Dillon Inouye and His Influence on My Life

One of the most influential people in my life was Dillon Inouye. Most people in the LDS Church have probably never heard of him. But he is one of the most influential teachers who has shaped the lives of hundreds of BYU students and several LDS General Authorities. He is a pretty honest guy and usually tells it likes he sees it. He is about ten years older than me and was married within a year of me so his children are even about the same age as mine. I have known him my entire adult life. I call him from time to time just to see how he is doing. He thinks I call him up to give him a report but the truth is I think about him and know he must be doing something good so I want to know what he is up to. I pretend to give him a report of my life because he is my teacher and I am his student.



When I was a student at BYU Dillon Inouye was a professor of Instructional Science now the Instructional Psychology and Technology Department. I ended up taking a class from him based on the philosophy of Walter Gong. Dillon was a wiz kid of sorts having gone to Stanford and majored in psychology where he completed his doctorate in 1978. After his doctorate he came to work at BYU and that is where I met him. I had been a student there about a year when he graduated and I met him in 1981 which was about in his third year there. Dillon had been a student of Walter Gong who was in to exponential learning. Gong talked about learning as being a three-person problem. "Gong, was a firm believer that teachers must be learners and learners must teach others." Dillon modeled his life on Gong's philosophy and was close personal friends with him and his family. Dillon brought his former mentor's ideas to BYU from Stanford. He made recruits out of professors across the campus and tried to interest students in the concepts espoused by Gong.



Dillon even arranged for Gong to come and teach a special class that influenced Stephen R. Covey who went on to make millions using the three person problem concept. I took Covey for a couple of classes including his Organizational Behavior Class before the BYU administration forced him to choose between consulting or teaching which I believe was a great loss for students but beneficial to Covey who built his motivational seminar firm. I knew Covey from the fact he was a good friend to my mission president M. Russell Ballard and had spoken to us when visiting the Canada Toronto Mission (CTM) back in 1976 at a time he was consulting for IBM. I used to sit on the floor in Covey's class and listen to him describe the three person problem we had and how we all needed to be teachers and learners. Covey being Gong's disciple gave credence to what Dillon told us. In his 2005 book the Eight Habit: From Effectiveness to Greatness, Covey said about Gong:



"While teaching at the university years ago, I met a visiting professor, Dr. Walter Gong, from San Jose, California. He taught a one-semester class for faculty entitled How to Improve Your Teaching. The essence of his program was this great principle: The best way to get people to learn is to turn them into teachers. In other words, you learn the material best when you teach it.



I immediately started to apply that principle in my work and at home. When I first started university teaching, my classes only had about fifteen to thirty students. When I started applying Dr. Gong's principle, I found that I could effectively teach many more students; in fact, some of my classes were packed with nearly a thousand students, and yet the students' performance and test scores actually went up. Why? When you teach you simply learn better. Every student becomes a teacher, and every teacher a student.

Now, the common paradigm is that the teacher-student ratio is critical -- fewer students means higher-quality teaching. But if you turn your students into teachers, you gain leverage. You move the fulcrum over.

Also when you teach or share what you're learning with others, you implicitly commit socially to live what you teach. You will naturally be more motivated to live what you're learning. This sharing will be a basis for deepening learning, commitment and motivation, making change legitimate, and enrolling a support team. You will also find that sharing creates bonding with people -- especially with your children. Have them regularly teach you what they are learning in school. My wife, Sandra, and I have found that doing this simple thing essentially eliminates any need for external motivation with their studies. Those who teach what they are learning are, by far, the greatest students."

