Finding Grandpa Mouritsen

My Grandpa Mouritsen died in the spring of 2000, a little over a month before I married Jeanell. He had suffered a stroke many years before that, and so all of my memories of him also included the halting way that he spoke following the stroke.

Grandpa's life was hard. His own father died of appendicitis, exacerbated by being hit in the side by a baseball, before Grandpa was even born. Just before he turned four, his mother married a widower 18 years her senior (could have been worse, Jeanell), and they moved from Bennington, Idaho to Draper, Utah, which is where Grandpa would grow up, very poor, and with a stepfather who didn't treat him well.

As a teenager, he was famous locally for his dog Tip, whom he had taught a variety of tricks, and who went everywhere with him. In the summer of 1934, Grandpa and Tip were in Idaho, where Grandpa was working with the sheep. Tip ate some poisoned meat that a rancher had left out. Seeing that there was nothing he could do, Grandpa shot Tip and buried him at the origin of Pruse Creek and Crow Creek, northeast of Montpelier.

Several months ago, my cousin Stephen shared a newspaper snippet from with me, and asked if I was aware of the information the snippet revealed. I was not. The snippet was from the December 17, 1935 edition of the Salt Lake Tribune, and revealed that my grandpa had pleaded guilty to stealing a scarf.

Neither of us had heard this story, and initially it was nothing more than a curiosity, but as we looked at the dates and the information we had been told about Grandpa, we started to wonder if the version of events we had been told was not accurate.

We had had been told that Grandpa went to BYU on a football scholarship, but that the program was cutback after his freshman year, causing him to lose his scholarship, and since he did not have other means to pay for his schooling, he was forced to withdraw from school and work. Ultimately, he would only attend one quarter at BYU.

When we realized that the timing of the scarf theft matched up with what would have been the end of the one quarter he attended BYU, which was also when and where he first met my grandma, we wondered if he had instead been expelled due to the theft of the scarf. We imagined an alternate version of events where Grandpa had met Grandma, who grew up in better economic circumstances, and wanting to get her something for Christmas, but lacking the means to purchase anything, he resorted to stealing the scarf to give her, but was caught, and was expelled when the incident became public. As a result, he was never able to get a college education, and our fathers would also grow up very poor. This was our theory, but we needed to see if we could find some evidence for it.

I began to question whether he had played football at all, or if he had, if there had ever been a scholarship. I noticed that he had waited a year after graduating from high school before enrolling at BYU and that seemed odd to me, if he had in fact been given a football scholarship.

We started searching BYU's archives that were available online and found proof that Grandpa had in fact been a part of the football team as a halfback. And evidence that at least freshman football changed at the time in that they no longer competed against other schools. While no mention is made of the Depression being the cause of this change, it at least somewhat matches up with the story that football was cutback, causing him to lose his scholarship.

Still wanting to learn the truth about Grandpa's departure from BYU, I reached out to my friend Natalie (Tripp) Ipson, who works at BYU. She directed me to the university archivist, Cory Nimer, who I emailed, asking if he could direct me to any information about the end of my grandpa's time at BYU. Mr. Nimer was incredibly helpful and was able to find a letter my grandpa had written to Franklin S. Harris, who was the president of BYU at the time, as well as President Harris' response.

(Franklin Harris became the president of BYU in 1921, before he was even 40 years old. He was the first person with a PhD and the first monogamist to serve as BYU's president and is credited with transforming BYU from a glorified high school to a true university and his efforts to modernize BYU and promote academic freedom led to its finally being accredited in 1927).

The letters satisfied me that the theft of the scarf had nothing to do with Grandpa's departure from BYU. The story we've been told about the football program being cut and Grandpa losing his scholarship is probably the true one. Questions remain that we were unable to find the answers to. Did Grandpa pay the fine or did he spend time in jail? Did Grandma know about the theft of the scarf, and was the scarf to be a gift for her? And why did Grandpa sign his name "Glendale H. Mouritsen" (as far as I know, he does not have a middle name, and I have no idea what the H would stand for)? We may never know.

Researching Grandpa's life gave me a new appreciation for the trials he grew up with and the challenges he faced and helped me to know him in a way I didn't before.