Everything in this story is fiction. All characters were over 18 at all relevant times in the story and no characterization of any person or organization is intended to be taken as true. It just makes the story work.
The events in this story occurred in the early 1970s when I was a college student. I am now in my 70s so everyone involved has either passed on or are so old they won't care. Just in case someone would care, I've used fictitious names including my own. And as for the Church, it's still around and doing fine. Like any church, The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints, (LDS or Mormon as it and its members are commonly referred to) has its strong points and its weak points and the view of which is which varies from individual to individual. But this story isn't about the Church, just some of its members and their values and what I learned from them. The Church is just background. The story is about people and their values. Oh yes, and about my first time! And all that that led too.
My father's parting words of advice when he dropped me off at a dormitory for my first year of college were, "Richard, always use a rubber." That was not the kind of parting advice I expected from my family. In our family the governing value was that sex was not something you did until you were married, and it wasn't just for fun. It was for creating good Mormon babies. There was no reason I could think of why my Father thought he needed to tell me that.
I was born and raised in a small farming and ranching community in Eastern Idaho. My parents weren't ranchers or farmers, but nearly everyone we knew was. We owned a small feed and grain/hardware store. It kept the town supplied with most of what they needed to purchase beyond food (Lavell's IGA and back yard gardens) and major farm equipment and its repair (the John Deere franchise in Idaho Falls). Health care generally required a trip to Idaho Falls (as did beer, for those who chose to partake). Fire protection was a local volunteer force of dubious effectiveness. Law enforcement came from the County Sheriff and District Judge, whose offices were twenty miles away. There was a town council, but they didn't really do much, other than freshly gravel and grade roads in the spring (the only paved roads were owned and maintained by the State of Idaho). The town also had the usual schools, but they were, as in any small town in Utah or Eastern Idaho, more or less a subsidiary of the Church. Most of the religious teaching was in the seminary the Church operated next door to the school but there was nothing taught in the regular school that was going to contradict what was being taught in the seminary. We all knew that the candidates for School Board and Town Council elections were selected and made known in advance by the elders of the Church. Needless to say, no one ran against them.
It wasn't particularly oppressive because the Church provided much of the social structure needed to make a small town function. We were all, or nearly all, members of the Church. We paid our tithes, went to meeting on Sunday, and participated in the committees that ran the numerous religious and social functions. Participation was important. The role of the Church in our lives was not simply delivered on Sundays by a minister reading a text delivered from Salt Lake City. The Church provided a lot of our social structure but it was those of us who lived in the town that manned the committees and even did the preaching on Sundays. There was doctrine and support from Salt Lake, even money if needed for a new roof on the seminary, but the social interface was with your neighbors and fellow members.
For families that fell on hard times the Church was there to help. It was a smooth, frictionless, existence, or at least it appeared so on the surface. Of course if you were one of the few residents who wasn't a member of the Church there was a significant part of the town's social structure that you weren't participating in, but that didn't seem to concern anyone. It didn't apply to anyone I knew.
Like any good church, it was a place where you learned and were regularly reminded of the rules people in the community expected you to live by and we all lived by those rules or at least we conducted ourselves in a fashion that made it apparent to the community as a whole that we lived by those rules. Growing up in my family we didn't call the Church's requirements rules. We called them values.
I had done well in school and the SAT exams so when it came time to go off to college, a choice not open to discussion in my family, I applied to several major out of state universities. I guess I wasn't as smart as I thought I was because I was only accepted by two, Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah and UC Berkeley. Of course I had the option of going to Idaho State. That was the normal next step for successful kids from a farm town like ours but I was determined to avoid another four years of 'advanced high school' as I called it. It was the early 1970s and my parents viewed Berkeley as something like a modern-day Sodom and Gomorrah. BYU was the principal major university sponsored and run by the Church so my parents said I would be surrounded there by people who shared the values I was raised with, as opposed to the ungodly and wild culture of Berkeley that we saw on the evening news. So my choices were BYU or going to work on my Uncle Lou's cattle ranch. I figured I knew all I needed to know about riding and roping, mending fence, castrating and branding cattle, and loading bales of hay on and off a flatbed truck, so in the fall of 1972 my Dad and I loaded a few belongings in the back of the family pick-up and drove down to Provo, Utah where he dropped me off at the dormitory I was to live in that year.
I learned a lot of useful things while in college and graduate school, both at BYU and later at Berkeley. But perhaps one of the most useful was that people are often not what they seem. By that I mean that the values they profess, what they tell you they believe is right and wrong, are not always consistent with the values they use to guide their conduct, especially when it comes to sex. Based on his parting words of advice my Father apparently thought my value system on the subject of sex was perhaps not quite as solid as I professed it to be, or at least there was a risk of that. If I had thought about it for a bit I might have even asked myself whether he shared the values taught by the Church. But I had just been released into a new world so I didn't spend time asking myself any questions about my Dad's advice, much less his values. I simply responded, "Yeah Dad. No problem," and watched him drive away.
