Bill McKeever.

Not exactly a missionary, not exactly not a missionary. Not exactly crazy, but it was crazy to be a missionary and meet him.

Crazy missionary experience.

What was the question?..

All the guys I knew who met him reported back that he was a nice guy. What year were you in the San Diego Mission. I was there 97-98 under Boyden, though I got sent home early for fighting with a companion.

BTW, if you were there the same time I was, then there is a good chance that I was the crazy elder.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/24/2013 06:19PM by forbiddencokedrinker.

2003-2005 - Olsen, little bit of Packer

McKeever seems like a nice guy on youtube. He wasn't very nice to me at all. But of course back then I would have been projecting a lot of anti-mormon stereotypes onto him so perhaps he was nicer than I thought..

He pulled up to a couple of my buddies. Told them his name was Bill, and asked if they wanted lunch. Took them to a nearby restaurant, fed them, asked them where they were from, then told them his full name. He then asked them if they could pass onto their mission president that he would like the missionaries to stop telling people he was just a bitter ex-mormon, because he had never been a member of the church. (This was a rumor in the mission)

But he came out when he was 20 years old and I was his first companion. When he got excited, he'd get a bloody nose. That includes sexual excitement.

Sometimes we'd see some sexy girls and he would bust up laughing uncontrollably, sit on the sidewalk, and get a bloody nose. This happened quite a few times. It was hilarious and strange.

One day we had a heart-to-heart about why he came out late on his mission. He told me he had to wait a year because he got arrested for stalking women!!!

I don't know if that deserves an "LOL" or a "holy crap!" or some mixture of the two.

Called a hanaji in Japanese--and this response (i.e., a bloody nose) to sexual excitement is very iconic in Japan (particularly in anime). The street hand gesture (which is probably not really that common in today's era) is a quick drop of the hand from the nose (middle and pointer finger pointing loosely to the nose). That's pretty funny that this actually happened. I've never heard of it before.

I was in Central America. A rich section. So there were lots of beautiful women.

He was from a tiny farm town in southern Utah. The youngest of 16 children born late in his parents thirties. I was thinking there was some sticky chromosome splitting in the donor egg and sperm because, well... he wasn't in need of baptism was my final conclusion because he just wasn't all there.

Would only communicate in the mission language which he really didn't know. But we were assigned to teach US military members at the time. OK, he would speak to members and investigators in English, but not me or any other missionary.

Would stare at his hand for hours at a time while ostensibly studying the scriptures. Move it closer to his eyes and away. Again. Pry his eye open a little further with his other hand and repeat. Would zone out this way in discusssions, on trains, in cars, on the street, in church.

I saw him starting to zone in a discussion once and tried to turn the discussion over to him to bring him back to NOW. Didn't work. He repeated what I had said for the last few minutes word for word instead. We never talked to that investigator again, though we shared some odd freaked out eye contact during my companion's echo discourse.

Ate a pound of moldy bread because he wouldn't throw it away and waste it. Would lick the frying pan after I cooked in it. Licked out the honey tub that came with his chicken nuggets at McDonalds one day. Dinner appointments became scarcer with him...

I had to teach him to use deodorant.

He got pulled in to the security office of a major store on suspicion of shoplifting because he had such strange behaviors.

Had no sense of direction or internal map. He couldn't figure out how to get anywhere in a city. If you got ahead of him and turned a corner, he was lost. He was an inobservant driver. I got him trained so if I stamped my foot, he would hit the brakes knowing he had missed something and we were about to crash. This in heavy European traffic. My license was invalid for a few weeks and he had to drive everywhere those weeks. We never did crash.

He never did figure out how to get from our apartment to the church in the time I was with him.

I begged for a transfer starting at week two in my weekly letter to the president, but had to spend two months with the guy.

One day he just picked me up, threw me over his shoulder and started doing wresting spins and moves from pro wrestling. This was in the pedestrian zone of a major city. I was way outclassed in size and strength. Performed random "martial arts" moves on me. I have a few scars still from kicks and things.

He had been on his mission about 16 months at this point.

Apparently he was good at ping pong as I was informed by the elder who got him after me. They had a ping pong table at that apartment.

I am laughing my ass off!

Sounds like he was autistic.

Could be. He was't safe for himself or the average missionary to handle.

I was thinking he sounded ID.

My thoughts, exactly!

Had a zone leader that ended up getting residential psych treatment that started with him kneeling with his arm to the square and invited evil spirits into his flat, and then practicing his use of the Holy Melch Priesthood to cast out the evil spirit. I was a fellow zone leader and was part of the emergency midnight transfer that happened when he suffered his breakdown.

