Courtship

BYU Studies

Volume 59:3 (2020) - People ask from time to time how Richard and I met. I have told the story in various ways for different occasions. It all began in 1952, some sixty-eight years ago at this writing. I call the man I eventually married Dick in this account. He later, about 1992, became Richard.

After Dick Bushman had been at Harvard for two years, he was called on a Latter-day Saint mission to the New England states. At that time, the mission home was immediately adjacent to the Latter-day Saint ­chapel in Cambridge on Brattle Street, both located in old houses built by the Longfellow family. Dick was very active in that small church group and acquainted with the mission personnel who had offices next door. He knew the mission president, J. Howard Maughan, well. Sister Hattie Maughan always called him Dick, even as a missionary.

Dick was serving his second year in the mission when I came from San Francisco to Boston to attend Wellesley College. He had begun college three years before me, and so after his two-year mission, he would be only a year ahead. I began to hear about him from young people at church as soon as I arrived. He was a fabled figure, spoken of with awe. The two most memorable stories were that in running for the student council as a freshman at Harvard, then an all-male university, he had knocked at the door of every classmate and asked for his support. Could I imagine such a driven person? The other story was that after election to the student council, he had been asked by another, older Mormon member to nominate him for the council’s presidency. This Dick refused to do, telling his friend that he preferred to support the other candidate. I thought that Dick must be a hard man, a frightening person, one to avoid.

Our actual fateful meeting that year is a blur. A group of Latter-day Saint students gathered one Sunday evening in a Harvard room. Elder Bushman arrived, alone. Why, we can never remember or determine. He must have had a reason. He was not one to break rules. He turned up in this forbidden place, and we met. He says it was passionate love at first sight. I have suspected that he had heard about me, as I had heard about him, and that he knew that my father was a Latter-day Saint stake president and that I had a scholarship to Wellesley, suggesting that I was a more serious student of religion and academics than I actually was. The meeting was soon over. I don’t remember any conversation on that occasion. Later, I wrote, “During the first month of school back in 1952 I met a young elder named Richard Bushman. The group I was with had spoken more than highly of him and I was not disappointed. He was both thoughtful and articulate. However, his reddish hair grew down over one eye in the manner of a romantic poet and my impression was, ‘What a lovely boy; I wish he’d cut his hair.’”