Dillon liked to find ways of helping some of his gifted students to excel in their lives and treated us all as Gong would. I met Dillon in a strange way I was one day talking to someone about my interest in studying LDS temples and a female student in the Harold B. Lee Library told me that I should go over to the stadium and meet him. She said she had worked for one of his colleagues Grant Von Harrison in the Instructional Science department and that if he had any money he would hire you. Dillon's office was up by the stadium and later in the Jesse Knight Building before ending up in the McKay Building so I decided to apply my father's philosophy which was "They can just say no" which means you can't get it if you don't ask so I went over to see him. I remember it seemed like a long way from the campus to go up there by the stadium but I trudged up there one day and he immediately decided to make me one of his projects. He claimed that Von Harrison had the money and he was going to hire me to research the subject. Can you imagine getting paid to do something you wanted to do in the first place?



They did it to help students who needed help and it was their way of finding new recruits. Soon you were sucked in to their world. Many people who have doctorates today started out that way. Even Richard Page, a high powered lawyer now legal counsel for the Church in Russia and a former stake president I served under in Houston, Texas told me one day he had worked for Grant Von Harrison and knew the very same men I did including some of the research assistants. He said he even went to law school with Jeanne Bryant now Dillon's wife.



There was a cadre of men back then who liked to act like a think tank that consisted of Dillon Inouye, Monte Shelley, Grant Von Harrison, Adrian Van Mondfrans, and Harvey Black. They used to sit around and talk about some deep philosophical issues including LDS religion. They could go on for hours and didn't mind students being in the room who would listen in and sometimes offer up opinions. I sat with them some times for four or five hours as they would debate different intellectual ideas. For example years later after I left there in 2003 at the International Conference on the Psychology of Other Dillon presented Levinas" Hypostasis: Three Implications for Psychology that is the kind of stuff they would talk about if it wasn't him it would have been Piaget or Montessori etc.



They actually ruined my academic career as I developed the mistaken notion that all academicians sat around and discussed intellectual concepts. Later I learned after twenty years of working in universities that most professors are mundane and banal and would rather tell jokes or talk about sports. Usually their conversations were so esoteric it went over our heads but we soaked in a few ideas that carried with us. You had to be intellectually gifted to understand the various psychologists and philosophers that they would be sprouting. Grant Von Harrison was known for his book Drawing on the Power of Heaven and was idealized by people since it was a mystical thing to tap in to the powers of heaven.



His assistants were guys like Larry Ellsworth and Conrad Gottfredsen who later worked at the MTC and one ended up teaching at BYU. Grant Von Harrison was in to his blended theory of reading at the time that kids needed to learn to read by both sight words and memorizing key words. His current popularity of using the Book of Mormon isn't something new but something he preached for thirty plus years. All of these men were quite innovative and made money either by developing software or publishing books or investing in start-up companies. They were quite generous and gave lots of upcoming students a start including many of us that weren't directly related to them. I was always amazed that they picked me out since I wasn't the sharpest card in the deck back then. He was a very caring individual who loved to serve in the Church and did very innovative types of projects. He gave dozens of students over the year a start lots of times out of his own pocket or awarded them grants or student internships.







Dillon liked to help out students and was in to financing many of them out of his own pocket. He even helped lots of emotionally challenged people including counseling them from time to time. When I took his revolutionary Instructional Science class that was supposed to make you in the top ten percent of your class, he hooked me up with a couple of really anti-social characters that I wouldn't have otherwise come to know. We had small cluster groups and were suppose to know our fellow students like they were our families. One of them was a young woman who was brilliant artist but socially a whack job. She couldn't even look you in the eyes and was constantly putting herself down. I met her family but couldn't see how they had emotionally abused her but she suffered from low self-esteem. I wasn't very normal but she even beat me in the social skills department. She was a passive aggressive type who one minute was tearing herself down and then the next saying something angry and hostile. For his sake I hung out with her and came to see her outlandish behavior was just a coping mechanism. I ended up liking her as a friend. It was one of the few times in life I saw a female as a friend not a girlfriend so in that regards it was an evolutionary success in my development. I actually discovered that she was abnormally normal now that I have had seven daughters and a wife. Associating with her helped me cope with all that progesterone.



