Pioneer Legacy Inspires Local Mormon Project

Actor Larry Bagby III stunned his agent and manager when two years ago he told them that he was putting a promising career in Hollywood on hold to serve as a Mormon missionary in Argentina.

The Thousand Oaks native had just finished playing one of the lead roles in the Disney movie “Hocus Pocus,” and studios were calling about casting the then 20-year-old in future films.

“Nobody could believe me,” said the square-jawed Bagby, now 22. “My manager and agent kept saying, ‘But you just got off a major motion picture.’ ”

Hollywood or no Hollywood, Bagby, like many young Mormons, had raised $10,000 of his own money to go on a two-year “mission,” spreading the word abroad about the church. Stardom would have to wait.

“I just knew that it was more important than anything else in the world that I could be doing,” said Bagby, who recently returned to Thousand Oaks from Cordoba, Argentina.

Bagby’s rock-solid faith, he says, stems in part from the knowledge that Mormons were once persecuted for their beliefs, forced to flee the East Coast and Midwest in the 1830s and 1840s for Utah and other western states.

In 1846, 238 Mormons escaping persecution in New York state arrived in San Francisco on the ship the Brooklyn after a six-month voyage, marking the first Mormon presence in California.

Now the more than 9.4 million-member Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is one of the world’s fastest-growing churches and a powerful force in American society.

Although Ventura County’s Mormon population is small--about 10,000--the close-knit community grows by about 400 converts every year, with its members among the most prominent citizens in the county.

“I think that our society is becoming far more aware of the [Mormon] faith and people of all faiths, for that matter,” said Grant Brimhall, Thousand Oaks’ city manager and a member of the church’s Thousand Oaks “stake” or regional diocese. “We are becoming, I would hope, far more effective at celebrating our diversity and learning and profiting from our diversity.”

Today, that celebration will come in the form of “Community Work Day,” which commemorates the sesquicentennial of Mormon settlement in California.

Faithful to a Mormon pioneer tradition, church members will roll up their sleeves and participate in neighborhood cleanup projects from Simi Valley to Santa Paula as a way to note the 150 years since the arrival of the Brooklyn on July 31, 1846.

Many of the county’s Mormons say the celebration is important because the pioneers profoundly shaped their outlook on life and their religious convictions.

“I think there is a legacy that has been handed down from this pioneer heritage--a sense of hard work, self-sufficiency and determination,” said Kevin Hamilton, lay president of the church’s Newbury Park stake, which has about 2,500 members.

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A 41-year-old businessman, Hamilton founded Calabasas-based Prime Matrix Wireless Communications in 1986 and has nurtured the fledgling cellular phone and pager firm into a company with more than 100 employees.

“As we have encountered difficulties and problems watching the company grow, I have reflected many times on the faith that these pioneers handed down,” Hamilton said.

Many outside the church know only of Mormons as the young, clean-cut missionaries who come through neighborhoods in pairs, wearing white shirts and name-tags.

Michael Murdock, mission president for the church’s California-Ventura Mission, said there are about 210 Mormon missionaries from other states and countries working in the region, reaching out to potential new members.

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But a far greater number of Mormons have long called the county their home, including church members such as County Counsel Jim McBride, Undersheriff Richard Bryce and retired Municipal Court Judge John Hunter, son of the late president of the church, Howard W. Hunter.

“Mormons are an extraordinarily educated and professional population,” said Rodney Stark, a professor of sociology and comparative religion at the University of Washington. “They have all these virtues: They work hard, don’t skip school, have no scandals. Consequently, you find them in a lot of consequential places.”

Mormons trace the first church presence in the county back to 1926, when Latter-day Saints began meeting in a private Ventura home to worship. After gathering for many years in locations around the city, the church’s current Ventura Stake Center at Mills Road and Loma Vista was built in 1966.

By 1961, church membership in the eastern part of the county had grown to more than 800, but the first regional diocese buildings or stake center did not go up in Newbury Park until 1974.

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As the church continues to grow in the county and around the globe, Murdock said, the faith continues to gain greater acceptance in society.

