I am Rod Griffin. I was born in Salt Lake City, actually. In a house on 700 East between 400 and 500 South. That’s what my parents told me, anyway. Born in the back of a house in 1935.
When I was a year old my dad opened up a bakery in America Fork, Utah. He operated that bakery for essentially the rest of his career until he retired. So I kinda grew up in a bakery.
American Fork was, at that time, a small town — 3,000 people or so. It was good to grow up in a small town. Everybody knew everybody else almost, and everybody knew everybody’s business, too. But that’s the way it is in a small town — but it was good.
Me and my friends would go all around town on our bicycles and we would sometimes take our bicycles down to Utah Lake and go swimming in the lake, not realizing how polluted it was at the time. And you know, when you’re young, nothing affects you anyway. So we’d go down and throw that black muck at each other, and so on.
Anyway, I went to — they called it — play school, when I was five-years-old. It was actually Kindergarten, I guess. And every child in the town my age went to it and there were like 80-85 kids who went through elementary school, junior high school & high school together, so we knew each other for a long time and everybody knew each other pretty well.
The only thing I remember about kindergarten was that we had a little rug that our mothers provided, a little carpet, and when it was nap time, we’d lay on the floor on the carpet and have a little nap. I don’t remember ever actually napping, but we’d lay there.
An example of kindergarten napping, not dad’s actual class
The other thing I remember is they had a sandbox inside the room we were being taught in, a big wooden sandbox and one of my friends brought a big wooden spoon to move that sand around with. I still remember his name was Drew Pulley and he was famous for the guy that brought the wooden spoon and I do not remember anything else about kindergarten.
Oh, it was in a building that was on the national historic registry. It was an old building in American Fork Park and it was because it was used for education in the very early years. I can’t even remember the national celebrity that established the educational system around the country but it was a well-known building with a plaque on it and everything.
Harrington Elementary School.
Harrington Elementary School
In elementary school, I went to Harrington elementary, the only elementary school in town. I remember second grade I had Mrs. Dunion, and we all called her, you might guess, Mrs. Onion.
In the fifth grade, I got sent to the principal’s office. I drew a picture of Bugs Bunny or something resembling Bugs Bunny and I put my teacher’s name under it and posted it on his classroom door. That got me to the principal’s office in the fifth grade, which worked out pretty good because he just brought me to sit in on his sixth grade math class. So a year later, when I was in that sixth grade math class, he asked some questions and I was the only one that knew the answers cause I had sat in on that question a year earlier. It was something about how long it takes to count to a million. Everybody underestimated, except me, because I had sat in on that question.
All of us in that elementary school moved up to the junior high school in a big imposing brick building up on the hill. It was actually an old Fossil Delta from the old Lake Bonneville. It was a big flat hill so the building was built there.
*****
All six grades from junior high to high school were in that one building. So us little bitty kids and then there was the big kids about to graduate all in that building. That building has been torn down now by the way, and has been replaced by a swimming pool.
Anyway, I remember in high school I liked journalism. I took a journalism class and ended up being a sports writer for the school. Newspaper has been in the family ever since. Andy, you know, he’s been a sportscaster for years and now he’s got a regular daily news program. So I just remember taking that class and of course we had the usual gym and sports and things like that.
I was number six in our class and I don’t know I think by that time they were like 100 and something maybe 104 or 105 in our graduating class and I was number six. They gave awards to the first five. I didn’t even deserve to be that close.
Anyway, my favorite sport in high school was soccer. In those days they had only intramural, they didn’t have any competition between schools or anything like that. That was my favorite because that was the only one I was very good at.
Now my brother, I had a brother who was four years older than me. He was an athletic person. He was a star center on the basketball team in high school. He was much more athletic than I was. When I would go to the barbershop or someplace in town when I was in junior high school, they would always ask me, are you going to play basketball like your brother when you get a little older? And I said ‘I don’t know.’ It turns out my skills were not that developed when I got to that stage. I developed a little later, where I did pretty well.
Our family lived in American Fork for the whole time. When I was growing up, we lived in three different houses. I remember the first house we rented and it was a very small house. There were three children then.
My brother, who’s four years older than me, his name is Bud, his real name is LeRoy, my sister who was two years older than me and her name was Chick and her real name was Donna, but they called her Chick and then they called me Griff and I remember I was one year old and the three of us slept in the living room of the house they only had one bedroom so we slept in the living room. I slept in a crib and my brother slept on the couch and I can’t remember my sister’s sleeping arrangements. We all slept in in that one room in the front of the house and I remember a couple of things. When I was a year old I remember learning to walk, believe it or not. The reason I remember is that I was staggering across the yard and ran into a tree and it hurt. When I told my parents about that later on they said, well you were only a year old when that happened. I also remember my dad bathing me in the kitchen sink and hitting my head on the faucet and I saw stars and that’s why remember that.
And then the only other memorable thing about that was my sister found a little cat. She just loved that little kitty cat and I was impressed. It was the first animal that I’ve had anything to do with. My sister just loved that little cat.
We moved to a larger house in a different part of town. I think we were renting. It might’ve been a duplex, but it had more bedrooms and we stayed there for a couple years and then finally we moved to house on Merchant Street in American Fork, near the center of town and only a block away from the bakery that my dad owned and operated. We were in there until I was in fourth or fifth grade.
We moved to another house on first North and First East in American Fork and it was a clapboard house and again it wasn’t very large, but it was large enough for our family as there were only three children in the family. What I remember about that house is that one Thanksgiving we had a big Thanksgiving dinner and my big brother decided he could eat more if he ate and then ran around the house several times, so we all watched him run around the house. I think he ran around the house about eight times and then ate some more. It was pretty impressive.
The only other thing I remember is in the fifth grade my parents used to dress me in high top boots and knickers to go to school and they had laces that seem to go up forever. I know they went up nearly to my knees. I remember one time, when it was bedtime, I bid everybody goodnight and went in my bedroom and left the boots on and went to bed with my boots on. So the next morning, I didn’t have to put my boots on and lace them up. I thought that was pretty smart. Of course, I did get some leg aches afterwards and my mom was really upset when she found out I had slept in those boots.