Dillon was an entrepreneur of sorts. When I knew him in the early 1980s he was single and in his thirties. He had been at BYU for several years and was able to save a great deal of his income which he invested in different start-up companies. When Walkman were hot he purchased thousands of knock-offs and sold them making a tidy profit. He owned a house near Timpview even before he was married and was known for making investments in up and coming innovations. He invested in many different kind of technologies including Folio View which was an indexing program that grew into LDS Infobase. When computers first came out he actually helped several kids pay for their education or go on missions by building and selling computers.



In the last few years he founded Perfect Search which is a sophisticated way to find information. He gave me my first paid job in the Instructional Science department doing a bibliography on LDS Temples. When computers first came out just before he married his wife Jeanne he sold me a computer saying I needed it to do my LDS research. Later when I struggled to pay for it when he was first married he and Jeanne just gave it to me saying to help someone else out who was in need when I was in a better financial position in life. I learned a lesson in generosity from him. Later I was able to give away a couple of automobiles and furniture to struggling families as well as hundreds of dollars in food and cash. I probably won't have done that if it weren't for his example.



He is involved in education and helped found a couple of educational institutions in the Provo area including the Walden School and the Liahona Academy where his daughter Emily worked. The Walden Schools says: " This vision is rooted in the developmental and cognitive theories of Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky, Maria Montessori, and Jerome Bruner; in the contemporary research of respected educators such as David Gardner, Frank Pajaras and Carol Dweck, and on the ideas of noted educational philosophers such as Nell Noddings, Parker Palmer, Walter Gong and Dillon Inouye. It will be a place where students feel welcome and respected and where they will rediscover a love of learning."



Even when Dillon was single he served in the Church in some very important callings such as on a LDS Melchizedek Priesthood church board and in a campus bishopric. His wife served on the General Relief Society Board and is now an assistant attorney general in Utah. He was of Japanese descent and had served a mission to Japan. He became acquainted with Elder Yoshihiko Kikuchi through his Japanese connections. It was through Dillon that I was introduced to Elder Kikuchi. He and Elder Kikuchi were both about the same age and both served missions in Japan. Dillon's parents were both placed in a Japanese American concentration camp in Utah where he was born during World War II. Kikuchi's dad was killed by American bombings during World War II so the two men could relate to one another in both had suffered oppression at the hands of the American government.





Elder Yoshihiko Kikuchi was called to be a Seventy in October 1977. In the summer of 1978 he and his family went to BYU every summer for a few years to take classes and learn English. They actually stayed in Heritage Halls over on Ninth East. Dillon was one of his best friends when he came to this country and helped him to get situated and acculturate to the culture. I remembered how quickly Elder Kikuchi picked up English and how he started functioning professionally once he picked up the language in a year or two. I remember the first time I met him going up to his office in the Church Administration Building that he spoke in broken English but by the time I worked with him on his book he had almost mastered the language.



In an earlier blog Spiritual Experience on Spencer W. Kimball book I described how Dillon introduced me to Elder Kikuchi. Dillon was a friend and confidante to him. When Elder Kikuchi expressed his desire to do a quote book on missionary work to Dillon he knew that I had a gift for collecting and compiling information. Dillon liked to think good things about the people he mentored he told him "I had a gift and a genius for finding material by the General Authorities on any subject." I actually helped Elder Kikuchi find the best missionary stuff by getting Ed Kimball to let me make copies of all his father's talks. Then I rounded up a group of student volunteers including my future wife who helped extract them in to usable subjects. My real contribution was falling on the Ensign index and adapting its topical arrangement in to subjects that he used in his book. Elder Kikuchi was good at extracting things but he was in to overkill he found things that weren't specific enough and had to do with other subjects like a beautiful sunset or something on tithing. My job was to distill down to the punchy stuff on the topic.