Dh went on a mission in California back in the 80's. One of the guys in his area seemed to have a alternate ego. He had 2 missionary name tags. He said he worked as an undercover police agent before his mission. And he wasn't an 'older' missionary. On PDays he'd dress like Don Johnson in pink shirt and white pants. Maybe even the sunglasses, but dh isn't sure about this!

Most of all it was confusing to investigators because he went by different names. One day he'd be wearing a name tag Elder B.... and other days he went by Elder C...

And then there was Cool Elder Lester. He had to tract in the mall and the college campuses. He wore sunglasses.

Then there was the 'inactive' missionary. He skipped church on Sundays and went to play basketball down on the streets. You could do that there because mishies covered 3 wards, so if you weren't at 1 ward, you could be at one of the others.


And then there was the one who played piano at baptisms. He'd play rock music- like Stairway To Heaven- really slowly as prelude music.

'And then there was the one who played piano at baptisms. He'd play rock music- like Stairway To Heaven- really slowly as prelude music.'

That is cool. I bet Boyd KKK would not have noticed should he have lowered himself to be around the unwashed masses.

One of the mishies that converted my mom when I was a kid was (is, they are still in contact) a strange duck. I'll call him "Elder Strange."

A few years ago his companion (who we are also still family friends with) told us that one night he woke up and Elder Strange wasn't in his bed. And he heard something in the other room.

He crept out and saw Elder strange sitting on the floor with two lit candles singing 1980's pop love songs to a picture of his girlfriend.

My mom invited the local mishies over for Christmas Eve a few years ago. Trying to make non-church-related small talk I asked them what their plans were when they got back from their missions. One did the typical college, marriage, white collar job answer. The other (a southern kid with a thick accent) tolm me about how is goal in life was to breed pitbulls. He was really into it. Talked about it for almost an hour. Not once mentioned school or marriage or anything TBM. It was by far my favorite mishie convo.

Guy by the name of Ahlstrom. He couldn't eat sugar... Like any. If he did he would wig out and do crazy crap.

To give you an example, one time we were riding to an appointment when I looked behind me and saw him riding the other way full speed.
Finally caught up to him at a Carls Jr where he had ditched his bike on the grass outside, ran into the bathroom, went into a stall and curled up in the fetal position and started sobbing.

I called the Mission Office from a pay phone outside to basically file my list of grievances for the week and ask for some "WTF do I do now?" guidance.

I was told to lock up the bikes, order something to eat, get my companion something as well (no sugar) and to call back once I'd gotten him out of the bathroom.

Dude was a menace. It was a lot of babysitting and very little missionary work.

Dude, I might know that Ahlstrom guy. Where/when did you and him serve? Was he from Cali, by chance?



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 04/25/2013 02:14AM by jackamormon.

I was companions with emotionally distraught people, violent individuals, insecure bullies, and caring, loving, compassionate, creative, and fun people. We were all nuts for being on missions. I feel a few of us are less crazy now since leaving the morg.

Dude by the name of Peck from a small town in Idaho. The guy was a walking Darwin Award waiting to happen. He had already almost 3 accidental deaths.

First when he was a kid he took the spiral wire out of his spiral notebook and put it in his mouth to make a comical smile but it sproinged the wrong way down his throat and nearly killed him.

Second he and his sister were riding bikes and collided with each other and her teeth cut his forehead. That went untreated and caused a near fatal infection.

The last one was more his Dad's fault as they were treating the floor of a car repair garage with a chemical sealant but also decided to use an electric heater because it was winter. You guessed it, it caused a small billowing vapor explosion in the garage that once again was almost fatal. He survived somehow with minimal burns. This guy drove me nuts with his clear lack of common sense and intelligence for 3 months.

My dad is very accident prone like that kid! He lit himself on fire with a blow torch while he was re-shingling our roof!

My companions (save my trainer) were very masculine and one has come out, incidentally she was a favorite because she was cool and we sang Sarah McClauglin songs as we biked. As for weird how about the psycho bitch who would ride her bike a half mile ahead of me show up for zone meetings without me and hid in a member girls shower pretending she wasn't there yet and making me cry. On another occasion she told me how easy it would be for her to kill me and no one would ever know, it was shortly after that I packed my bags and ran away, I did get caught and brought back and they finally transferred me.

My craziest companion kept all of the mission rules. All. of. Them. To a T. We were never back into our apartment before 9:00 at night or after 9:00 at night. We had to walk through the door at exactly 9:00 every night. Or else we weren't being obedient. THis meant sometimes knocking on an apartment door in our building if we happened to get there too early. Our lunch hours were exactly 1 hour long. When he taught a discussion, he wouldn't react to any questions the investigator had. He would just ignore them and keep going on with the lesson. This was in the day when you had to memorize the discussions word for word. I learned later on that he had a nervous breakdown and had to go home early.

