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Bryce Canyon National Park in southern Utah is a great place to visit — or revisit, in our case: I first went there as a kid with my parents in the 1950s. Then, when Sally and I were on our honeymoon 40 years ago, we stopped there briefly to give the island girl her first hands-on experience with snow; and later we took some of our kids there . . . so going back recently felt very familiar.

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One of the side benefits of recently staying at Jacob Lake Inn near the North Rim of the Grand Canyon was meeting the grandson of the founders, John Rich, who used his personal experiences and 40-year career of dealing in hand-woven Navaho rugs to help us understand the concept of hozho.

Rich, pictured at left, holds up a blanket he bought several years ago from a near-80-year-old Navaho woman who asked him not to sell it until her second granddaughter graduates from high school in a year or two while wearing it.

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In 1925-26, armed with a Columbia University Ph.D. in cultural anthropology, 23-year-old Margaret Mead spent about six months on the island of Ta’ü, Manu’a, American Samoa, conducting field research on whether nurture or nature was predominant in determining behavior. Her controversial book, Coming of Age in Samoa (which I was required to read in Anthropology 101 at the University of Utah in 1964), described an idyllic place where adolescent promiscuity was a natural part of their society.

Even though her book captured the imagination of many, while raising the ire of others, that didn’t stop the people of Ta’ü from giving the doyenne of anthropology a royal welcome when she returned for the first time in 46 years on November 11, 1971 . . . and I had fa’amolemole‘d [i.e. begged] and bluffed my way onto the official traveling party to see it:

Margaret Mead (center) with American Samoa Governor John Hayden
(on her left) arriving at Faleasao, Ta’ü, Manu’a, on November 11, 1971
— photos by Mike Foley
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Years ago when our kids were all home and finances were tight we undertook a family project with the hopes of raising enough money to go to Disneyland: Almost every month we would label, prepare and deliver about 10,000 copies of the old Hawaii LDS News to the U.S. Post Office at the airport for bulk distribution.

I was also the editor at the time of this amazing tabloid started in 1967 by Alf Pratte and Ron Safsten as the Honolulu Stake Record-Bulletin (Reg Schwenke also served as one of the editors). The publication eventually spread throughout Hawaii, and until regional leaders stopped publishing it in 1991, Hawaii LDS News was the only Latter-day Saint-sponsored newspaper outside of the worldwide Church News.

Our family project took hours to complete each issue and it was a lot of work. To make the reward a little more immediate, each weekend after we got the newspaper out we would take some of the funds and all go to dinner: The kids particularly liked going to the Pizza Hut restaurant in Haleiwa, which was the closest one in those days.

But as the summer we hoped to go drew near we knew we didn’t have enough money for the mainland… so we planned a trip closer to home that took us to Maui and Kauai. Staying in hotels with swimming pools was definitely important to the kids, and of course we hit many of the regular visitor attractions on both islands; but our plans also included “high adventure” snorkeling off Molokini and along the Garden Island’s Na Pali coast. (more…)

When I was a Mormon missionary in Samoa in the early months of 1967, my companion and I were assigned to live in Samata, Savaii, in the Falelima district…where we experienced what some have called a miracle. Now, I experienced a number of miracles during my missionary days in Samoa, some of them even humorous, but you decide about this one, First, however, some background: (more…)