I didn't see the project to completion because of a personal life's situation. I was dating an eighteen year old freshman at the time who was very immature. We never went past making out but we spent a lot of time kissing. Once she lost control and tried to do some serious stuff but I stopped her when she started unzipping my fly. I said what do you think you are doing. I told Dillon about it who demanded that I should tell Elder Kikuchi immediately since if I lost control I could jeopardize the spirituality of the Kimball missionary book project. Dillon thought I shouldn't work on the book any more.



I didn't know it but it was just what they needed to get rid of me as Kikuchi's unofficial assistant on the book. When I went up to see Elder Kikuchi he told me that I had been accused of stealing and copying some sensitive documents in the temple department. I had used the CES vertical file library which had some missionary articles and a compilation by the Prophets on doctrinal topics and was going between two floors with the documents to copy it near Elder Kikuchi's office and to save him charges. One of the full-time employees in the temple department where Elder Kikuchi's office was located said I had copied a sensitive notebook from his office. The only temple stuff I got at the time was some histories of the current temples that Elder Kikuchi gave me and his secretary at the time copied which was an unofficial volume about the history of each temple which included dedicatory prayers and who the architect were. Nothing high level or sensitive. I always wondered what this other document was that I never saw but that I was accused of copying. I didn't even know where the guy's office was at the time. The funny thing was that the Mormon underground claimed the guy's son feed them stuff his son provided them when he wasn't looking. I found the thing very funny but Elder Kikuchi went on about his losing face over something I had been perceived to have done.



Losing face is a very serious matter to a Japanese person who wanted to be in the good graces of the Prophets and Apostles. Dillon told me one time that Gordon B. Hinckley had prophesied about Elder Kikuchi when he was touring his mission Elder Hinckley pointed at the young Elder Kikuchi and said that he would be a great leader one day in the Church. Dillon told me he thought Elder Hinckley meant one day Elder Kikuchi might be an apostle. So I felt sorry for the guy since I was innocent of taking anything but he thought he had a mark against him by his association with me and it could affect his future prospects. My personal concern was that he wasn't faithful to those who were faithful to him. I would never have believed for one minute what the church bureacrat said without finding out from the horse's mouth.



I was actually told I might be put on a list that might follow me the rest of my life. I sometimes wonder if that is true once I was called in by a stake president who said he thought he would call me to be his executive secretary but had changed his mind at the last moment. I wonder if when my name goes to Salt Lake does it come back with a red mark. Plus now I have been turned down twenty times for jobs at BYU even one for $40,000 that was a library technician and didn't require an MLS let alone the doctorate that I hold. When they hire a person with a BA over someone with a doctorate as being the better qualified person it makes you wonder.



I never even got a grateful mention for my work or the loss of several hundred dollars that I paid to copy the articles. I had four hundred dollars covered by ASBYU grant but I paid for some of it personally. I figured Dillon did the same thing so I should be more like him. I didn't see my name mentioned even in a long list of names. It is better to be like Dillon Inouye behind the scenes. I know he has personally spent thousands of dollars on different Church related projects and all he gets out of it is the satisfaction of knowing he did a good thing.



Kikuchi never had much to do with me after that except to marry me and my wife in the Salt Lake Temple when my own mission president M. Russell Ballard didn't want to do it since Tom Mullen was getting married the same day and he just didn't have the time. The one thing I did learn was it was always better "to walk in the noon day sun" so I didn't regret telling him. Kikuchi was very pleasant and came out with our non-member families and had his picture taken. He is one very likable guy.



The funny thing is that in my meeting Elder Kikuchi told me "the young woman I was dating would one day end up a divorcee." I wonder if she has been? and just how prophetic he is. I never told her what Kikuchi said. My girlfriend broke up with me because one of my roommates who was a jerk started putting me down telling her I was told old for her and a loser. He actually told her she deserved a better guy. After what Elder Kikuchi said I really thought it for the best at the time that she broke up with me.



