Reflections on the ?????Apology Letter?????

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

I must admit that I came to detest the name Kilmer, and hence that poem, when I was snatched from the dreadful experience of undergoing "basic training" at Fort Ord in California, which I was able to discover was not far from a community that very much reminded me of New Zealand, and after visiting that neck of the woods. Well, I did Clerk Typist school, which I very much enjoyed. Then I was flown to somewhere near the infamous Camp Kilmer just after Christmas to wait to board a blood "Troop Ship" headed from Bremerhaven in northern Germany.

...

All this just to indicate that I have wild memories of Camp Kilmer. Two of us escaped that place very early one morning and spent the day in NYC, and took a bus that went right to the gate, and had an MP board and ask for our passes. He got to the two sitting right in front of me and my friend, and then gave up checking. My friend and I figured that either an MP would just ignore our not having passes, or that his officer would ignore it, rather than fill out papers, since it was not at all likely that they would have held a court, since the next day we were to board that Troop Ship. So the next day we were out of Camp Kilmer, but I can't get that poem out of my head.

I'll just note that Professor Louis C. Midgley put on record he was AWOL at one point. It appears he was a clerk and a typist, which makes the story above about 'writing' a manual and some other documents come into focus. He was basically a secretary claiming to be a master strategist and CEO.

Not looking good for The Midge.

- Doc

[_Lemmie]

I must admit that I came to detest the name Kilmer, and hence that poem, when I was snatched from the dreadful experience of undergoing "basic training" at Fort Ord in California, which I was able to discover was not far from a community that very much reminded me of New Zealand, and after visiting that neck of the woods. Well, I did Clerk Typist school, which I very much enjoyed. Then I was flown to somewhere near the infamous Camp Kilmer just after Christmas to wait to board a blood "Troop Ship" headed from Bremerhaven in northern Germany.

...

All this just to indicate that I have wild memories of Camp Kilmer. Two of us escaped that place very early one morning and spent the day in NYC, and took a bus that went right to the gate, and had an MP board and ask for our passes. He got to the two sitting right in front of me and my friend, and then gave up checking. My friend and I figured that either an MP would just ignore our not having passes, or that his officer would ignore it, rather than fill out papers, since it was not at all likely that they would have held a court, since the next day we were to board that Troop Ship. So the next day we were out of Camp Kilmer, but I can't get that poem out of my head.

I'll just note that Professor Louis C. Midgley put on record he was AWOL at one point. It appears he was a clerk and a typist, which makes the story above about 'writing' a manual and some other documents come into focus. He was basically a secretary claiming to be a master strategist and CEO.

Not looking good for The Midge.

- Doc

He was then transferred to the Dental Corp? Don’t you have to be a dentist for that?

[_Doctor CamNC4Me]

Nah, there are all sorts of support personnel assigned to support any given unit.

So far we have him assigned to a transportation unit, a dental command, and possibly a third unit where a security clearance was required. <- That one is questionable because of his U2 intel claims.

Whatever the case may be, I can’t work out where he fit an enlistment into his life from 1950 - 1959 unless he somehow accelerated his academic ‘training’. Also, some of his military experiences appear to be outright fabrications.

- Doc

[_Gadianton]

unless he somehow accelerated his academic ‘training’.

I don't know how much this helps the timeline, but lets remember by his own account, his Phd is questionable. According to him, the administration was gobsmacked over his testimony and his missionary experiences, and was afforded an arrange of favors, including skipping multiple courses required for graduation and allowed his mission experiences to suffice as credit for the political science courses.

[Guest]

Tompkins Barracks and the US Army headquarters were just outside Heidelberg, deep in southwestern Germany. It would have been a long trip by car for Russian agents coming from "eastern Europe". And if would have been awfully strange to mount a noisy and obvious attack in order to steal codes. Once your enemy even suspects you've got their codes, they change their codes, so you only learn how to decode their old messages. You don't send agents to die for history like that; the point of stealing codes is to do it without the enemy realizing, so that they keep on using the same codes that you can now read. So you might conceivably sneak in and out with a camera, but you definitely don't blow a hole in the wall and sit there transmitting the codebooks over radio until you get shot.

And of course an assault on US Army headquarters with explosives and Russian agents shooting American soldiers at an American base in southwest Germany in the 1950s would have been front-page news all over the world. Even if it could have been hushed up, why would anyone have wanted to hush it up?

What we learn from Midgley's story about the great Russian attack is that back in the 1950's Midgley was the kind of guy to whom other soldiers told absurd stories—and he believed them.

I think it is plausible that an army clerk might have been assigned to type up drafts of documents that were later classified—not compose them. And dental units do need clerks. I'm a little more skeptical that a clerk would have had his own jeep to drive. Driving a jeep is normally a job in itself, and you don't drive yourself around—you're somebody's driver. But Midgley might well have ridden in jeeps a few times.

His timeline needs him to squeeze college, mission, and military service all into the 1950s. That's a busy decade but I think it could be just feasible.

[_Tom]

Dr. Midgley:

Dan is right in stressing that others, who despise the Church of Jesus Christ, are busy fashioning a false narrative about the Maxwell Institute. Part of this is that they want to claim that what was published in the Review of Books on the Book of Mormon, that soon morphed into the FARMS Review, was strongly disliked by the Brethren, and hence they eventually had Dan fired as its editor.

