2. A Haunting Religious Legacy

My father was the oldest of four boys and a girl, all born in the years before the Great Depression, my father’s birth year being 1916. He was 13, just ready to begin high school, in 1929. His parents had a small but fairly successful dairy farm amid the coal fields of Southern Illinois, just south of Johnston City. The small community was known as Prosperity, not far from places like Dogwalk and Chocolate, names of other nondescript collections of working people.

His father, my grandfather, was Morris Webb, a stocky, cigar-smoking, hard-working man, who had married Bessie Hood, a young woman from the same area. Both grew up in substantial families, with deep roots in that region known as Little Egypt, so called because the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers at the bottom of Illinois resembled the familiar Y-shaped delta fingers of the Nile River in Egypt. It is unclear where Morris was born, but Bessie was born in Creal Springs, another of those small mining towns south of Carbondale.

From the middle to the end of the nineteenth century, both the Webbs and the Hoods had become attracted to Mormonism, the religious group founded in the East by Joseph Smith. Led by Smith, the Mormons had moved west in the opening years of the nineteenth century, settling in Western Central Illinois along the Mississippi River. They founded a town they called Nauvoo. During its early years there, the Mormon religion spread, extending itself south into Missouri and even west across the Mississippi into Iowa. It also picked up adherents throughout Illinois, particularly down into Southern Illinois. Virtually everywhere it was, it stirred opposition, often accompanied by violence.

In the 1840s, a band of Mormon haters from Missouri stormed north into Nauvoo where they kidnapped and assassinated Joseph Smith. With that, Brigham Young stepped into the leadership of the Mormons, and immediately put into motion a plan to move the Mormons once again, at least those in the Nauvoo region, west again. Even as plans were made to move, non-Mormon settlers in Iowa and Missouri were attacking Mormons in their states, causing hundreds who did not want to move west to scatter, seeking new places to live. One of those areas, as it turned out, that offered a relatively safe environment for Mormon settlers was Little Egypt.

Among those Mormons who moved into Southern Illinois in the 1860s and 70s to stay were members of the Webb and Hood families. Those who stayed behind would take Joseph Smith's son as their new leader, while Brigham Young would lead most of the Mormons on to Utah. Those who stayed behind became part of the "reorganized" Latter Day Saints, but remained Mormons nonetheless. In 2000, even in Southern Illinois, the Reorganized Latter Day Saints would rename themselves the "Community of Christ."

Morris and Bessie, though, were not particularly religious people, though, not really devoted to Mormonism or anything else. But hey did have dozens of relatives, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, among others, who were. Morris's father, my great-grandfather, a man named Columbus Webb, was a faithful follower of Joseph Smith and was said to have had five wives, even in Southern Illinois.

Ironically, the Reorganized Latter Day Saints was able to survive in states like Illinois by giving up polygamy. Morris's sister, Pearl, my father's aunt, was a devout Mormon, as were his sisters Glenna and Aggie. The Webb cemetery, sitting today on the grounds of a Community of Christ (Mormon) church, is carefully tended to this day in Southern Illinois. Creal Springs, Bessie's home town, is only a few miles north of the Webb cemetery. In short, Mormonism ran in the blood of my great-grandparents and grandparents. In fact, members of that extended Webb-Hood family held numerous positions of leadership in the Reorganized Mormon Church.

Not surprisingly, some of those family members kept their eyes open for young ones among them who might have promising futures in the faith. One who is said to have caught their eye, in fact, was Morris and Bessie’s first child, the one who carried his father’s name and became John Morris Webb, my father. He was quiet and hard-working like his father, but he grew tall and athletic very quickly. It was not lost on his extended Mormon family that he was also very good-looking with an unmistakable charisma about him, something clearly visible in early photographs of him.

His entrance into puberty and high school coincided with the country’s 1929 economic crash. Even with the farm, Morris’s family, like most families, fell onto very hard times. Morris had to find a way to make more money than the farm could produce. By 1930 he managed to land a job as a prison guard at the Menard State Penitentiary, about 40 miles away. It meant that keeping up the work of the dairy farm would fall to 14-year-old John, my father. The family had an old Model T truck that John used on the farm and for early morning milk deliveries, but Morris hitched a ride to Menard on Monday morning and back home on Friday night. For John it meant starting the day with the milking and delivering chores, going to high school, and then picking up the milking chores again after school. That, along with maintaining good grades, would be the pattern of his high school years at nearby Johnston City High School.

What became obvious even before he graduated from high school, at least to some in his Mormon family, was that his tall good looks and his charismatic smile made him a natural around people. Early on, he developed a commanding, if quiet, presence. The talk in the family—talk that was not paid much attention by Morris or Bessie--was that John had the makings of an excellent Mormon bishop. It was actually more than talk. There were discussions, which he knew about and would later tell me about, that there were Mormon family members who were willing to help him get whatever education and training he needed to become a leader in their Church. He was actually quite taken with the idea.