I loved it when the same roommate started dating my former girlfriend's roommate and actually shared his patriarchal blessing with her and then she dumped him for another guy in our ward who was actually a decent human being unlike him and married the other guy who she barely met. I met my wife right after this so it was actually a blessing in my opinion that I didn't marry the first girl. The jerky roommate once threw away a hundred dollar pair of my hiking boots because I left them outside the apartment when they were muddy for a couple of days. He didn't care I couldn't afford another pair or wouldn't even tell me where they were when I asked about them for a few days. His brother later confessed to me where they were and apologized about his brother but the trash company had already picked up the bin. When I called the hick on it he said he would do it again if I ever left something out and I should learn to take care of my stuff. What goes around comes around, he got what he deserved in life.



Elder Packer even had come about this time warning youth not to share their blessings. I will always remember that roommate as the red neck hillbilly roommate who was stupid in sharing something he should have held as sacred. Getting your heart crushed at BYU was just a part of your social development as I had learned myself and my roommate later learned. His experience was one of the few times that my faith in social justice was restored. It couldn't have happened to a nicer guy.



I got the last laugh a year later when Ezra Taft Benson asked me to do his Teachings book. I always loved Elder Kikuchi but I learned that even LDS General Authorities could be disappointing at times. I never trusted another one after that incident and wasn't overly surprised when the Benson book didn't list me as compiler later nor that Elder Kukuchi has never used me again and doesn't welcome my visiting him in Salt Lake City with open arms. It didn't shake my testimony that GA's were human and could make mistakes by unjustly accusing you of untrue things. I offered him my missionary compilation a couple of times to use when I heard he wanted to do a similar thing but he just blew me off.



Dillon Inouye ended up being a BYU campus bishop in a married student ward I lived in. He did some very innovative things. He divided us up in to family home evening groups. We actually went to Sunday School in several different classes by group where we would have a leader who would be the teacher. Every Monday one of them would show up and make sure we were doing okay. It was a very tight knit group. I still remember many of the young couples fondly. He even tried counseling my wife when we had marital problems which helped a little bit at the time. He was a good listening going ah ha and would try to get the person to answer how to solve their own problems sometimes it was helpful.



I think it surprised Dillon that I ended up compiling the Teachings of Ezra Taft Benson. I stayed in touch with him throughout the years. After I finished the book when they were deciding what to do with me. Elder Ballard wondered what to do with me so he contacted a couple of people like Donald Q. Cannon and Dillon. I had been promised a job when I was done in the CES. All of them including Elder Ballard said they should give me one that I had earned it and it was the least they could do but none of them were willing to do anything to really help me other than to say I should have a job. So I actually wrote a letter on his stationary and signed it telling the CES to hire me. I knew that I was going to be put out on the street after years of service and that you couldn't do anything with a bachelor's degree in history. I also knew that if he told them to they couldn't refuse. Some men have power and can do things.



I knew Gary Gillispie had phoned the CES earlier but Joe Christensen and Stan Peterson said they wouldn't hire me and that if President Benson didn't like it he should release them since they ran the CES and he had called them in the first place so he should let them do their jobs and they just didn't want me so that was the end of the matter. When I told Dillon about writing the letter he told me that I should be banned from BYU for life and that I followed Satan since I wasn't trustworthy. I admit it wasn't my most ethical moment but I was desperate at the time since I was made promises that no one meant to keep. In the end I was given a temporary job at BYU Hawaii and had my graduate degree paid by the CES. I know Dillon feels he has always been faithful and he probably has for the most part. But he had a few breaks that people like me never seem to have. Desperate people are reduced to desperate measures. Its an area I didn't measure up in.



I kept in touch with Dillon who went through some up and down times in his own life due to his health and a couple of run-ins with Church leaders. He is usually serving quietly in some position and doing a marvelous job. He always said he was at fault never his leaders unlike me who thinks it takes two to tango. About two years ago when I wrote the foreword to my Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord and told about how it was not published by Sheri Dew for unknown reasons. Dillon told me that I was under the power of Satan to mention the details since I was negative. He doesn't think it any big deal if I don't publish it. Some of us are meant for greatness and some us aren't.



