Jim has asked me to write about the Fuller connection to my conversion story.  I first became acquainted with him in Don Hunt's French class in the 8th grade.  Jim became my best friend in high school.  He and I did many things together.  He came out to my farm at Haines, but I was more often at his house on 17th Street.  I became well acquainted with both Grandma Tanner, and with Grandma Burris, who lived in the house next door.

Jim invited me to go with him to church one Sunday.  I sat in the congregation while he sat at the sacrament table and blessed the sacrament.  I was impressed as well as dismayed.  "I could never join this church," I thought to myself, "because I could never in my life do what he's doing!"

Jim and I were invited to go to a party to be held at Narn Reagan's cabin at McEwen, on the way to Sumpter.  Narn's best friend was Marjorie Hunt.  Jim drove us to the party.  Margie brought her ukelele along.  She played and sang all the way back to town.  It was the most beautiful thing I'd ever heard.  Jim had introduced her to me earlier, but it was probably that night that I fell in love with her.  That ukelele went along with us on our honeymoon five years later where Marjorie taught me how to sing and to harmonize with her.  We've been harmonizing ever since, and the ukelele is still one of our most prized possessions.

The kids that I gravitated to in high school were all LDS.  They were Jim's circle of acquaintances from church and seminary.  I remember thinking that if religion ever became important to me that I would first look at their church, because they were the most Christian people that I knew.

I went off to Oregon State University after high school.  I was an honor student, but as I began my sophomore year I was so depressed that I was unable to open a book.  Not once did I do so.  On the last day possible to drop classes without penalty I withdrew from school and headed home.  I had hit rock bottom.  In desperation, and in the privacy of the car as I crossed the state of Oregon from west to east, I cried out for help.  I didn't know if there was a God in heaven or not, but I was in desperate straits.  I had never prayed before; but this first-ever prayer was out loud, and lasted all the way from the summit of the Cascade Mountains to the western border of Baker County.  A brilliant rainbow appeared just after I began the prayer and stayed just ahead of me in a gentle rain, never once dimming, for what must have been four hours.  My prayer and the rain and the rainbow lasted clear across central Oregon.  When I reached the area of Unity Reservoir it suddenly began raining heavily, and I caught the rainbow!  If the window had been open, I could have put my hand out in it.  A voice said, "Everything is going to be all right."  I was so shocked that I pulled off the road and shook and trembled.  I realized that the rainbow was leaving me, so I quickly pulled back onto the road, but the message had been delivered, and the rainbow was gone.

Two weeks later Marjorie gave me a Book of Mormon.  I hadn't opened a book in months, but I couldn't put this one down.  I could feel light coming into my head as I'd read.  The light pushed the darkness to the back of my head until it exited completely.

Jim was on his mission.  I wrote several letters to him telling him what was happening to me.

Quitting college caused me to lose my draft deferment.  To keep from being drafted into the Army, and to keep from being sent to Vietnam where I'd be killed, I joined the U.S. Navy.  Marjorie and I married in the Salt Lake Temple 15 months before I was discharged.  We came back to Baker where we became members of the Baker Second Ward, of which Dennis Fuller was bishop.

One day Bishop Fuller called me into his office.  I had previously held numerous callings in the branches of the Church where I'd been serving in the Navy.  It was obvious that Bishop Fuller was going to issue a calling to me.  Rather unworthily I said to him, "Bishop, you can't call me to a position that I haven't already held."

Bishop Fuller simply smiled sweetly, and called me to be ward chorister.  I was dumbfounded.  I wouldn't have been more shocked if he had called me to be Relief Society president.  I didn't know a thing about leading music.  All that I had going for me was that I could carry a tune, and that I had a musical wife.  That was by far the scariest calling I've ever received in my life.  I spent the next two weeks sitting on the piano bench beside my wife as she played the piano and I led music.  I'm more grateful for that calling than for any other that I've ever received.  Later, in area meetings of stake presidencies, it was my hand that went up when a volunteer was needed to lead the music.  I also became the official chorister in preparation meetings for ordinance workers in two temples.

Bishop Fuller also called me to be ward financial clerk.  He had been doing the job himself.  He opened the tithing envelopes with me that first Sunday, showed me how to balance the checkbook, and if things didn't jibe, showed me how to subtract my balance from the bank's balance so that the error would stand out.  Then he turned me loose with the job.  He told me that he'd occasionally open envelopes with me again, but he never did.

I was his bishop when he and Betty submitted their missionary application, so I guess you could say that I called them on their mission.

I got to conduct Grandma Burris' funeral, and to be the speaker.

I was Annie Tanner's bishop as she lay in the Cedar Manor rest home.  She could neither see, hear, nor walk.  I visited her there.  I put my mouth down by her ear and shouted, "Annie, what do you do all day while you're lying here?"

"Well, after breakfast I recite all the poetry that I know, and then I sing all the hymns that I can remember.  That takes about two hours, and then I just lie here."

Sadly, I was at a week-long Scout encampment when Annie died, so I missed being able to do her funeral.

I'm grateful for the Fuller family, and especially for my lifelong friendship with Jim.