Posted by:
cludgie
(
)
Date: April 25, 2013 09:16AM
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.