I told Dillon I appreciated his sentiment but I didn't agree with him. I spent twenty years compiling the book and in that twenty years I have never wavered about telling my disappointment in never being acknowledged for my work on ETB nor my being able to make it right with the second book by being acknowledged as compiler and having it published in a legitimate place. I told him one day when I stand before God I will tell him to his face of my disappointment and I won't be ashamed of what I wrote or what I feel. I just don't agree that I follow Satan just because he Dillon Inouye says so. It is hard to tell your teacher you reject anything they say but that is what happens in the learning teaching process. Students become teachers and teachers become students. I didn't tell him when he had a scuffle with a stake president several years ago and he was released that he must have been under the power of Satan. Two can play that game. No I just saw it as a human break down in communication. Any one that knows Dillon knows his heart is usually in the right place. Any one that knows me knows that I love the brethren and would do anything to build the kingdom of God. We are not the same person we have different experiences.



Unlike me Dillon Inouye is as faithful as the sun shining. You know it is up there in the sky shining even on a cloudy day. I can't say the same for me because I don't mind calling a bozo a bozo when he is one even if he holds a church position. I respect the man for his deeds but being a former Catholic I don't kiss any rings. I could use a little more humility as taught in the Japanese culture. I don't have a problem luckily with any current general authorities so I don't foresee a problem nor do I associate with any nor do I think I will at my age. So I am safe to make these statements.



Dillon helped me to weather periods in the church when others have accused me of following the wrong spirit. Unless someone calls you out a time or two you don't have the ability to analyze yourself. His telling me I followed Satan a time or two has allowed me to realize that maybe I do at times make bad decisions. Sometimes I let others run all over me because I think am I being disobedient. Once a bishop ecclesiastically abused me and told me I followed Satan when he removed my recommend for saying a counselor in a stake presidency needed to dust off his scriptures because he was plugging Abraham Gileadi in a gospel doctrine class shortly after the man had been disfellowshipped. I had laughed when the counselor had been teaching a gospel doctrine class and yes I snickered because at the time Gileadi was living up by the Kohl Dream Mine near Benjamin. I wasn't laughing at his naivety nor at Gileadi's scholarship which is some of the best ever written on Isaiah I was laughing at the fact he was in to Jewish mysticism and was living up there near a mine that never once produce one lick of gold.



A few weeks later I was in the stake presidency counselor's institute class and had shared an experience about President Benson's To the Mother's in Zion talk about how I thought it was an inspired talk and how my wife benefited from it. A non member was in the class who worked and she didn't like my telling how Reed Benson told me about how President Benson got thirty thousand letters from women who said he didn't know what he was talking about nor my telling how the next seventy thousand said he was inspired from women who went home so he called me in to tell me not to talk in his class. The institute man had his secretary call me in to his institute office saying President F..... want to see you. He in essence told me to shut up that he was telling me to shut up. I told him he worked for the CES and in my opinion he should tell us if there is a non member in the class if we need to be careful and he had no right to use his stake position to tell me what to do or not do since it was a religion class and had nothing to do directly with the church. I also told him it wasn't the policy of the CES to have non-members taking institute classes. He didn't like that I disrespected him and he reported me to the stake president.



The next week the stake president showed up at the institute building and told me and my wife that I didn't sustain my leaders. I told the stake president his counselor was not acting as my leader but as an institute guy and that was different. If the guy asked me to do something I would do it but what he said or did in his class was separate from the Church structure. My wife and I both tried to tell him my side of the story but he said we were lying and his friend wouldn't misuse his position and that my problem was I didn't sustain the other man.