They had a little clothes line out back. I was standing on a little hump of dirt and jumped to try to grab a the clothes line and fell on my face and I got a broken arm out of it. That was the only broken bone I’ve had. The thing I remember about that is the pain when they reset the bone.
Other than that, while we were living in that house, my dad was building or having built a larger house right on the corner, right next to it. This is the house that we grew up in. Me and my two siblings, for the rest of our lives. Right on the corner of First East and First North — Beautiful view of Mount Timpanogos., a nice rural street, although it was on the highway that led up to Alpine at that time, so they probably had a little more traffic then some of the other streets, but at least it wasn’t on Main Street.
Mount Timpanogos
I remember in the winter time we had sleds and in those days when it snowed, they didn’t plow the road. They just let the cars run along until it was a hard packed ice on all the roads and there was just a little bit of a hill out in front of our house and so the kids would get running and slam their sleighs on the road and coast down for a ways or if a car went by, sometimes we’d grab it’s bumper and go down the street pretty fast. That was pretty dangerous!
I remember growing up, even when I got older, that every winter we drove on those roads and they stayed icy all winter long. In the winter of 1947 and 1948 it was particularly snowy in Utah. We had on our front lawn about 48 inches of snow. It was so much snow on the roof of the house and the garage, that I actually had to get up on the roof with a scoop shovel and scoop the snow off the roof so the roof wouldn’t cave in. And after I got through there was a big pile of snow below, and I just jumped off the roof into the pile of snow.
A home in nearby Holladay, Utah, Winter 1948
No harm done, but, that was a particularly snowy winter. The snowiest one I can ever remember.
When I was a senior in high school, my mom and dad got me a car, actually between junior and senior year they got the car. It was a ’39 Chevy club coupe. That little Club Coupe was a runaround car for me and my buddies and we went all over between Pleasant Grove, Lehvi and American Fork. These were three towns close together about 3 miles apart between each one and we had a lot of fun running around in that little club coupe.
1939 Chevy Club Coupe
Then one of my buddies, Leonard Green, got one almost like it was the same color — black (as matter fact, most cars were black in those days). This was a ’39 Chevy and his I think was Ford and it was also black. I remember he tried to back out of my driveway really fast and broke his rear axle and I felt real bad for him because he couldn’t move his car.
Leonard Green
Anyway, during that school year, I was driving when I was a senior. I was driving with a girlfriend that I had at that time, teaching her how to drive. We were driving out in the farm country between American Fork and Pleasant Grove, and we’re going down the road and I told her to turn the corner and she started turning it and panicked and just kept going and ran into the ditch with it. There was a big head gate there for irrigation. It broke and damaged the car pretty badly. I slammed my knees against the dashboard, and she slammed her head against it. She had a big knot on her head after that for a week or so, and I think I still have sore knees, but that wasn’t because of that, I just got old. Anyway, the car was wrecked, and I got the farmer whose head gate we ruined. He towed us back and towed the car in front of my place and left it sitting out in front on the road in front of the house and I remember when my folks got home first thing they did was get out of the car and go look at the front of my car which was pretty smashed in. It was totaled. So until Christmas time that year, I didn’t have a car and I had to walk to school about a mile to school and of course it was uphill both ways. Just kidding. It was up going, but it was downhill coming back.
Anyway, It was kinda fun to walk to school with the other guys from our neighborhood. Then at Christmas time, this would’ve been 1952. Dad’s bakery was doing pretty well so we had a bountiful Christmas — presents all over the place. For some reason, they were keeping our garage locked and I couldn’t get in it and one day, I did figure out a way to get that door open even though it was locked. I peeked into the garage and there was a ’46 Ford convertible in there and it’s the very same car, if you’ve seen karate kid, Mr. Bugatti (Miyagi) or whatever his name is, he had the karate kid polishing that same car. That was a wonderful convertible, because it ended up helping me find my wife.
But anyway, Christmas time came and everybody opened all their gifts and there were just one little gift left to open. It was a little box that was for me and of course I’d seen the car already so I figured it was keys in that box. My folks would have been really upset if they knew I knew. I saved it for last. I’m sure they were getting frustrated. I opened that box and there was a key to that little Ford in there so this was my second car — a ’46 Ford convertible and I ran around town and went past my girlfriend‘s houses a lot in that little Ford and graduated from high school in 1953.
1946 Ford Convertible
I got a job working at Saratoga Springs, which was not a town at that time, it was a swimming resort. There was a hot spring over near the north end of Utah Lake and they had two swimming pools there, fed by this hot spring. By the way, they had to cool it in order to get the water cool enough to swim in. I got a job at Saratoga Springs. It actually is interesting how I got that job. I had just graduated and was looking for some work to do so I could earn money to go to college and my dad said well I know the guy that runs the Dairy Queen over on Fifth East in town and if you go see him, he’ll probably give you a job working in his Dairy Queen. Meanwhile, well I went to his house and his wife said well he’s not gonna be home until 3 o’clock this afternoon so if you can come back, you know you can talk to him. Well while I was waiting, I drove over to the resort at Saratoga. It was about maybe six or 7 miles and I applied there and they hired me immediately and so instead of the Dairy Queen job, I ended up working as a lifeguard at the swimming pool.
Saratoga Resort Swimming Pool
Eventually, they made me the chief lifeguard and put me in charge of sanitation for the pool — putting the chlorine in and stuff like that. One day I was working on the inside pool as a lifeguard (they had one pool on the inside of the building and that was the hot water one and one on the outside, a larger pool a little further down the hill).
Saratoga Resort Inside Pool
I was working on the inside and there was a pretty girl selling tickets to get in and checking the suits and everything in for the people at the entrance to the pool and I went over to ask her what her name was she said her name was Jean and so I took a minute from lifeguarding and slipped into the room where they had a time clock where you check in and check out with the card, and I looked on the card to see what her last name was and then the a little later I went back and told her I knew what her name was and I got it wrong. I said Jean Baker but it was Jean Bahr. She corrected me quickly. Anyway, the rest of that evening every time we saw each other I would think of different bars, like Iron bar and things like that to make fun of her last name and she started making fun of my name by calling me curtain rod, lightning rod and things like that. We kinda hit it off.