Of course Dad's concern was not unfounded. Like almost any other 19-year-old male in the country my key sex value was, what do I have to do to get laid? I knew what I wanted and it didn't mesh with the values I had been raised with. But it wasn't the inconsistency that bothered me. The problem was how unsuccessful I was at getting laid--still a virgin. It's not that I hadn't tried. Like any high school kid I had done my best to pursue the girls I went to school with. My conclusion was that they took the preaching of the Church to heart. I could get them to neck with me, but any time I tried to get beyond smooching they shut me down. I got quite good at kissing, but no further.
You need to understand that bad as I wanted to get laid, I had the good sense to recognize that there were other priorities to be achieved when I first moved into college. Within my first week on campus I settled into my dorm and met the rest of the guys on my floor (a couple of jocks, a farm kid or two like me, one or two Mormons sent there by their parents from out of state, and a bunch of guys from Salt Lake City); met with a counselor; signed up for my classes; opened a bank account with a local bank; and found a job washing dishes in the dorm kitchen (Dad was willing to pay the tuition, but he still me expected me to work. Work was a core value in our family). I also checked in with the campus ward of the LDS Church, another core value in our family.
It was a busy week but it didn't prevent me from noticing that there were a lot of very attractive women on the campus, far beyond anything I had ever seen in high school. That's not to say that I got dates with any of them or even met them and learned their names, but that could be addressed later after I completed all the other chores associated with my arrival on campus.
It was the early 1970s but this was BYU so the girls weren't wandering around braless in loose fitting T-shirts like I had been led to believe they did in California. The dress was stylish and conservative, skirts down to or below the knee, low heeled or flat soled shoes (made from nicely finished leather, not canvas), blouses or sweaters that showed no cleavage, but still did little to really disguise the wearer's endowment. Hair was carefully trimmed, permed, and manicured and makeup was carefully applied. Overall the effect was stunning, not lewd as I was led to believe it would have been in California, but it was clear that the girls were attractive and anxious to exhibit their assets.
Of course our dormitory wasn't coed like I had heard they were in Berkeley, so I had to rely on my classes as a place to meet girls. But I'm a gregarious type so that worked reasonably well and within a week or so I was on nodding terms with a number of girls and on first name terms with a few. In some ways it was like high school. The girls tended to clump together and if you paid attention you could kind of tell who was the queen bee of any given group. Of course you didn't want to just walk up to a group and try to enter the conversation. That was too bold and would make them uncomfortable. There were other ways, like asking a girl you were walking alongside as you left class about some part of the lecture that was unclear (or at least you claimed was unclear).
There was a girl named Sandra Olsen that I met that way, a queen bee of her little clique. With a little effort I established a regular practice of having a brief discussion of each lecture with her on our way out of class. It was more her asking me questions than the way I started it. After all it was Calculus and math was my strong suit. Sandra was a beauty--about five and a half feet tall with lovely legs (to the extent I could see them below her knee length dress), nicely rounded hips, a narrow waist, and ample breasts always covered by her sweater or blouse, but far from hidden. And once I got above her neck I couldn't help but notice her creamy skin, easy smile, and sparkling blue eyes. Her thick, dark brown, hair was cut reasonably short ending just above her shoulders. And when I was explaining some arcane aspect of basic calculus she had this way of focusing her eyes solely on me as I spoke. I told myself it was the calculus, but I hoped it was me that had her attention riveted.
After a couple of weeks of post lecture calculus tutoring I worked up the courage to ask her for a date and to my surprise she said yes. Now in most colleges in those days a first date might well be a coffee date, but not at BYU. There was no place on the campus, and in those days to my knowledge probably no place in Provo, that you could get a cup of coffee. Abstinence from stimulants of all manner was one of the values taught by the Church and coffee seemed to be the posterchild for a stimulus to be avoided. None of this came as a surprise to me. I did what a lot of good Mormon boys did for a get acquainted date. I took her out for ice cream. There was an ice cream bar in the Student Center.
The date went well and according to form for first dates at BYU. She learned about my background: growing up in a small farming and ranching community; that I had played football in high school (Six-man teams. That's what you do in small towns); that I planned to major in Engineering or Math; and that I didn't really want to go back to my hometown after graduation; that I liked the Beatles, the Rolling Stones; Fleetwood Mac; and the Grateful Dead.
I learned that she was from Salt Lake City where her father was a banker and her mother was a homemaker (naturally in a Mormon community) but also sold real estate on the side now that Sandra and her brother were grown. She hadn't decided on a major, but it might be art history. She had danced in high school but her family was discouraging her from pursuing it further--not really a proper activity for a young Mormon girl and totally unnecessary for a Mormon woman raising a family.
We talked about our favorite movie stars (hers) and sports teams (mine) and what we thought about the professors we had for the two classes we had in common (Calculus and English Literature). Sandra was just starting her Sophomore Year and was taking Calculus because she needed a math credit and I was taking English Literature because I needed an English credit, not that I had a clue then why an engineer should study English. She said she would likely go back to Salt Lake City when she graduated but hadn't given it much thought. I told her I planned to go on to graduate school to study engineering or perhaps mathematics.
It was a very typical first date and afterward I walked her back to the dorm where I kissed her, a peck on the cheek, at the door and she hugged me, a fuller and tighter hug than I expected.
