And, in the fall of , he dedicated a Mormon temple in his hometown of Brigham City on a site where he once attended grade school. Members of his large clan — 10 children and scores of nieces, nephews, grandchildren and great-grandchildren — knew him as a great teacher and loving family man with an extraordinary work ethic and a lively sense of humor.
His father was a mechanic, who eventually built a car dealership. At age 5, young Boyd was laid up for six weeks with what was diagnosed as pneumonia, but later determined to be polio.
He was confined to his bed, mostly unable to move. When he finally recovered, he struggled to learn to walk again. That experience took a toll. In photographs taken after the illness, according to Packer biographer Lucile Tate, there was "an old look in a young face. Inner fear "became a reality to be reckoned with and eventually overcome," Tate writes. He couldn't run and play sports. Instead, he developed a keen eye for detail and an ability to re-create images from nature.
He crafted miniature farm, circus and jungle animals as family gifts. A deep love of birds took root. He belonged to a Brigham City pigeon club, Tate writes, whose members offered their homing pigeons to distribute and collect votes from far-flung Utah communities in the elections.
Once in awhile, the wild birds would make a home in the spires of the Box Elder Tabernacle. To retrieve them, Boyd and a friend would jimmy a window, climb to the attic, crawl on the catwalk, and then inch up to the top of the spire, the biographer explains.
These became Boyd's twin qualities — love of birds and fearlessness in the face of danger — that stretched into adulthood. So he enlisted in the military and was a year-old bomber pilot in Okinawa during the war's final days. While standing on a beach in Japan, Packer decided to become a teacher.
After returning to Utah, he met and married Donna Smith, a beauty queen. He then graduated from Utah State University with a degree in education. The seminary experience pushed Packer's career away from university education and toward teaching religion, which he did with such gusto it attracted the attention of LDS leaders.
In , at age 37, the seminary teacher became an assistant to the Quorum of Twelve Apostles, a full-time church position, and was tapped to help supervise CES while he still was completing a doctorate in education at Brigham Young University.
Packer and his friend A. Theodore Tuttle, who would become a member of the Utah-based faith's First Quorum of the Seventy, were determined to stop a secular movement within CES. Some of the church's teachers had been trained at the University of Chicago, and they wanted the system to be similar, except with a Mormon bent. Packer and Tuttle saw such a movement as a sellout, trading faith for academic credentials.
Within four years of his assignment to full-time church service, Packer was sent into a hotbed of the s anti-war movement, Cambridge, Mass. If a missionary had a problem, Kenney said, the key question for Packer was not how to help the individual but how to forward the work. Packer's predecessor was the late Truman G. Madsen, a garrulous intellectual who taught philosophy at BYU until his death in Elder Packer sent none.
Truman had several missionwide fasts, Elder Packer had none," Kenney said. Elder Packer said get out the door and teach. Packer's style was a form of "tough love,'' pushing young people into peak performance, Kenney said.
He also launched religious education for college-age Mormons and taught several classes himself. He felt overwhelmed, observers say. That feeling of inadequacy never left, but neither did his determination to do all he could to further what he saw as God's kingdom on Earth.
Tate called her biography, "A Watchman on the Tower," alluding to a biblical passage urging believers to be on the lookout for approaching enemies, which speaks to Packer's self-perception. The young apostle came to see his role as keeping the church pure from outside influences and to warn the members, especially young people, of the threats around them.
The world's values are "spiritual crocodiles," Packer once said, dangerous ideas that "you can't see that are lying in the mud Packer didn't always relish the role of straight shooter on delicate issues, but he didn't shrink from the task either.
He initially balked when then-President Spencer W. Kimball asked him to address male sexuality, including homosexuality, at a BYU fireside in March , according to the second volume of Edward Kimball's biography of his father.
The apostle had only water, Lynn Packer recalled, saying he was "too nervous to eat. In a General Conference address, Packer discussed masturbation, using the euphemism "little factories" to describe male anatomy. It will do so perhaps as long as you live. For the most part, unless you tamper with it, you will hardly be aware that it is working at all," Packer said. The Lord has provided a way for that to be released.
It will happen without any help or without any resistance from you. Perhaps one night you will have a dream. In the course of it the release valve that controls the factory will open and release all that is excess. The speech prompted amused chatter, but later was reproduced in a pamphlet for use by the church's youth leaders.
His October General Conference speech, suggesting that gays could change their sexual orientation, drew more than chuckles. It sparked petitions and protests. Within days, Packer, by then president of the Quorum of Twelve Apostles and next in line to lead the LDS Church, modified his speech to align more closely with his faith's view that the cause of same-sex attraction is unknown and that the only sin is acting on those desires.
In April , Packer again raised eyebrows with a hard-edged sermon about the rise of immorality and the nation's acceptance of it. He did not mention gay marriage, but his remarks came in the wake of public-opinion polls showing a dramatic swing in favor of recognizing same-sex unions.
Just last month, the U. Supreme Court issued a landmark ruling legalizing same-sex marriage in all 50 states. At one point, Packer tried to soften the apparent harshness of his remarks about feminists and intellectuals.
But if it's in print, I said it," Packer told filmmaker Whitney, almost apologetically. Maxine Hanks — a Mormon feminist and one of the so-called "September Six" excommunicated from the LDS Church in — recalled letters she exchanged with Packer a year after she rejoined the faith in The apostle replied, according to Hanks, "I appreciate the sincerity of your feelings and the spirit in which they were written.
Know that for my part, I have only admiration and joy to know of your progress and growth. Those words moved Hanks, she said, "since it referred to my efforts past and present, not just my return to the church.
Consider his work in the early s with the Genesis Group, a small monthly gathering of black Mormons. Its purpose was to support these black families, including men, who at the time were barred from the faith's all-male priesthood, and their wives and children who couldn't enter LDS temples. Once, when Genesis leaders tried to enter the Mormon Tabernacle for the priesthood session of General Conference, an usher barred the black men from the door.
Darius Gray, one of the Genesis leaders, said they sent an urgent message to Packer, who told the stunned volunteer to escort them into the building and show them to their seats near him on the stand. Packer was one of three apostles charged with proposing a course of action for making the announcement. He immediately called the Genesis leaders and offered to ordain them.
That's why he worried so much about them. Bushman became acquainted with Packer at BYU, where the historian was teaching in the s. Decades later, Bushman asked for — and received — a blessing from Packer as the historian commenced work on "Joseph Smith: Rough Stone Rolling," his critically acclaimed magnum opus on the LDS founder.
Though a lifelong Mormon, Bushman knew he would have to include unflattering, even challenging aspects about the faith's first prophet if his book were to have any credibility in the world outside Mormondom. Packer offered a powerful prayer, Bushman recalled. He's a very spiritual person who strives harder than most others to listen to God's spirit as it comes to him. And we all learned at his feet. Time did not appear to have altered his views, at least not on homosexuality.
Not so. Why would our Heavenly Father do that to anyone? Packer was born Sept. He is survived by his wife of more than 70 years, Donna, and their 10 children. He left The Times in Sylvere Lotringer, intellectual who infused U. Bobbie Kirkhart, the matriarch of atheism in L. All Sections. About Us. B2B Publishing. Business Visionaries. Hot Property. Times Events. Times Store. Facebook Twitter Show more sharing options Share Close extra sharing options.
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