The next day, I’m lifeguarding again on the inside pool and my friend Brad Webb was there with me. He was a lifeguard, too, and Jean came out of the locker room dressed in her swimming suit, and Brad said “Look at those legs! Are they beautiful or what?” and I was already attracted to this girl so when he said that I thought I’m gonna get to know this girl a little bit better.
So the next day I’m lifeguarding on the outside pool up on my big stool looking over the pool and here comes Jean across the lawn toward the pool toward the lifeguard stand actually, with two little twin girls in hand and she was babysitting for one of the guys that owns the pool. She was babysitting these two little twin girls and I saw her with those two little girls, and I just fell in love. Just like that. Then she started talking to me and she told me about that she’s making a yellow dress to wear to church out of some yellow chiffon material. She was really happy about this dress she was making that she could wear to church. So I got real brave and said how about if I go to church with you .
She went to church in Lehi. They actually lived in a farm by the swimming pool but they went to church in Lehi. So I drove over to Lehi that Sunday morning and met early in church together and that was the beginning of what has so far been a 69, no 70 year romance, which is still going on.
Salt Lake Temple
It was a year later, a year to the day later, we got married. It was pretty special. We were sealed together in the Salt Lake Temple, on the 30th of June, 1955.
That was 69 years ago week before last. We’ve lived together for 65 years as a married couple in mortality and four years ago she departed for the spirit world. It was a special relationship for the whole time. We had five children actually, and the first one was born when we lived in Salt Lake City. I was working at ZCMI wholesale furniture and hardware store (no longer exists), but I was working there and our first child was born. We named him Gordon because my two best friends my senior year in high school were Gordon Bennett and Eldon Huntsman and so our first two kids were named Gordon and Eldon after them. And my sister’s best friend for those years was a girl named of Laura Van Wagner and our third child was named Laura.
ZCMI Wholesale Store
Years later when I worked for a department store there was a cute little high school girl, named Wendy. So that accounts for those names Gordon, Eldon, Laura and Wendy.
Andy was our fourth child and we named him Andy because a guy in our ward that worked with the youth and his name was Andrew. So our children were named after someone we knew.
When I was growing up I lived in a part of town that wasn’t close to my friends and we walked back-and-forth across town when our bicycles weren’t working.
We had a DNR railroad track right next to our house. There was our yard and there was a sidewalk and a ditch and then there was a railroad track and in those days the big steam engines would come in. It was a block away from the American Fork station and so when the steam engines would come in, they’d start slowing down right at our house and letting off steam and I just remember when I was growing up if I’d be in the front yard that Big Bertha would let off all that steam and I would run around the other side of the house. I didn’t wanna to get steam cleaned.
Big Bertha
I wish those old engines were still around because they were something to watch. When we were kids we used to put coins on the railroad track, quarters, nickels, pennies, whatever and when the train was gone, we’d go out there and the coins would be flattened. It was fun to go out there and find the misshaped coins. So I grew up next to a railroad track. Every night in the wee hours of the night we would hear a train go by and the whole house would rumble.
Flattened coins
We were married in 1955. I was going to school and Jean was finishing her high school. She was actually still in high school when we were married. She finished her last year of high school while we were married and I signed her report cards. I was still going to school. My first full-time job was at ZCMI wholesale in Salt Lake City on the west side in an area called the industrial center.
Then I left there and took a job selling little baby seats, called babe tenda and it seemed like a good deal. I believed in the seats, they were safe. They could sit in the seats and not fall out or get injured. So I started helping to sell those. There was only one other guy selling them and he was the dealer, and I just remember when he got referrals he would keep them for himself and wouldn’t share so I wasn’t selling very many seats.
Babee Tenda
So we started looking for another job. We were living in South Salt Lake City near 33rd south and 7th East and I started looking for another job. I applied in a whole lot of places and it was getting frustrating because nobody was responding to my applications and I couldn’t go back to ZCMI Wholesale so I just kept applying and trying and I was trying to sell baby seats while I was at it. One Sunday came and I had gotten my last paycheck and it was $60 and Sunday came around and Jean, who was just so righteous and faithful all her life, all the time, she said “Well, what have we got left?” I said after buying baby food and groceries, and cans of beans and stuff like that, we have six dollars left.” She said, “OK we gotta take that and give it to the Bishop for tithing.” And I said ain’t no way! We have a baby boy, we have expenses, we can’t give our last six dollars to the Bishop for tithing. Needless to say, I lost that argument very quickly and we took that last six dollars on Sunday and gave it to the Bishop for tithing. Monday morning I had phone calls from three different places offering me a job.
The one I took was with WT Grant Company management training program and went to work for them in Salt Lake City on State Street between 200 S and 300 S. and they trained potential managers there and then they would transfer them out to other stores. They had 1,100 stores around the country. It was a wholesale, not a wholesale, a retail store, a variety store. About six months after I started working for them they decided they were gonna transfer me to the Oakland store in Oakland, California. Jean and I both grew up in Utah and we were not very cosmopolitan and here we are headed for Oakland, California. But I did go there and I served as assistant manager for a store downtown. It was a very interesting place. In those days, Oakland was the terminus of the railroad that went all the way across the country. We got a lot of very interesting people that showed up in downtown Oakland and it was kind of scary.
Oakland, CA:
Hayward, CA:
After a few months there I got transferred to a store in Hayward, California, which was about 15 miles south of Oakland and there I was assistant manager and we had a very successful store. The manager was just a prince of a guy, name of Fritchner. He was really a nice guy. We had a big blanket sale. They had an annual blanket sale. He put me in charge of it. We really did a lot of promoting and decorating and everything for this blanket sale and when it was over, we got first place in the whole company in the blanket sales and Fritchner was very pleased and he wanted to promote me as fast as he could to be a manager in another store, but first I had to have the experience of opening a new store and so they transferred me over to Sunnyvale, California, which is the San Francisco Peninsula south of San Francisco about 30 miles just south of Stanford University. So I opened that store. My job was to get everything in stock and put it out on the counters and get it all set up and ready to go. So when that store opened up, I was assistant manager there and then the company decided to transfer me to Concord, California, on the other side of the bay north of San Francisco Bay and I worked in Concord and meanwhile we had three children.
