Heber Jedediah Grant, seventh president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints
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Big Mormon names appear on the boards of practically every important enterprise in Utah, but none more often than that of Heber Jedediah Grant. Born 73 years ago in Salt Lake City, he is the first native of Utah to lead his Church (the senior of the Twelve Apostles, high church council, is always chosen President). In 1918 he succeeded Joseph F. Smith, nephew of Founder-Prophet Joseph. President Grant's father died when his son was nine. The boy played smart baseball, developed a florid script di which he is still proud, worked at journalism until he ran the paper (the late Salt Lake Herald), organized insurance companies, banks. Meanwhile, in 1877, he married Lucy Stringham. Seven years later, on May 26, he espoused Augusta Winters and, on May 27, Emily Wells. The last is the only one of his three wives now alive. In 1882 a startling businessman, aged 25, he was chosen one of the Twelve Apostles. During 1901-03 he lived in Japan as a Mormon missionary, then served two years as head of missionary activity in Europe.
Tall, bewhiskered, graced with patriarchal kindness and authority, he is, as divinely authorized President, Prophet, Seer and Revelator of the Latter-day Saints, responsible to no one for his administration of L. D. S. affairs. Two other high priests or Presidents constitute with him the First Presidency or governing triumvirate of the Church: Anthony W. Ivins. Charles Wilson Nibley. Both are potent Salt Lake City financiers, board members. Next are the Twelve Apostles, most famed of whom is U. S. Senator Reed Smoot, chairman of the Senate Finance Committee, devout Mormon and second in line for the Mormon Presidency (TIME, April 8, 1929). Next are the Presiding Patriarch (head evangelist), the First Quorum of Seventy (foreign ministry), the Presiding Bishopric (temporal affairs), the Standing Ministry (high priests, seventies, elders, priests, teachers, deacons).
A Mormon diocese, called a stake, includes men of varying degrees of priesthood. All worthy male Mormons belong to the priesthood. And each and every one is a Latter-day Saint. Able Saints not already mentioned: Apostle George Albert Smith, past president of the International Irrigation Congress; Apostle James Edward Talmadge, famed geologist, onetime President of the University of Utah; Apostle John Andreas Widtsoe, irrigation expert, member of the Boulder Dam fact-finding committee of which Herbert Clark Hoover was chairman; U. S. Senator William Henry King of Utah; James Henry Moyle, Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Wilson Administration; Edgar Bernard Brossard, U. S. Tariff Commissioner; Heber Manning Wells, treasurer of U. S. Shipping Board Merchant Fleet Corp.; Joshua Reuben Clark, Jr., Undersecretary of State under Calvin Coolidge; Dr. Harvey Fletcher, famed acoustics' expert (Bell Telephone laboratories).
* By Mormons a Jew, or any other non-Mormon, is called a Gentile.