b   I first became acquainted with ARTABAN, the hero of Henry Van Dyke's religious novel, as a small child living in a two or three room apartment in a prairie farmhouse in Utah.  The farmhouse was owned by a Mormon family (this was, after all, Utah, where the overwhelming majority of the    farmers are Mormons by religion, and very hard-working     by nature and necessity).  But my family was not Mormons, but Seventh-day Adventists.  In those days, the early 1940s, only slightly     less disliked and shunned by "mainline" Christians, such as Methodists, Baptists, Presbyterians, and Roman Catholics, as were the Morrmons outside of Utah and Navada and a few other western states where by pereserverance, hard work, and lots of missionary effort, the Mormons have achieved a majority and a large representation in government.

Russell Holt, the man pictured here on the left, was my father, my preacher, my school-teacher. and the one besides my mother (also a school-teacher) who taught me to read and write, and love good books and good stories.   And it was my father, Russell Holt, who first read me the "Story of the Other Wise Man", and instilled in me the idea that just because you don't achieve right away what you hope to achieve doesn't mean you should just give up, and drift with the tide, but instead perservere, and work hard, and perhaps you will succeed in unexpected ways!

b