Provo Isn’t Friendly by Accident, Gosh Darn It

Maybe it’s time to quit poking fun at Provo.

Sure, everyone’s friendly here. Really, really friendly. Even the folks in Salt Lake City call Provo “Happy Valley.” But why hold it against Provo that people say “aw heck”? What’s wrong with raising your kids in a place that’s as squeaky clean as a Disney production?

“Oh, we’ve heard all the jokes, and actually they’re pretty funny,” says Mary Gordon, who manages a women’s clothing shop. “We ask for it because we are peculiar. We even poke fun at ourselves. It’s good to be different.”

Provo, an Olympic venue for preliminary rounds in men’s and women’s hockey, is 90% Mormon. It doesn’t stray far from the teachings of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ founder, Joseph Smith, who believed that in every person is the capacity to be like God. People here don’t scowl, curse or smoke. They ooze good neighborliness. It’s all in the Book of Mormon, which visitors will find in the bedside table of their hotel rooms.

Provo, settled in 1849 by Mormon farmers, is arguably the most conservative city in the most Republican county in the nation’s most Republican state. In all of Utah County, not a single Democrat holds elected office. And in all the United States, only one city, Fargo, N.D., is safer than Provo in terms of violent crime, according to last year’s FBI statistics.

“These are good people, people with an inner compass that drives them to do the right thing,” Mayor Lewis Billings said. “It’s not because we’ve got a cop out there watching them; it’s because they want to do what’s right.”

Last year Billings was instrumental in getting the minor league baseball team in Helena, Mont., to relocate to Provo. Luckily, its major league affiliation changed in the transfer, and the Brewers became the Angels. The club came with the understanding it could not play home games on Sundays or sell beer at Miller Field--restrictions that would be financially difficult for a professional team in virtually any other city.

The dominant influence over Utah’s third-largest city (population 110,000) is Brigham Young University, whose 30,000 students are included in the census and help make Provo the nation’s youngest city with a population of 100,000 or more.

Its clean-cut enrollment comes from 50 states and 110 countries and includes a small percentage of non-Mormons.

Most undergraduates have spent up to two years on a Mormon mission. More than 43% of the American students have lived abroad and 70% are fluent in a second language. The university suspended classes for the duration of the Olympics so 500 students could volunteer as interpreters for the Games in Salt Lake City.

To many Gentiles--as Mormons refer to all non-Mormons, including Jews--BYU seems unreal because of the three-paragraph honor code students sign when applying: to abstain from smoking, drugs, drinking and premarital sex; to lead chaste and virtuous lives; to use clean language; and to uphold the doctrine of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which owns BYU. In a recent poll, 74% of alumni said the code was an important factor in their decision to attend BYU.

“It’s not a difficult adjustment because most of us had made the decision to lead that kind of life before we applied,” said history major Julie Harris, who spent 18 months as a missionary in Venezuela. “The code reflects who we were in the first place. It’s empowering, not restricting.”

“Actually it’s an easier challenge than most of us had adjusting to high school, where we faced being the only one who didn’t do this and that,” said Mike Smart, a 1997 BYU graduate. “The code made us free for the first time in years to be ourselves.”

Provo traces its roots to Brigham Young, who led the first Mormon pioneers to the Salt Lake Valley. Young later sent settlers south to Provo, now just a 40-minute drive from Salt Lake City, to seek new farmland.

Young wanted his people to be farmers, not miners. The miners’ lifestyle was raucous, unstable and disruptive to families. Provo was laid out in quarter-mile grids, with a substantial farmer’s home on each corner and the land he worked outside the town boundary. Streets were wide enough for a wagon hauled by eight oxen to make a U-turn. Everyone was expected to be as industrious as the first settlers, who planted five acres of potatoes the day they arrived in Salt Lake after a grueling 111-day journey from Illinois.

Provo’s streets are still wide, with Freedom Avenue hardly more than a stone’s throw from the foothills of the snow-capped Wasatch Front. The freshwater Lake Utah lies on the city’s front doorstep.

It is a stunning scene and may help answer a question raised by an Olympic visitor from Brazil the other day: “What is it that makes these people so cheerful and nice? They keep saying ‘thank you’ and ‘good morning’ and using words like ‘wonderful.’ ”