The bishop took my recommend over the CES man misusing his power. You can cloak it all you want but I to this day do not respect the institute teacher. When the bishop told me I followed Satan as he took my recommend I said "yes sir you are the bishop and if you say I follow Satan then I must sir." I had learned from Dillon Inouye that I followed Satan on the CES matter with the Benson book so I figured I might as well admit if I ever did follow Satan again. I have always been taught to jump when my leaders say jump and ask how high to jump. A few months later the bishop returned my recommend on the day he was released. It was his last official act as bishop. The stake president went off to BYU and the CES guy went off to Utah State leaving me all alone. I am glad BYU was smart enough never to hire him nor did he ever get any higher in the church. Unfortunately the new stake president heard all about me so he treated me accordingly. I solved matter by leaving a perfectly good job at 37 and getting a doctorate. I am glad I did I was made a high priest two months later. If I had stayed in Missouri I would have lived and died as an elder.



I had a second problem with ecclesiastical abuse a few years later after I completed my doctorate. I moved to California and the counselor in the stake presidency touched my wife in an inappropriate place at a Know Your Religion Session. It was crowded so she sat on one side of a row and I sat across the row on the side pew. He had his hand on the pew and she wasn't sure it was a hand at first. She told me about it a few days later and at first I didn't believe her and thought she was imagining it. But one Sunday I saw him take a hold of her hand and he wouldn't let go of it. She had to literally pry it out of his hands. I never saw anything like it in all the years I have been a member of a guy holding on to a woman's hand for five minutes. The Spirit told me at that moment she was telling me the truth.



I don't know which Spirit it was but I knew he had done it. A few weeks later I told him in private when he was visiting my ward after he said to me "you don't like me do you?" I told him he was very perceptive and that he was a slime ball in my opinion. I told him about putting his hands on my wife and then I told him if I had actually seen him do it I would have punched his lights out but that since I didn't see it I would have to take my wife's word for it and I knew she was telling the truth. He never denied he touched her but he said I don't know if I did touch her but if I did touch her I apologize." The stake president came to my place of work a few days later and told me I had traumatized the poor guy so he was taking my recommend and putting it in a drawer for a few months that I couldn't treat such a spiritual man that way. I left a tenured faculty position and moved within a few months to get away from them despite the fact I would have made $100,000 a year just by staying in my job for ten more years. I would have never left California if not for that man inappropriately touching my wife. I lived four blocks from the campus and had a cushy job. I regret the day I left there but I wouldn't have had another calling for years had I stayed.



I was appalled a few years later after I moved when I heard the perv was made a stake president which he still is today. I guess he repented. I told a couple of area seventy's about him but they counseled me to forget it so I did meaning don't contact the First Presidency and the Twelve which I told them I was contemplating. I just wonder if he has been tempted in dealing with women with problems. Will he put his hand on their behinds mentally?



I talked to Dillon a few months before coming to the Middle East. He told me he thought about recommending me to Terry Warner since he was looking for someone with my skills. But the foreword in my Prepare Ye the Way of the Lord was written under a dark cloud and that guys like me don't belong at BYU. The first part I didn't agree with but I think I agree with the last part. I could never make it in a repressed society like BYU. They aren't the best librarians in the country and many of them are actually quite rude. One time I had an interview with them they called me fifteen minutes early and made fun of me during the interview. Lucky for us we have faithful brethren like Dillon Inouye there. I wish more of us were like him.



He sees a bright beautiful world while others like me see the good, the bad, and the ugly at times. It is all in our construct. The one thing I have learned from Dillon Inouye is to serve no matter how flawed we may be and that sickness shouldn't hold us back either. I have been amazed that he is still going strong like the energizer bunny despite kidney problems and an atrocious hacking cough. I would have given Dillon Inouye my kidney had I been a blood match because in my opinion this would be a sad world if he weren't in it. He is an honest and true friend. We just don't always agree about some things. I wonder if I really learned what he was trying to teach me.



With the passing of Dillon K. Inouye one of his other students P. Clint Rogers posted another tribute on 3 July 2008 entitled "In memory of a true teacher and friend, Dillon K. Inouye: his thoughts on the central role of our profession."