He did like people, and he liked the idea of being in public. His leadership qualities became obvious to those around him, and it did not take long after high school for those qualities to land him the kind of job that put him squarely in the middle of the little town of Johnston City. About 1935, Morris missed a couple of payments on the farm, and with an unpaid mortgage of $200 the bank foreclosed, forcing Morris and his family to move into Johnston City. Very quickly, John landed a job at the Post Office, and within two years was appointed the Postmaster of the town, a respectable public post no matter how one looked at it.

It was during this time at the Post Office that Dad met the high school girl almost ten years younger than he was, a beauty named Edith June Goddard. She was growing up in another small town south of Johnston City, a mining community called Spillertown, not far from Prosperity. She had three sisters and a younger brother, she being the middle one of the five. All of the girls were attractive, but none as much as Edith and her sister Delores. For years Southern Illinois was an important coal mining region of the Midwest, and most of Edith’s male relatives, including her dad, worked in the mines. Her father died while she was still a child. Her mother, Esther Goddard, raised the children alone and lived into old age.

The Goddards were more religious than the Webbs or the Hoods, but they were Protestant through and through. In fact, they knew well about the Mormons of Southern Illinois (and the Mormons in general), and, like many good Protestants, wanted nothing to do with them. At first, the Goddards, with Edith in the lead, made their way each Sunday into Johnston City to the Methodist Church. Edith had decided early on that the boy she was looking for would be a church-going boy. So her church motives were mixed, to say the least. Through various friendships, Edith came to prefer to local independent Christian Church, a largely non-denominational church that was much less formal and stodgy than the Methodists. Edith had met John, though, and since there was relatively little to do for dating in towns like Johnston City in those days before the War, Edith suggested that she and John could “date” by meeting at church—“her” church, which by then had become the Christian Church.

John was more than interested, and, not going to any church on his own, took her up on her offer. They met at church, with occasional trips into Marion, the larger town not far away, and a romance quickly became promising between the tiny beauty from Spillertown with a mind of her own and the tall, good-looking older fellow who happened to be the Postmaster of Johnston City. They talked of marriage, and soon plans were being made, even though it would mean that Edith would not finish high school. John was reaching his mid-20s as 1940 drew near.

Edith, though, had one demand. Not a request of him, but a demand. And, in making it, she made clear that if he could not or would not comply, she would not marry him. It was as serious as anything could get, as both of them came to tell the story. He had to renounce once and for all not just the Mormonism that he had grown up around, but every one of his Mormon relatives. Mormonism had to disappear from his life and relationships, even if it involved uncles, aunts, cousins, or whoever, which it did. She would not, she let him know, have her children growing up around anything or anyone Mormon. Beyond that, she expected that their family be faithful Christians and church goers—of the Protestant variety.

John was smitten and ready to marry Edith, so he agreed to her demand. No small number of his family members, all Mormon, decried his decision, and vowed that they would never see him again either. John would not forget, though, that a number of those relatives had told him that he had what it took to be a Church leader and, long before Edith, he had secretly found that idea very compelling, even though he had no idea at that point how those Mormon words would actually play themselves out in his life. But the decision to give up Mormonism, and even his Mormon family, in order to marry Edith was easy. They eloped to Cape Gireaudeau, Missouri, for their wedding and brief honeymoon, and then it was back home to Johnston City and work at the Post Office.

The future was cloudy, to say the least. The war was on the horizon. Within months, they were expecting their first child, who was born on February 11, 1942, two months after Pearl Harbor. It was a child, the one now writing these notes, who would not only carry the Webb name forward, but, like his father and his father before him, would be given the name Morris, a name he would grow into very proudly.

My dad kept that religious promise to my mother, the one she had extracted from him as a condition of marriage. At least mostly he did. On at least three occasions during his lifetime (he died at age 66 in 1982), twice when I was in high school and once after I became an adult, he talked with me about his Mormon relatives and what he remembered about who they were and what he had heard from them. To my surprise, he said that he was quite interested in Mormonism when he was young; but he had no difficulty at all in turning his back on it. He wasn’t sure why, except that he saw the future he wanted in Edith, my mother. By the same token, his interest in Mormon leadership, which he said he secretly harbored when he was in high school, is what carried him into his life in church leadership in the years after he and mother were married.

He did on number of occasions over the years see some of his Mormon family members, something he said that Edith knew about. As it turned out, he knew a good deal more about the Mormon faith than I would have guessed, something that none of his Christian friends, his Christian students or church members, ever knew or, I am sure, ever suspected.Even before I was in high school, I learned about the Mormon side of the family from one of my uncles, one of Dad’s brothers whom we often saw and whose kids were among our favorite cousins. That led me to ask Dad about it one morning a year or two later. Dad was open and candid with me, as he was about so many things.

What he wanted me to know more than anything else, he said, was that John, my younger brother, and I had a lot more uncles, aunts, and cousins, mostly second and third removed from us, that we had never met and probably never would. We had, in short, a very large family that we were consciously kept away from. I remember being shocked at hearing that, not because of religious issues but just because of family issues and ties.