“It used to be that people had some funny ideas about what the church thought,” said Murdock, a retired executive with the American Cancer Society. “But many people now know someone who is a member of the church and they respect that person’s commitment to a higher principle. I think that they like that the church places such a strong emphasis on the family.”

In fact, many credit the church’s accent on family, self-sufficiency, hard work and on a strict code that forbids alcohol, tobacco and sex before marriage for the church’s appeal.

Since 1980, the church has more than doubled in size, and more than half of its members now are in foreign countries, in large part because of missionary efforts. More than 800,000 Mormons live in California.

Matt Lemmon, an 18-year-old Westlake resident, who plans to leave on a Mormon mission to Argentina in October, said the burgeoning ranks of Latter-day Saints attest to the church’s status as an established religion.

“Some people may feel we are elite or some little cult, but we are not a cult,” said Lemmon, a sophomore at Brigham Young University in Utah and a Westlake High School graduate. “We are a worldwide religion and it really shows when the whole world is accepting the gospel.”

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After going through two months of training at a Mormon center in Provo, Utah, Lemmon will fly to Buenos Aires where he will begin his mission, a sort of rite of passage to adulthood for young Mormons.

Using a network of church contacts in the city, Lemmon will mainly spend his days studying with fellow missionaries and meeting with Argentine people interested in the church to talk about Mormon doctrine.

“I have been saving all my life for this mission,” said Lemmon, adding that he will have to come up with $375 a month to pay his own living expenses. “Kids have their college funds. I have my college and missionary fund.”

Amy Paul, a 32-year-old Newbury Park physician, became a Mormon eight years ago after she began dating her now-husband in college. When William Paul, currently a screenwriter, left on a two-year mission, Amy began studying the Mormon religion and later decided to join the church.

“Going into medicine kind of overtakes your life,” said Amy Paul, who works at a family-care practice in Newbury Park and teaches at Northridge Medical Center. “A lot of doctors get into long hours and making money and lose the balance in their life. By having my faith, my family is so important to me.”

But Paul said she is a rarity in the church as a woman doctor balancing a family with a demanding profession.

“It is certainly an atypical thing for a woman to do in the [Latter-day Saints] faith,” said Paul, a mother of two who is expecting a third child. “The emphasis is on the divine role of the mother, and medicine is interpreted as interfering with that. The training is so lengthy and rigorous.”

According to Bagby, it can also be a challenge to stick to Mormon beliefs while trying to break through in Hollywood. But the actor said he has always remained faithful to his convictions. Bagby said he has turned down several roles in scripts calling for him to smoke pot or drink alcohol.

“I don’t want to portray that image,” said Bagby, who is working with his cousin on making their own film about two boys who find an alien artifact. “I just don’t want my kids to be saying, ‘Well, you did that in a movie.’ ”

As Bagby and other Latter-day Saints in the county observe “Community Work Day,” many said they will spend time reflecting upon the church’s contributions to California history. According to Mormon records, “the Saints” started the state’s first newspaper, opened the state’s first bank and built the first school, to tick off just a few accomplishments.

“I think it is significant to recognize that the early members of the church had a significant impact on California,” said Bryce, the county’s undersheriff, who also is lay president of the Ventura Stake. “Utah isn’t the only place where the church has been established and flourished.”

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Community Work Day Projects

FILLMORE

* Landscape project on C Street, south of Highway 126 near St. Francis of Assisi Church, 8 a.m. to 1 p.m.

MOORPARK

* Cleanup of home at 262 Mallard St., 9 to 11:30 a.m.

OJAI

* Park and Ride lot cleanup, on Ojai Avenue across from Fox Street. All day.

SANTA PAULA

* Santa Paula High School, 404 N. 6th St., between 8 a.m. and 1 p.m.

THOUSAND OAKS

* Many Mansions, 227 E. Wilbur Road, 9 to 11:30 a.m.

* Chumash Indian Interpretive Center, 3920 Lang Ranch Parkway, 9 to 11:30 a.m.

VENTURA

* Riverbed rock project at Sanjon Road and Harbor Boulevard, 8 a.m. to 1 p.m.

For information on the Community Work Day projects, call 630-7624.