Gordon was born when we lived in Salt Lake City and Eldon and Laura were born while we lived in in the Bay Area. We lived in Hayward when Eldon was born and in Sunnyvale when Laura was born and so we had two boys and a girl and then I wanted to go back to school. I was successful, but not happy with the retail business . It was really a dog-eat-dog type of existence and I wanted to go back to school. I wanted to go to BYU where I had gone before, so we just pulled up stakes and headed back for Utah. One of a couple of other times.
Anyway we headed back to Utah and we didn’t have a job. We just went back and stayed with her parents, her family, when we first got back. I went to school and I did part-time jobs. I had three part-time jobs. I still worked for WT Grant company part-time in Sugarhouse in Salt Lake Valley. I worked as a graduate assistant in the Geography department at BYU, I had one other job, what was it, oh I worked at the physical plant department at the university too. So anyway, we kept that up, me working three jobs and Jean working for the life insurance company— Beneficial Life Insurance Company, which at that time was owned by the church.
I got my degree in 1964 and decided to stay and get my masters degree in the summer of 1965. I was looking for a job. I wanted to teach and geography was a great field for somebody that wants to teach because you can’t do much else with it. So I applied at many places, including a place in Oregon on the coast and they offered me a job and we were gonna move to Oregon. I think it was $5300 a year wage at that time which is $100 a week, anyway we still had three children and Jean fortunately wasn’t working at that time. She was able to be at home with the children.
When I got the job in Oregon and I was real pleased and sent the application back to him in the meantime, I also got an offer from Nevada Southern University in Las Vegas and this was for considerably more money than I was going to get in Oregon. At that time it that seemed like a lot of money. It was like $7870, something like that, a year and it seemed like a lot and it probably was a lot in those days you know — we’re talking 1965 was when I got my master’s degree.
So anyway, I communicated with the people in Oregon and told them I have a better offer, would you let me out of the contract? And they did, they were very gracious and so I went down to work at Nevada Southern University.
University of Southern Nevada
As we’re packing up and getting ready to move to Las Vegas, Jean came in. She said, “Honey you have a good job and I want to have another child.” And I thought about it for a few minutes and I said “Yeah, I guess.” She said “Good, cause I’m pregnant.” That’s when she was pregnant with Andy. So we had Gordon, Eldon, Laura and she’s pregnant with Andy when we moved to Las Vegas
So I worked for UNLV for eight years. I remember the day Andy was born, I went and taught class. I took Jean to the hospital first cause she was having labor pains. I went and taught a 9 o’clock class. Then I went to the hospital and stayed for an hour while Andy was born. And then went back and taught another class at 11 o’clock and I wrote on the blackboard. ”It’s a boy!” and got a nice round of applause from the class.
It’s interesting when I went to work for UNLV, I went down and applied for the job a friend had told me there was there in the science department and I went down to apply and they sent me into the office of a fellow who was an engineer but he was the chairman of the Physical Science Department at that time.
He interviewed me and he said, “OK Rod, I’m gonna ask you two questions.” First question he asked me was about my religion and whether I could teach Geology based based on my religious background. I assured him I could do that and by the way you couldn’t asked that question in an interview nowadays, but those days you could. And the second question, he said what do you think of the theories of Alfred Wegener? I don’t know if he thought he was gonna trip me up on something or if he thought I didn’t know about him or what. But Alfred Wegener was a guy back in the 1950s who wrote a book in which he described the way the continents would fit together again if they were fit together again like a jigsaw puzzle. Of course the theory was that the continents had moved and in those days that was known as the continental drift and Wegener’s book gave a lot of evidence for the fact, especially in Africa and in South America they would fit together and there was fossil evidence for it So he wrote a book about it. Fortunately, I had taken two years of German. He wrote the book in German, I taken two years in German in college.
And I happened upon Alfred Wegener’s book and read it. At that time, If you believed in those things, they called it the continental drift, you were considered to be somewhat of a kook, a weirdo, because nobody believed that continents could move.
So he asked me that question and here’s what went through my mind. If I tell him I believe in those theories, he’s gonna think I’m a kook and I probably won’t get the job. On the other hand, I do believe there is some validity to that. Should I go with the truth? So just in a flash I made that decision. I’m gonna go with the truth. His name was Herb Wells, that interviewed me, by the way.
And I said “Mr. Wells, I do believe there is some validity to the theories of Wegener and there is a lot of proof. He looked at me kind of strangely, and he got this funny look on his face. He pointed his finger at me, raised his finger and said, “That makes only two of us in the whole state of Nevada.” Needless to say, I got that job and I’m glad I went with the truth instead of what I was thinking. I guess the truth sometimes pays off.
And of course, in the eight years that I worked for UNLV as a professor, those theories became strong theories and by the time those eight years were up, almost everyone in the field of Geology and anywhere else for that matter, began to believe in what is now called plate tectonics. That was neat that it worked out that way.
When we were in Las Vegas, we lived in the eighth ward, and I was called to be the leader of the priest quorum. In those days the Bishop was technically the leader but they called an instructor who taught and led the boys. We had 16 priests in that ward. A lot of young men. They were really good kids and they were really active.
And 15 of the 16 ended up going on missions. The other one got a job working on Sundays and never made it. It was a real success teaching those boys. I really enjoyed it. The only thing I didn’t enjoy, was, in those days, we’re talking the 1960s, there was a lot of racial tension in the country, a lot in Las Vegas. Those boys had a good time making fun of black people and I didn’t know what to say to them. There was a lot of bigotry and prejudice going on at that time. I think they got it from their parents. It was a whole different attitude then what there is now. So that part, I didn’t enjoy. But those boys turned out pretty good and I enjoyed working with them.
Then I was teaching and looking for a place to go to get my PhD and we had rented a house in Las Vegas from a family called the Fishers and they had a son who is actually a professor of geography at Weber State. They said he had such a great time getting his PhD from the University of Nebraska. The University of Nebraska has a really fine department.
I decided I would go ahead and apply for the University of Nebraska and in the summer of 1966. We went there, the whole family, we just drove back and I had a station wagon, an old Ford Woody station wagon, and we drove back to Lincoln and went to summer school and I got started on my PhD program.
