Reissued: Rick Turley, 35 Years of LDS Church History (S1, E4 - Part 2)

**Brad Westwood** (0:05)
Welcome to the podcast Speak Your Piece, which we spell out P-E-A-C-E and P-I-E-C-E as in a work or something to share. This is a podcast about Utah's history. My name's Brad Westwood. I'm Senior Public Historian at the Utah Department of Heritage and Arts. The past is never the past, it's all around us. And this podcast, if there's one podcast you get involved in related to Utah's history, we hope this is the one.
My guest today is Richard E. Turley, a former assistant church historian and recorder for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. In our former podcast, in the prior podcast, we talked a lot about history over the last 40 years.
I'd like to ask about preservation. I think the idea of preservation is a vital aspect to the church's approach to history. Speak to that, would you please?

**Richard E. Turley Jr.** (1:02)
As I mentioned on the last podcast, the mantra for the time that we were in the Church History Department was collect, preserve, and share. Once we acquired materials and before we shared them, we needed to make certain that they would be around for succeeding generations. When you and I first met in the old East Wing of the Church office building, preservation was a major issue. It was a major issue in part because that space had not been constructed for preservation.
It had been constructed as office space. So the storage areas had windows in them, leading to tremendous fluctuations in temperature and relative humidity.

**Brad Westwood** (1:39)
I think at one time, looking at the architectural drawings, Rick, they actually thought of building an MTC in that wing too.

**Richard E. Turley Jr.** (1:46)
There was consideration of an MTC. There was consideration of a steak center or at least a meeting house in that space. So deciding that it was going to be a records facility was a late addition to that wing. The building itself had been motivated by the idea of preserving records, but that particular space was not. So it didn't have adequate engineering for the weight that was being added to it as we collected more and more materials. It allowed sunshine in with all the problems that light brings, including fading of books and materials.
The biggest concerns that I had as the managing director of the department were earthquake and fire.
I had lived in Japan and experienced a great number of earthquakes. I knew that with the Wasatch fault, we were going to be expecting an earthquake in any time. It could be massive. I knew from my experience living in Japan that earthquakes could easily be followed by fire. In the great Kanto earthquake of 1923, September 1923, a few thousand people were killed in the crush and more than 100,000 in the fire.
I also had the odd experience one day while I was at my home in West Jordan, getting a telephone call informing me that our local seminary was on fire. I climbed up on my roof and looked down the street to the seminary and saw the dark smoke billowing up from it. And it turned out that even though the seminary was almost directly across the street from a fire station and the response was immediate, the fire people could do nothing to save the building and its contents. It was a complete loss. And I thought about the east wing of the church office building and how similar it was to that seminary building, which was essentially a steel and concrete facility full of flammable materials. The east wing of the church office building had virtually no fire suppression equipment. It was a large concrete structure full of paper. And I knew that if there was something that started a fire, an electrical problem or a deliberate act of arson, that we would lose the priceless heritage of the church.

**Brad Westwood** (3:48)
Of course, human life would have been the first thing people would seek out and make sure people are safe. And if a building is not prepared in any form or another, it's pretty hard to double back after human life is saved.

**Richard E. Turley Jr.** (4:01)
It is. And we did have we did have drills in place and procedures in place for making certain that the people were safe first and foremost.
But once the people were safe, we then had to think about the materials. And simply put, the facility just was inadequate. We talked with engineers. We thought about taking the shelving and bolting it to the floor and ceiling so that in case of an earthquake, people would be safe and the materials would be safer. And we were told we couldn't do that because it would it would take the floors, which were already at maximum and weaken them further. We tried all kinds of other things. Ultimately, we decided we needed to build a new facility. So we looked all around the world and we collected the best ideas and built the Church History Library, which is today one of the most revolutionary state-of-the-art facilities for preservation that exist. There are 12 vaults in the building. Ten of those vaults are kept at 55 degrees Fahrenheit and 35 percent relative humidity constantly throughout the year, regardless of outside conditions. There are two floors just of the engineering equipment necessary in order to pull off that miracle.