Mission  1927

We soon learned that in addition to tracting and visiting, the missionaries were expected to give the sermons in church each Sunday. We were called on the first Sunday we were there and got up and said a few words of french we had memorized. We spent a good deal of time studying the language during the first few months of our mission. Frere Miller was a good missionary and he spoke the french language very fluently. He held the people spellbound in church when he spoke and was highly regarded by all the saints and by the mission president. At that time it would have been very hard to convince me that Frere Miller would leave the Church and die a comparatively young man almost without a friend. After his mission, Frere Miller went down to Italy to learn the Italian language. His parents died while he was over there or shortly after he came home.

I lost track of him until I went back to Washington D.C. to work and go to school. He was living there in the same apartment development that we lived in. When a branch of the church was organized out in Arlington, Virginia where this development was located, I was assigned as his ward teacher. I called on him several times and without exception I found him with so-called friends, drinking and having a good time. The last time I visited him he came out on the porch with me and told me that he did not want me to come back again. He said that the Church meant nothing to him anymore and that it was embarrassing to him for me to come to his apartment. I again lost track of him and the next I heard he had died, in this same apartment. His cousin later told me that he did not have a friend who would claim his body and that hie ( his cousin) had to arrange for his body to be taken back to Utah for burial.

During my brief stay in Geneva I learned to love this city. It is located on lake Geneva, is modern, with wide streets and smart shops. The Swiss people are more like Americans than any people that I met in Europe. Another thing that I liked, they used money of about the same size as that used in the United States. There five franc piece was just the size of an American silver dollar. The only Saturday we were there we went down to the beach on the lake and watched the people and boats. It would be a beautiful spot to go for a vacation.

After a stay of ten days or two weeks in Geneva I was sent down to a little town on the Mediterranean Coast in southern France called Montpellier. It was a town of about 60,000 people and the chief occupation was wine making and selling. My first missionary companion was Leon Cowles. His father was a professor at the University of Utah. I have seen Leon just a few times since my mission. He decided to follow a career in the United States foreign service. He served for a time in Mexico and in Spain. He married out of the Church and the last time I saw him, he was little interested in the Church. He was a good conscientious missionary, though, and I learned a lot from him.


YEAR (FILE ) SUBJECT
---- ------- ---------------------------------
1927 (9028) John Griffin in Montpelier
1927 (1051) John Griffin Portrait
1927 (9038) District Missionaries

(MISSIONARY JOURNAL OF JOHN GRIFFIN - page 2)

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