University of Nebraska
The second year we thought it might be practical if I just went back by myself and Jean would stay home in Las Vegas with the kids. By this time we had bought a house in Las Vegas in the same ward. By the way, the house cost $14,000 and the payments were $122 a month. A few things have changed.
Anyway, so the second summer I went back and spent the summer living in a dorm. It was a girls dorm and it was closed off for the summer for teacher candidates to live in.
I spent that summer there — it was not a good thing. I didn’t like being away from my family. I’m sure my family had a hard time with me not being there all summer so that was the last time we did that.
When I got back to UNLV, I still had a lot of work to do on my PhD so I was gonna have to go back again, but there was a publication that came out that said certain faculty members can qualify for a national science foundation science faculty fellowship (that’s a mouthful).
I applied for that fellowship and sent all the paperwork and everything and all my records to the national science foundation and low and behold I got the fellowship to go back to study for 12 months at the University of Nebraska.
It was kind of big news in Las Vegas at the time by the way, Southern Nevada University by that time had turned into UNLV and had built quite a bit in that period of time.
Local television station channel 3 sent their weatherman to interview me. They wanted somebody to come interview me about this scholarship so they could do a story about it and the guy that happened to send was the weatherman. He did the weather and a few other things. He wasn’t really a professional weatherman. They sent him to interview me. During the interview we got to talking and I found out I knew a whole lot more about the weather than he did because of my studies in Geography at BYU and also at Nebraska.
He said, you ought to apply to do weather on our channel and I said well I’m a teacher, not a television personality. I don’t think so.
That summer we left for Lincoln, Nebraska, to stay for a year on this fellowship. It was a great fellowship. Got paid for going to school. All my equipment & materials were all paid for as well. That was a good thing. I got an extension. We actually stayed there for 15 months while I did graduate work.
When I got back, they assigned me an office and that office had four desks in it, and three other graduate students and while I was sitting there at the University of Nebraska, they brought in a young man to be one of our office mates and his name was Randy Phillips.
Randy and I hit it off right away and we became good friends and Randy was seeking information about the church, about God and the Godhead and principles of the Bible and so on.
So he started asking me questions and since I grew up a member of the Church, and was familiar with a lot of the tenets and I was familiar with the Articles of Faith, which we all learned in primary, I started answering his qƒuestions the way I understood them. These just rang the bell with Randy because these were the answers he was looking for that he hadn’t been able to find anywhere else. We had really good religious discussions. We became fast friends. We played racquetball together, actually handball we played and a couple of our other colleagues played handball with us.
I remember particularly Randy. Of course we would get in our gym shorts to go play handball and one of the guys, I won’t give his name, but he decided he was gonna tease me about my underwear. I was, of course, wearing the temple garments and he could see them when I changed clothes to play handball.
As soon as he said something about it, Randy just climbed all over him. He said you are making fun of something that has a religious connotation. It’s just not the right thing to do.
So this man apologized to me and I was really impressed with Randy that he would defend me that way. He still didn’t know much about the church but he knew that those garments meant something to me.
Anyway, the end of the tenure came and the end of the summer. We’d been there for 15 months. I was getting my family ready to travel back to Las Vegas to resume my work at UNLV.
While we had been in Lincoln, we had been able to rent a house out on the old Lincoln Air Force Base. It was a good environment. There was a community there of mostly graduate students as a matter of fact and it was a really good place to watch thunderstorms. Nebraska had a lot of thunderstorms in the summer. And out behind our house, there was a hill with a chain-link fence separating our property from the wheat fields and corn fields. When there was a thunderstorm approaching I would go out on that hill with the camera and try to take pictures of lightning. It is of course impossible to take a picture of lightning when it happens because it lasts about 150th of a second and your reaction time is more like 1/8 of a second so you can’t do that, but I had a camera. I don’t remember what it was or where I got. It was a camera that you could click the shutter and it would stay exposed for 17 seconds or if light fell into it, it would close.
And sure enough, I got some really good lightning pictures out on that hill.
One time a thunderstorm was approaching and I felt a little uncomfortable because it was getting pretty close. So I decided I better get going down the hill back into the house.
So I went down the hill and got on the back porch of our house and turned around to take one more picture and just as I did lightning hit the chain link fence I’d been leaning against and it went down the telephone pole right there, too. I got a picture of that. But I thought I was about 15 seconds away from getting hit by that lightning bolt. It was neat that I got that neat picture of it.
Nowadays they have cameras that can get time lapse and a lot better pictures than what I ever got.
It did show the lightning going down that pole along that chain link fence.
We went back to UNLV to Las Vegas back to my Department and when I got back, the climates seemed to have changed somewhat. We had a new dean of the department and he was thinking that the Geography department didn’t belong in the physical sciences and he was trying to get us transferred over to social sciences and the other department and I were both physical geographers. We were much more interested in that than in the Social. A big controversy arose, and long story short, they decided to transfer our department over to the social science department and they decided they no longer needed the two geographers who were teaching in the Department so I knew I needed to hurry and find another teaching job. I called around a lot of places. I had colleagues in Nebraska. I called them and other people, I went to Weber State and talked to the department up there and I was looking for another job. I could’ve stayed and taught at Clark County community college at that time but I kind of wanted to get out of that environment so I called around and finally I called Randy Phillips. At that time Randy was living in Maryville, Missouri, and teaching at Northwest Missouri State College in the Geography Department. On the call he said “You know what, we have a man that’s going on sabbatical for one year and we’re gonna need somebody to come and take his place for a year. Would you be willing to come for one year with the possibility that it might extend longer?” So we packed up our family and moved to Northwest Missouri, found a farmhouse out in a little town called Pickering (and it was really rural!). We actually kinda enjoyed being out in that agricultural area. The nights were beautiful with lots of stars and fireflies (which we’d never seen before) in the ditchbanks and so on and the thunderstorms, which I have always been excited about, so we enjoyed that.
Northwest Missouri State College
And I did teach in the Geography department and a class in the Geology department. And the possibility was that the person that was on the sabbatical might not come back and I might be able to take that position full-time.
But it turned out he did come back, and so again I was looking for another job.
