The Missionary
Side of
George Romney
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Keep an eye on Michigan's new governor: he's pursuing
politics with the same zeal that made him
a wizard of industry and a leader of the Mormon Church
By MARYA SAUNDERS and BOB GAINES
A surly crowd jostled about in the
street below Edinburgh's grim
castle that spring day in 1927. The
center of their attention was a grinning
Scottish heckler and his prey, a young
Mormon street preacher from America
named George Wilcken Romney.
The heckler was moving in for the kill. "Hey,
Yank, what do you mean here?" he barked as he
waved one of the pamphlets the youth had given
out explaining his Church of Latter-Day Saints.
"It says Christ was born 'of Jerusalem,' and every
bloke knows Christ was born in Bethlehem."
The question caught young Romney unpre
pared. As he fumbled for an answer, the heckler,
an old hand at baiting street-corner preachers,
shouted: "The Yank who wrote this book was
pretty cockeyed." The crowd laughed. The young
missionary clenched his fists and tried to reply,
but the heckler snapped a rude remark about
Mormon polygamy and swaggered oft to attack
another street speaker. The crowd moved on.
Romney's face was grim. "What right do I
have to preach if I can't answer questions about
my religion?" he said to a companion.
The rest of the afternoon and evening, the dis
traught young man sat in the city library search
ing for an answer to the heckler's question. Final
ly, he discovered "of" meant "close to" and that
Jerusalem was about three miles from Bethlehem.
When the library closed, he withdrew all the
books he could on religion and took them to his
lodgings. "In a few weeks, the Edinburgh heck
lers realized there weren't many questions they
could stump me on," George Romney recalled re
cently. "I was ready to outtalk anyone." '
This booming confidence in his ability to out
talk or outsell anybody on something he believes
in has carried Romney a long way. He took over
American Motors, which lost $19 million in 1956.
and lifted its earnings to $60 million three years
later. As Michigan's recent Republican guberna
torial candidate, he ran a whirlwind campaign
which ended 14 years of Democratic rule in the
state and shot his name into the limelight as one
of the most exciting new figures in politics.
H Acts to Srv Qod and Society
To understand Romney, you must begin with
his religion. He handles problems in the Mormon
way, which he calls "prayerful consideration."
Before deciding to run for governor in 1962, he
studied all sides of the problem, then fasted and
prayed for 24 hours. When he emerged from his
room, he announced to his wife: "I've decided.
I'm going to be governor of Michigan."
Such an announcement could seem presumptu
ous; but there is in Romney a humility and burn
ing missionary zeal to serve both his God and
society which demands respect, if for no other
reason than that it gets results.
George was born July 8, 1907, in Mexico in a
Mormon colony that had been established there
after the United States declared polygamy illegal
in 1885. His grandfather had several wives (by
whom he had 30 children) and so was forced to
flee into Mexico to avoid imprisonment The
Mormon Church banned plural marriages in
1890, and George's father, a carpenter, confined
himself to one wife, who gave him seven children.
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