The Mormon James Frey

Thu, 17 Jan 2013 16:43:00 +0000

  This is not a story about Manti Te’o. He is, after all, a 21 year-old kid caught up in something—a cruel and elaborate hoax? a fabrication?—that no one yet seems to have a total grip on. Yet.

This is a story about a man named Paul H. Dunn.

Paul H. Dunn was a high-ranking leader in the LDS Church during the 1970s and 1980s. He gave public talks, as LDS Church leaders are expected to do, and wrote over fifty books.

In a couple of those books, Dunn described how he had played baseball for the St. Louis Cardinals. That he’d pitched to Joe DiMaggio and Ted Williams and rubbed elbows with Stan Musial.

He also told stories about his service in World War II. He said that he was one of six soldiers out of his battalion of 1,000 to have survived the war. He said a buddy named Harold Lester Brown had died in his arms on Okinawa—prayers on his lips--and that Dunn himself had helped bury the body.

Stories like these made Paul H. Dunn one of the best-loved motivational speakers in the world of Mormonism.

Salon.com > Paul H. Dunn

The Mormon James Frey