While we were there in Maryville, we became acquainted not only with Randy, Kay and Jon, their little baby boy that they had at that time, but also with all the people in the branch. It was an interesting little branch of the church there. Because it was small, they met in what used to be, I guess a restaurant. It was a building that was not a church building but just a remodeled restaurant. We used to call it Uncle Tom’s Tomain Parlor.
We met there in the little rooms in the house that they had there were used for classrooms and they had converted the garage into a chapel. It was a pretty small department, but I remember the first day we moved in to Pickering, of course I had written to the branch President DeGase and told him that we were coming and that first day we moved in amazingly people started driving up to our house, which was about 8 miles away from Maryville, and they started riding up to our house and it was harvest time in the fall of that year and they start bringing us produce.
We had tons and tons of different kinds of produce that those Missourians had produced. They were so friendly. Such good people. There was another family of Griffins in the branch and because they’d been there for a lot of years, they were known as the old Griffins and we were know as the new Griffins. We never did find any relationship genealogically, but we all became good friends.
This is where Randy and I, as good friends, begin talking more about religion and eventually where we asked Randy and Kay to come to our house and receive the lessons from us and from the Missionaries in the area to Investigate the church and they did. The rest of that is history.
I’m sitting here, right now with Jon, who is not a little baby anymore and he is just a really fine man. He’s having me record thiS. But anyway, Randy and Kay became staunch members of the church. They ended up with seven children, six boys and a girl, and all boys went on missions and Randy became a bishop, then a patriarch and then a stake president and then a patriarch again and then eventually moved out to St. George, Utah, where Jean and I were living at the time. So we not only became long distance friends, we finally became neighbor friends again. It’s been a great association, great friendship and it’s still going on.
So I was looking for another job because the one in Maryville wasn’t gonna work out. That year, they had a convention for the American Association of Geographers, in Seattle. I thought the best way to find a job is to go to that conference and meet with the other geographers there and talk to the department chairmen and see if I could find an opening.
Meanwhile, I had applied in several places and I’d been turned down at least ostensibly for other reasons, but mostly because of my religion. And because of Title IX, I have to say there were some people that were less qualified that fit in under the Title IX program better anyway. After flying to Seattle and meeting with Department Chairs I came back to Maryville.
I had applied at a place in Texas, it’s now called Texas State University, but then it was called Southwest Texas State University and I decided I really wanted that job. So I got in the car and drove down to Texas. I took Highway 35 all the way down from Missouri clear down to Texas and went to an interview for that job with the department chairman there — Al Helman He was just a really good guy. Then of course, we went home again and waited and hoped and one day the letter came.
Texas State University
Plus the phone call. The phone call first and then the letter, actually telling me that they wanted me to come down and teach there for them. I drove up to Pickering. Jean was there with the kids and we had a ward member visiting with us there. I walked in the house and started singing Yellow Rose of Texas and Jean knew right away what that meant — that we got that job. So Randy and Kay helped us move. We loaded up two cars and a trailer.
Randy drove one of the cars, actually went with us and we drove down to Texas. I worked at that department in Texas for three years, took a lot of really nice field trips and taught mostly physical geography at the time and some geology. I took some nice geology field trips.
Because I had not finished my PhD because of departmental politics, they told me I needed to do that and I could stay on for a couple more years but I need to do that if I wanted to stay on permanently.
One of my students was from Victoria, Texas, and he says “Professor, you know we got a television station down there in Victoria and they need a weatherman.” Well since I had already done the weather in Las Vegas, and by the way I left out that part out, we’ll pick that up in just a minute.
When we got back from our from our 15 month study at Nebraska when I went back to UNLV one of the things that happened was that same weatherman came to me and he says we really want you to be a weatherman on our station cause we know you know a lot about the weather and I said no, I’m a teacher and I can’t do that. He said at least come down and talk to the boss. So I went down and talked to the station manager, and told him what my background was and what I knew and so on. And he says, well we want you to work with us. I said, “I can’t do that, I don’t have experience with that sort of thing.” He says, “You’ll get experience. At least do an audition tape.”
So they set me up to do an audition tape and I did a weather broadcast for them and about two weeks later, I’m sitting in my office, and the guy that interviewed me the first time called up, he says the boss liked your tape. He wants you to come do the weather. So my last two years in Las Vegas, I taught classes in the daytime and I did the weather at night on channel 3 in Las Vegas and it was long hours because the weather didn’t come on in Las Vegas at that time, the news didn’t come on until 11 o’clock.
The weather was the last segment so it was 11:30 when I got through and then I had to go home and get up next morning and go teach my classes.
In addition to that I’d been to called to the High Council in Las Vegas North Stake. So sometimes I’d have to go to meetings after I got done with the early weather, which was at 6 o’clock. I know one time my wife made a face for me out of soft fabric and I put that on my lapel. If the weather was gonna be good, there was a smiling face. If it was gonna be bad there was another expression on the face that she made for me. I’d come out and I put them on my lapel. And I remember one time I went straight from doing the weather to a high Council meeting. I forgot to take that lapel off and when I went into the meeting to sit down and they all looked at me like he’s got a big smiley face on his lapel. The guy sitting next to me said keep it we need something like that around here. Anyways for the rest of the time I did the weather I had those lapel faces, which was kind of a gimmick I guess.
When we went to Victoria to hire me to be there weather person, it was channel 19 in Victoria, Texas. They were very excited because they never had anybody do the weather for them. They had someone that read the weather every night and that was it. So I went down, and they hired me for the same wages I would have made if I’d have stayed at Southwest Texas. And so I did the weather every night, got a job working for Dixie College and also for University of Houston, Victoria branch, teaching, geography & geology, I would teach in the morning, then I would go out to the weather service and get information from them and then I’d go through the weather in the afternoon and evening, so it was pretty busy. I was working those two jobs but they were good jobs, we were making pretty good money for the time, our family was happy in Texas and we did the weather for three years. I had developed maps on the wall and different things. At first we didn’t have the chromo key where you could project maps on the wall that the people could see and you couldn’t.
We had plastic maps on the wall. We did weather forecasting for the county, the state and even national and we did beach forecasts because we were close to the beaches there in South Central Texas.