He wasn’t even sure where they were any more, since he assumed that most of them had probably left Southern Illinois. He did know that a few of them had become active Mormons, and that he would most likely have become one too if he had not met my mother. He said that there were a number of things about Mormonism that he had liked when he was young, but had never really taken it very seriously since neither his own mother or father cared much about it. Ironically, in the years after he and my mother married and he entered the Christian ministry, both of his parents became members of the same Christian Church into which my mother had led him.

Dad had three brothers and a sister, my three uncles and an aunt. Even in the growing up years, I knew them, their families and kids fairly well. My first cousins. One of the brothers, the youngest, my uncle Charles, followed dad’s footsteps, almost in synch, into the Christian ministry, same school, same ordination, identical church work. Another brother, uncle Gerald, became an active member, a deacon as I recall, of a large Baptist church in Marion, the town near Johnston City. The other two, though, I never understood religiously. Uncle Glen was always a kind of outsider to John and Charles and even Gerald religiously. I suspected Uncle Glen, who died many years ago, of being a Mormon, along with his family. It was that suspicion that led me to ask Dad about his brother Glen and Mormonism when I became an adult. Dad’s response was vague, even though he said that Glen probably stayed closer to the Southern Illinois family roots than anyone else in the immediate family.

Then there was Aunt Cynthia, so much like the boys and yet with a wonderful brash streak that none of the reserved boys had. When my wife Linda and I and our son Joe packed up and moved to California the first time in 1970, where I had my first teaching job at California State University at Northridge, we were invited to stay for a time, until we could find a place to live, with Aunt Cynthia, Uncle Harry, and Rob, our cousin. They had moved to California from Southern Illinois several years earlier when Uncle Harry landed at job at Burroughs, in the aerospace industry.

One morning at breakfast, it was just me and Aunt Cyn, as she liked to be called, and as we talked I asked her about the Mormonism in her own background. To my surprise, she launched into a long and very excited discussion of what a great religion it was, citing this and that which no other religion offered, mostly family-type things. She said she didn’t know much about the specifics of its theology but she knew enough to know that it was a very great good in the world.

Then she said that she was not a particularly religious person, but in her heart she was a Mormon. She explained, too, that over the years she had stayed very close to many of those Mormon relatives of hers—and Dad’s and her brothers’—back in Illinois. Then she told me that one family of her cousins had moved to California from Southern Illinois not long after they did and were living just up in the next canyon. She saw them, she said, as often as possible. They were still active Mormons. Before we left California the first time a few years later, she took me to meet them and spend a couple of hours.

What I never did tell dad, or anyone else for that matter, was that in the weeks after he had told me at breakfast about the Mormonism in his family background, I became intensely interested in it. What I had more or less “overheard” here and there at family get-togethers that had made no sense to me, now made sense, and I wanted to know more. Not more about it in my own family background, but more about Mormonism itself. Secretly, I checked books out of both the school library, which didn’t have many, and the Lincoln Public Library, which was across the street from our church. It did have quite a few. I read and learned about Mormonism.

I reacted, I can now see in retrospect, with both a revulsion and a curious attraction. I was dumbfounded by the Joseph Smith stories and the Jesus in America stories. I was absolutely fascinated by the collective lifestyle stories, the history and dynamics of polygamy, and the secret rites of religious membership and passage. I did learn that my Southern Illinois Mormon kin were parted ways with the Salt Lake City Mormons, but it didn't make much sense to me at the time. What I saw were that Mormons were maverick people, or at least that is how I came to perceive them, and I am convinced, in retrospect, that the attraction I found in that dimension of them impacted how I came to live my own life. In a sense, I felt a strong pull to identify with them, even though I had no intention of, and actually no way to, become a Mormon, not even of the "reformed" kind.

The other thing that left its mark on me, as it still seems to to this day, is my sense of how very close I actually came to being born into and living my life as a Mormon. Or at least I was forced then, in high school, to acknowledge something that profoundly changed my outlook, my intellectual view of the world, as it were. It was the first time I realized flat-out that if my father had indeed become a leader in, or even a part of, the Mormon faith, I too would have undoubtedly lived my life as a Mormon. I realized, too, for the first time, that by a stroke of something, my father was separated from his Mormon roots by my mother, and hence I was born into and reared, not as a Mormon, but as a member of the particular faith and church orientation that I have embraced in one way or another all my life.

Even at the age I am now I find myself wondering what life would have been like had I found myself in circumstances of embracing the Mormonism on that side of my genealogy. Or what would have happened if mother had not been so assertive about “her” religion when she and dad married? What if he had told her that to marry him she would have to join him in making his Mormon relatives happy? Do the lives we live really hang on such shifts of this or that? Ironically, much, much later in life, only in recent days, in fact, do I look back with help and realize that I unwittingly did things in life that seem to reflect the pull and the strange legacy of my relationship with Mormonism.