable for Come, Follow Me Old Testament Lesson 17, “All That the Lord Hath Spoken We Will Do,” on Exodus 18–20, are Terry Hutchinson, John Gee, and Kevin Christensen. This roundtable has been extracted from the 13 March 2022 broadcast of the Interpreter Radio Show. The complete show may be heard at https://interpreterfoundation.org/interpreter-radio-show-March-13-2022/. The Interpreter Radio Show can be heard every week on Sunday evenings from 7 to 9 PM (MDT), on K-TALK, AM 1640. Or, if you prefer (or if you live outside of the Salt Lake Valley), you can listen live on the Internet at ktalkmedia.com.

Come, Follow Me — Old Testament Study and Teaching Helps: Lesson 17, April 18–24: Exodus 18–20 — “All That the Lord Hath Spoken We Will Do”

Once again, Jonn Claybaugh has generously contribute some concise notes for students and teachers of this year’s “Come, Follow Me” readings.

Nibley Lectures: One Eternal Round — Lesson 4

In 1990, Hugh Nibley presented a series of twelve lectures on Facsimile 2 in the Pearl of Great Price. The lectures occurred almost weekly, beginning on June 27, first in the Maeser Building and later in the Joseph Smith Building auditorium.

***

A friend and neighbor kindly invited me to go with him to Spanish Fork last night, where we listened to relatives of his recount their experiences during the famous “Cokeville Incident” (aka “The Cokeville Miracle”) — the 1986 hostage crisis that occurred at Cokeville Elementary School in Wyoming. It’s a truly remarkable story, one that is entirely worthy of attention. Two of the women who spoke to the youth gathering last night — one of my friend’s sisters and one of his sisters in law — were teachers at the school during the event. The third woman was a student in the elementary school at the time. All three were held hostage and yet, against all reasonable expectations, they survived the detonation of the homemade bomb that the two hostage-takers had brought into the little school. My friend’s brother was also in the audience, from which he offered a few helpful comments and explanations. He had been working out on his ranch when he heard the news of the school takeover and had been obliged to watch it all from outside.

I was pleased to hear one of the women expressly describe T. C. Christensen’s 2015 dramatic film The Cokeville Miracle as “accurate,” and to observe the tacit agreement of the other two to that verdict.

I’ve read quite a bit about the incident — which, to be exact, took place on Friday, 16 May 1986 –and have even visited the school on two separate occasions, so I didn’t learn a whole lot about the events themselves that was new to me last night. But it was still worthwhile to me to listen in person to people who were actually victims of the hostage takeover, and to hear their reflections on what happened.

I’ll share a few fairly trivial notes from the gathering last evening:

In the immediate aftermath of the crisis, mental health professionals from Wyoming, Nevada, Utah, Idaho, and California converged on tiny Cokeville in hopes of helping the elementary school kids and their teachers and the school’s staff to process what had happened to them. One of the former teachers recalled a psychiatrist or psychologist from California asking her how she was doing. She responded that she was doing fairly well, all things considered, but that she really disliked the sight of a certain door that had played a role in those still-recent terrifying events. He responded that she should think of it differently: “This is where a miracle happened,” he told her. “This is hallowed ground.”

I agree.

The other teacher, I believe, recalled a colleague who was an avowed religious skeptic. “I won’t believe,” he liked to say, “until I’ve seen the burning bush for myself.”

Some time after the hostage incident, she asked him “So, did you see the burning bush?” “No,” he replied. “I didn’t.” Then he added, “I don’t know who saved us, but I really like his style.”

Another thing that was done to try to give the kids some good memories to replace the horrific ones of the hostage crisis was to bring in a circus — something that surely can’t be a common occurrence in a little town that, even today, has a total population of just slightly above five hundred. So, one of the teachers recalled with a laugh, she was able to ride an elephant up and down the main street of Cokeville — something that, I’m guessing, the town’s founders never would have envisioned and that most likely will never happen again.

The younger of the three women said that, rather curiously, those involved in the 1986 hostage crisis and bombing have tended to speak about it only very rarely until the past few years. She sees this as not quite a veil of forgetfulness cast over their minds but a divine way of ensuring that they were able to grow to maturity without the horror of the experience overshadowing them and blighting their childhoods and their adolescence. Recently, though, she’s felt the freedom and even, to some extent, the obligation, to address it publicly. And she says that the filmmaker T. C. Christensen also felt for years that, although he wanted to create a movie about the story, the time wasn’t yet right. And then, suddenly, it was.

Another of my friend’s sisters is the widow of Elder L. Tom Perry, of the Quorum of the Twelve. After the event last night, she told me of how they heard the news of the crisis. They heard it on the radio while they were driving toward a Church assignment in Sacramento. She grew up in Cokeville; her sister and her sister in law — two of last evening’s speakers — were teachers in the school. It took the Perrys quite a while to find out what had happened. They heard (falsely) that a teacher had been killed. They heard about the explosion. They couldn’t get a call through. I hope that I’m not out of bounds in saying that she teared up while recalling that day. Who wouldn’t?

One man in the audience had attended school in Cokeville years after the hostage-taking. He was puzzled by the fact that he had seldom heard the story mentioned. Only once every three or four years, he estimated. He wondered why. It’s a really big story, he said. A really important one. People need to hear it.

Again, I agree.

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