We did that for three years and during that time we had sent our son Gordon on a mission. He went to Independence, Missouri. He spent most of his time in Wichita, Kansas. He was due to come home and we sent our second son on a mission from there. It’s interesting we, the stake president came and met us halfway between Victoria and the Stake headquarters, which were in Corpus Christi, so we met some rural place there in a parking lot, sat in the backseat and set both of our sons apart as Missionaries in those conditions. Anyway, our second son, Eldon, was called to go to Japan and we sent him on his mission to Japan.
It’s the winter now of 1979 and 80 and something told me, I just kept hearing this prompting, that I needed to move back to Utah and I went and talked to Jean about it and she said I’ve been getting the same thing. And our daughter Laura, our oldest daughter, by the way we did have one more child while we were living in Las Vegas, our youngest daughter Wendy, but our oldest daughter Laura was there she said you know I’ve been getting the same feeling that we should move back to Utah and we haven’t lived in Utah for like 20 years but we’ve got that strong prompting to do that and I thought well, I’ve got two really good jobs here making pretty good money. We’re happy, we’re established. We have a home. Why should we do this? We still kept getting that prompting.
So I thought, well OK, I’m gonna take a leave of absence from the television station and go back. My dad was sick and in the hospital, which was a good excuse for going back there. While we were thinking about doing that we talked and said let’s just pack everything up and go back there and stay.
We filled up a trailer. Gordon got home from his mission about that time and Gordon drove a big moving truck. We had a little sailboat, a 14 foot sailboat that we used on the lake around there that we bought in Missouri. So we had a car, a station wagon, the sailboat and a Moving van and we traveled with Gordon driving the moving van, I drove the station wagon with the sailboat on the back and I forget now who drove the car — must’ve been one of our friends.
We stopped in Flagstaff, Az. We stopped because they had a television station and I thought maybe they needed someone there. Turned out they didn’t need anybody, so we just stayed there one night and stayed with my parents in American Fork Utah when we first moved back looking for a place to stay and also looking for jobs.
I took a job working for a company that refined minerals and it was just a temporary job and it didn’t pay very well but it was something. I also applied at channel 4 television station in Salt Lake City and they did hire me part-time. So I was working a couple of part-time jobs but still nothing full-time and Jean was actually working at that time at a place in Salt Lake City as a stenographer. She knew short hand and stuff like that.
Anyway, we’re starting to settle down. We moved into an apartment, a duplex actually in Granger, Utah, which is a suburb of Salt Lake City. We wanted to get a home and we wanted to get good jobs and get established there and as it turned out we decided Jean and I and a couple of kids said we’re gonna go to Wienerschnitzel and get something to eat. When we were there we met one my aunt — one of my father’s sisters and she says “You’re looking for a house?” And we said yes and she said “Well we know a good realtor. His name is Wynder and you go talk to him and he’s gonna fix you up.”
So we contacted Wynder and sure enough they had a house we could rent to own in West Jordan, Utah, and so we went down and moved into that house. I was still working a couple of part-time jobs and Jean working full-time and the kids going to school. In the ward we moved in, It was very interesting. It was the West Jordan First Ward and the first week we attended, they released the Bishopric, split the Ward into two wards, the first ward and the 32nd ward and put in a new Bishopric for the 32nd Ward but did not put in a new Bishop for the First Ward for some reason and instead they had the first counselor conduct the meetings until they got things settled down. So the third week we were in ward we knew hardly anybody. It was a very big ward even though it had just been split. The third week we were starting to get to know a few people but not very many. I think it was the third week or the fourth. We got a call from Stake President and he needed Jean and to go visit with the President and lo and behold while we were there he called me to be the Bishop of the First Ward. We’d been in the ward less than a month.
I couldn’t believe it. Jean said that she looked at my face when he made that calling and saw the blood drain out of my head and I just went totally white, but I didn’t know if I was gonna accept. I just wasn’t sure I could do that and then he looked at me and said Bishop there are some things I want you to do. As soon as I heard him call me Bishop, I knew that was what I was supposed to do, so I accepted it.
We had a lot of learning to do. It was a big learning curve there because we didn’t know people but it turned out to be really successful. I served there for five years and we made a lot of progress and lot of good things happened and we had one Ward member, named Mark Klotovich, who happened to be on the school board for the Jordan School District. He says, “Rod, I got a job for you. They need somebody to teach physics at Alta High School. I said “I teach geography and geology. I don’t have a physics background.“ He says, “You’ll learn!”
I interviewed with Fred Worlton, who was the principal at the time and he hired me right on the spot. I did teach physics. I learned it while I was teaching, which is a good way to learn things I guess, and also taught some geology and some meteorology. I even did some chemistry classes and a class in aeronautics. I was Advisor to the science club. I ended up teaching there for 16 years and in the evenings, at Salt Lake Community College because of my background as a professor. They wanted me to teach for them there, too. I was hoping it would eventually work into full-time. They wanted me to teach physics, too. Also, I was teaching both high school and college level physics without ever having a class in it myself, but I learned as I went along and we had some good classes. It worked worked out good.
I would teach all day at Alta and then go in the evening, I think three times a week and teach at Salt Lake community college in Taylorsville, but it was good.
We had our house, we were settled. Our kids grew up pretty much in the West Jordan First Ward, our younger ones did anyway, Wendy and Andy. So anyway, then Andy went on a mission and he went to Philadelphia which included parts of New Jersey to Atlantic City. So this was our third son to go on a mission.
Our younger kids both graduated from high school in West Jordan. One went to Bingham high school, that was Andy and then he went to West Jordan High School when they opened it up. It was a new school and Wendy graduated from West Jordan, too. So that’s kinda where our kids grew up.
I actually taught there until I was retirement age at both institutions at Salt Lake Community College and at Alta. Jean worked at the Jordan School District also, first as an office personnel in the school district and then as assistant to the principal in a new school they opened up in Sandy Utah. There we stayed until it was time to retire.
Our daughter Laura and her husband had moved to St. George because he was working for Scott Machinery up in Salt Lake and they built an office in St. George and so they built a home down there and moved to St. George.
And Andy, after he got home from his mission, he got his degree from Utah State University in journalism and he ended up with a job in Cedar City and in St. George working for the newspaper and so with two of our children there, we decided upon retirement that we would move to Southern Utah.
