At Large. TWO ANONYMOUS PARACHUTERS who base jumped from the top of the Church Office Building on 12 November. According to Church employee Annie Beer, the two men landed in a parking lot across the street. By the time police arrived at the scene, the jumpers had sped off in a silver SUV. “It must have been on their bucket list or something,” Beer told the Deseret News.
Died. Former Relief Society President BARBARA BRADSHAW SMITH, 88, of pulmonary fibrosis. Smith led the Church women’s organization between 1974 and 1984—a period marked by national debate about the Equal Rights Amendment. Appointed by President SPENCER W. KIMBALL, Smith took an active role in fighting the ERA, championing traditional gender roles across the nation, and debating pro-ERA campaigner SONIA JOHNSON on the Phil Donahue Show. Smith also played an active role in the controversial International Women’s Year Conference, held in 1977 in Salt Lake City (see pages 50 and 52).
Published. The biography of LDS President THOMAS S. MONSON, 83, by Deseret Book. Titled To the Rescue: The Biography of Thomas S. Monson, the volume chronicles President Monson’s rise from boy to prophet and includes many little-known pictures. For the project, President Monson handpicked HEIDI S. SWINTON, an author and screenwriter who is the stepdaughter of LDS historian LEONARD ARRINGTON.
Died. LDS artist ARNOLD FRIBERG, 96, of complications related to a hip injury. The conceptual artist for CECIL B. DeMILLE’s 1956 film The Ten Commandments, Friberg will be remembered for his 1975 painting Prayer at Valley Forge, for his bodybuilder-like representations of Book of Mormon heroes, and for his dramatic, richly colored Book of Mormon scenes, which the LDS Church reproduced by the millions. Fiercely independent, Friberg had an uneasy relationship with the Church. LDS leaders disapproved of his 1963 painting Christ Appearing to the Nephites (later renamed The Risen Lord), which showed Jesus’s bare left breast. In the 1960s, the LDS Church hired illustrator HARRY ANDERSON instead of Friberg to create some of its most iconic representations of Jesus. Despite the rare honor of being memorialized with a funeral at Temple Square’s Assembly Hall, Friberg chose to be buried in a Royal Canadian Mounted Police uniform instead of in temple clothes. Clifton Holt Jolley’s tribute to Friberg appears in Sunstone issue 160 (September 2010: 81–83).
Died. Excommunicated LDS leader GEORGE P. LEE, 67, the first and only Native American thus far to become a General Authority. A gifted student and teacher, Lee was called to the First Quorum of the Seventy in 1975, at age 32. In the mid-1980s, after SPENCER W. KIMBALL’s death, Lee clashed with other LDS leaders over the termination of several Church programs for Native Americans. Lee accused LDS leaders of “turning your backs on the Lamanites, the very people on whom your salvation hangs.” LDS sociologist Armand Mauss has called Lee “one of the truly tragic figures in modern Mormon history.”