This is why people in "happy valley" are all on antidepressants because perfection is impossible!

It will make you miserable trying.

The mission was afraid of losing the leases, so you were never to harass, I mean proselytize, your neighbors.

I guess it was the expression: don't crap where you eat.

One comp I got along with very well for a week or two until I discovered he was a compulsive liar. Everything he said, particularly about another person, had to be verified. He loved gossip and spreading false rumors. He loved to break the rules, but then he would feel bad and make amends by turning someone else in for breaking the rules. He would get sanctimonious about the rules, and then when you pointed out his hypocrisy he would get angry.

He once punched me for pointing this out. I would have told my mission president, but it didn't hurt at all. I'm not a big guy by any means and his attack was more pathetic than painful. I just laughed at him, ducked his next swing, and walked into the other room. I told him that if he ever pulled another stunt I was telling the MP that he punched me and would tell him every other rule he broke. He pretty much left me alone.

The last week of my mission, I found out he had spread false rumors about me. He told people that I had confessed to sleeping with another male missionary that he despised. Even though I am gay, I never had sex on my mission. It made me wonder how many other missionaries thought that I was sinning with my companions.

Elder P used to take egg yolk and smear it on his pancakes. No big deal, everybody has a few peculiar eating habits. Except he used to mock me in front of members and investigators for what I put on my pancakes, maple syrup.

Did his parents keep him sequestered at all times in their house? How the hell did he not know about pancakes & maple syrup?

Lugano, Switzerland, 1969: An elder came in from Ephraim, Utah. I'd known him in Italian language training (at Allen Hall near BYU). He was a very tall, owl-eyed geek, who was just plain weird and very preachy. No one wanted to be with him, so they were always assigning him with me for "greeny tracting," where two new guys would be on their own. The other elders always got a good laugh out of it and loved to torment me with him.

We lived out of town and commuted by train. The train station is at the top of a hill overlooking the city, and there is a funicular that you have to take down to the city so that you can catch the buses. There is a magazine kiosk at the bottom station of the funicular, and it carries international magazines, including Stern, the German weekly, which in this case had a naked woman on the cover (not unusual for Stern). He was outraged, walked over to the kiosk and pulled all the copies off the rack and with "righteous indignation" then threw them on the track. Naturally, the kiosk owner came unglued, too, and people were shocked. I clambered down on the tracks, gathered them all up, shuffled them nicely, and put them on the rack and apologized. I grabbed him by the upper arm and hustled him away.

Once on the train he asked me if I had a girlfriend and maybe had a picture of her. I said yes, and took the picture out. That confirmed that I was carrying a picture of a girl, which he thought was wrong, so he grabbed it from me and began to pull the window down on the train to throw the picture out. I had to push him down and restrain him in order to get my picture back.

In the end he was transferred to Trieste. The DL, who had come to Lugano from Trieste, Italy, gave him the elders' telephone number, and instructions on how to walk from the station to the apartment, which was only a couple of blocks away down the same street. The elder was petrified, so he told him, "Know what? Just take a taxi." We saw him off at the train station, and left. Three days later we got a telegram (Yes! A telegram!) from him that read, "AT TRIESTE TRAIN STATION STOP LOST STOP." He'd apparently been so worked up that he never left the station. We just howled. In the evening the DL felt badly and called the elders so they could go fetch him. For me it was a priceless moment.

I was probably the crazy missionary in most of my companionships. I was one of those kids that developed a coupe years behind everyone else emotionally. Had I waited a few more years to go out on my mission, things would have been a lot easier for everyone.

I am not going to get into everything I did wrong, both because it is embarrassing, and because most of it was only a problem, because the mission made my condition a lot worse. I actually would have probably done very well if I had been living in a dorm, going to college at one of the big universities they had in my mission, but all the rules that missions have made it much harder for me to cope with my problems.

I eventually got sent home for fighting. What happened, was that I snored, and my companion was trying to drag my mattress, with me on it, into the next room. The church was so cheep, that they gave us cheap flimsy mattresses to sleep on and no bed. I flipped out, had a panic attack, wasn't thinking clearly, and next thing I know, we were fighting. Other guy was actually a nice guy, and we got along pretty good most of the time, but I wasn't right in the head just then.

Everything would have been okay, but a District Leader was over on a split, calls the mission president, the zone leaders come over, and I have a complete emotional breakdown. Next thing I know, my Dad is flying in, because they don't trust me to travel alone, and I am going home. There was a two day delay from my Dad flying in, and when we could leave, so I got to actually go on a tour of my mission, and see all the fun touristy stuff, including a big floating museum on board a big old sailing ship that was technically off limits, but my Dad didn't care, and knew how to explain things to me so it wouldn't bother me.