Jean didn’t want to move to St. George because it was too hot. Today is a good example of that, it is 112 degrees today. But our daughter Laura found some brochures describing a place that was building new homes up in Harmony Valley, which is 35 miles from St. George and a higher elevation. Our home we built there was at 5,100 feet elevation so it was a lot cooler.
We built a home there after we retired and stayed for 16 years (we moved down in 1997) and then moved to St George finally in 2013. Jean had contracted a lung disease and had other health problems and we felt that St. George would be a healthier place for her to live and it would be closer to our children and their families.
So in 2013 we moved here to St. George into the home that I’m sitting in. We’ve live here for seven years in this home and Jean because of her lung disease and because of kidney problems also she passed away in 2020.
So we had seven years together in this home and she passed away.
I decided I wanted to stay here in this place and so far I’ve been able to. It’s been four years now since Jean passed away and the kids have taken good care of me. They take me out to eat all the time and they take me when they go places and so on.
Our oldest son Eldon actually two years ago moved down to St. George as well. He worked for the Tabernacle Choir in Salt Lake City and he still does, but he could do his work remotely most of the time and so they moved into a housing area called Green Springs in St. George in Washington City adjacent to St. George down here.
Wendy, our youngest, moved to St. George with her husband who was a city manager for the city of Santa Clara, which again, is a Suburb of St. George and then they transferred up to South Ogden and back down here, so we’ve had her here part of the time but not all the time. Right now she is living in Salt Lake Valley in a place called Daybreak. Most of our family is here and we do associate with all of them.
I served as a bishop of West Jordan First Ward as I mentioned and then when we were in New Harmony, I served as a bishop at the student ward at SUU in Cedar city for three years before we moved down to St. George and then Jean and I worked in the St. George Temple.
St George Temple
We got started because Laura and her husband Ben were working in the Baptistry in the St. George temple. They invited us to join them. And while we were working there, the temple presidency announced that they needed more ordinance workers so we signed up for that, too. So every Friday night we’d go work in the baptistry and we’d go work Saturday night as ordinance workers in the St. George Temple.
We did that until the temple closed for renovations, the big makeover that they did. It took four years, but the temple was closed during those four years and the closest temple was up in Cedar city. But then they announced that they were going to build another temple in Washington County and they did, in an area known as Washington Fields. It’s actually in the city limits of St. George.
Red Cliffs Temple
It was called the Red Cliffs Temple. The St. George Temple reopened six months ago and then the Red Cliffs Temple opened three months ago and I was called to work in the Red Cliffs Temple as the endowment coordinator that’s what I’m doing now — every Saturday night I work in the temple as endowment coordinator.
I can testify that being a family man and having a wonderful righteous wife and good children is the best way to spend your life. I miss my wife. I’ve lived here alone now without her for four years, but I think of her every day and I know someday we’ll be together again. I know we will. And meanwhile the kids are taking good care of me and they keep me from being lonely all the time. They come and go and take me wherever they go and take me out to eat.
We have a weekly luncheon. Eldon and Diane — I work at the Happy Factory in Cedar City every Thursday, I go up, it’s a place that makes toys for children. It’s a volunteer place, a nonprofit, and they send those toys out to hospitals and orphanages and so forth. I work there every Thursday — and Eldon and Diane, on my way home they always send me a text and say meet us at our place or at Culvers or some other place for dinner before I go home.
Andy and his family almost every Sunday have me and other members of our family at their place for dinner and sometimes the dinners are here. Monday night is pizza night. That’s when Andy and Eldon and their wives and sometimes some of their children, we meet and have Pizza, either at somebody’s home or we eat out at someplace. We’ve had pizza here quite a few times lately and it’s really good just to have people around, people that I love.
Meanwhile, Randy and Kay moved here. They not only moved here eight years ago, but they moved in a house that is just down the street from where we live and we’re in the same ward and we enjoy each other as very good friends. Randy and Kay and myself and Jean, before she passed away, even sat in the same pew in church all time. I’m blessed to have good friends, like that and a good family.
I just turned 89 on the 30th of May and I’m slowing down, but I’m still doing it. I’m still doing the Temple, still doing the Happy Factory, still going out with the kids and still doing my other duties and responsibilities. I am happy to be able to do it. I’m just blessed. I have had a blessed life throughout my life many times when I didn’t deserve it. I still receive lots of blessings and I am grateful.
OK this is after a long life, this is my message to my posterity.
Something that has worked for me throughout my life. No matter what happens, stay close to the church. Even when you don’t feel worthy. Even when bad things happen. Stay close to the church and you’re always gonna be happy. You’re always gonna have a home. You’re always gonna be with people who love you and you’re always going to have something to do. You’re always going to have opportunities to give service and to make other people happy so if you, no matter what happens in your life, no matter what you do, stay close to the church, don’t go away from it ever. Like I said, that has really worked for me throughout my life, even in bad times.
I would recommend that to anyone especially those of you who are my family my loved ones and I testify that the church I’m talking about is the Savior’s church, it is the true church of Jesus Christ and the one he established in the meridian of time and the one that he restored through prophecy and revelation in modern times, and this is how I know I will be again sometime and maybe not too long from now I will be again with my beloved wife Jean, because she is waiting for me in the spirit world and we know this through revelation, and I believe this with all my heart. As a matter fact, when I was five years old and I went to primary for the first time, my parents sent me to primary, the first thing I heard, when I went to class, was the Joseph Smith story and I believed that when I was five years old. Now I’m ninety years old and I’ve got a science background got a lot of experience with life and I still believe that story. I know it happened and I testify these things in the name of Jesus Christ. Amen.
Rod Griffin Timeline
| Year | Event |
|---|---|
| 1935 | Born in Salt Lake City |
| 1936 | Family moved to American Fork |
| 1953 | Graduated high school |
| 1954 | Met Jean at Saratoga Springs |
| 1955 | Married in Salt Lake Temple |
| 1965 | Began teaching at Nevada Southern University |
| 1970s | Television weather broadcasting career |
| 1980 | Returned to Utah |
| 1997 | Moved to Southern Utah |
| 2020 | Jean passed away |
| 2024 | Continued temple and service work at age 89 |
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