The fact is that the firing of Professor Peterson was the work of M. Gerald (Jerry Bradford), and three employees whose names are Morgan Davis, Carl Griffin, and Kristian Heal. For six months I was aware that something nasty was taking place. My diary reminds me that I had decided to cease my volunteer efforts at the Maxwell Institute. My wife ordered me not to resign.

Eventually Morgan Davis had a way of getting to John Dehlin and alerting him to the fact that we were about to publish an essay by Greg Smith exposing Dehlin's violent hostility to his former faith. Dehlin made a huge fuss, and Bradford brought that to Cecil Samuelson's attention, and urged him to order Dan not to publish it, in the hope that Dan would resign. Instead, Dan agreed not to publish it. So Bradford fired Dan by email, while he was in Jerusalem.

I had the memo from Samuelson in my hands long enough to copy it into my diary. What Samuelson said was that he did not agree with, support or approve of anything that Dehlin has said or done. but that he thought that the Brethren wanted to deal with Dehlin in their own time and way. What Samuelson did not know is that I had Greg's essay referred by the secretary of the Strengthening the Faith Committee, who had previously taught courses in religion at BYU, and by those Brethren then assigned to that committee. (I was immediately asked if I would approve having Greg's essays among other Seventy. At the same time both Dan and I provided a copies of Greg's essay to Elder Bruce Porter, who was then in charge of meetings of the Twelve Apostles and those Seventy currently assigned in Salt Lake. Bruce was previously a member of my department at BYU, and Dan's close friend. Bruce had very close contact with the Brethren, so at least some of them were aware of Greg's essay on John Dehlin.

What we heard back from both of these efforts to know if we should publish Greg's Smith's essay is that it was far too long, but no one could figure out what to cut. With all this in mind, I urge everyone to read again Elder Holland's sound scolding of the current path they are following.

All this is important because Samuelson simply had no idea what the Brethren thought about Greg Smith's essay. However, we did.

What this means is that Dan's subsequent firing by an email by Jerry Bradford, while Dan was in Jerusalem, blindsided the Brethren. What this means is that the utterly false narrative that has again been spun mostly out of thin air gets all the crucial details wrong.

However, what has just been revealed are the following: that Morgan Davis, who argues passionately that no one should ever respond to anything written by someone who seems to still have his/her name on our membership records. Years later Dehlin was excommunicated for not believing in God, not believing that there even was a Jesus of Nazareth, and for mocking atonement. (Dehlin thought it idiotic that one man must die for the mistakes of another.) Much earlier, all that and much, much more, was in Greg Smith's essay.

But Morgan Davis does not live in the real world. Why? I got a phone call from one of the Brethren asking me when we were going to deal with someone called Denver Snuffer. I said that I had never heard of him. And that that name sounded like Nasty One in a James Bond movie.

That was weird, wild stuff.

[Guest]

And, as I said above, BYU hired people ABD—before they had finished their dissertation. They did so when I was an undergrad there.

[_Physics Guy]

In the Brown University library records of dissertations, fifth entry down the page, you can see that Midgley received his PhD in 1965. So if he joined faculty at BYU in 1960 then Kishkumen is right that he started teaching before he got his doctorate. Could he have spent as little as one year actually living in Providence as a doctoral candidate and then gone back to Utah to slowly finish his thesis, while working, over the next five years?

EDIT: And entry 4464, at the bottom of page 502 of this Bibliography on Daniel Webster, is Midgley's M.S. thesis from the University of Utah. It gives the year as 1957.

[Guest]

In the Brown University library records of dissertations, fifth entry down the page, you can see that Midgley received his PhD in 1965. So if he joined faculty at BYU in 1960 then Kishkumen is right that he started teaching before he got his doctorate. Could he have spent as little as one year actually living in Providence as a doctoral candidate and then gone back to Utah to slowly finish his thesis, while working, over the next five years?

Hrm. I wonder why his wife’s (RIP) obit mentioned they spent four years in Providence while he worked on his PhD. Perhaps you and Kish are right in that he was hired by BYU and then allowed to pursue his PhD while in the employ of the Y. So, it’s all kind of working out now. He could’ve served in the Army, came back, earned his degrees, was hired by the Y, and then sent off to Brown to get that coveted PhD.

Edited. Hrm. I see PG’s edit above. I don’t know what to make of it all now. Maybe he was, uh, drafted after getting his masters? I believe they changed the draft in the early 50’s to include married men as potential draftees. I may need fact checking on that. And that’d tuck in nicely with his U2 intel bit. He could’ve served his time after ‘57, but then why would he have been living in Germany during the time he was earning his undergrad and masters? I think I’m back to scratching my head in confusion.

- Doc

[_Doctor Scratch]

Wow! Some absolutely *stunning* revelations on this thread. So, based on Dr. Cam’s research, it would seem that Midgley *lied* about his military service? Not that such a thing is unprecedented, but wow. If it’s true, it’s absolutely despicable. Shameful. I almost think that this discussion should be broken off into a new thread so that it can get the full attention it deserves.