I've told my story both at gatherings and in more than one place here at the website, but given that this is asking a specific question, I'll just do a, for me, summary of the beginning years:
- My father disputes this, but I started teaching myself to read when I was shy of 4 years old (he claims I was just sounding out vowels and consonants -- and didn't know what I was saying, out loud or in my mind -- but he has never had an explanation for how I could also be using the words I was learning in sentences; oddly enough -- ha ha -- my second son taught himself to read at age 5 and then a year later was teaching his 4-year-old brother how to read; all I did was read to them; the younger one started talking before he was 8 months old, so I guess this is just some hereditary thing; anyway . . . ) and was reading big books out loud to teenagers and adults by the time I was 5.
- The first book I read cover to cover was the Bible. I started reading it in the car in June in California just after finishing Kindergarten in Cupertino. (That time I skipped a good bit of Numbers and most of Kings and Chronicles, so several months later I made myself read just them, because I wanted to be able to say I'd read every word.) I finished the summer in North Tonawanda NY, spending some time each day reading aloud from the Bible to a couple of gorgeous teenage girls who were fascinated that I could actually read (now, if my Dad had accused me of pretending to read just to keep those girls close enough to ogle, at least that would have hit close to the mark). I took the Bible with me to Wurlitzer Elementary each day and read when I was done with my assignments, which was usually about the time the teacher finished explaining how to do them. I finished that project just as we were all beginning to take up our Dick and Jane books.
- It didn't escape me even that first time that several very important and holy men in Scripture had had two wives, and none of them had problems described that came close to the problems my mother and father already had in their marriage, so I just accepted that it was legitimate to be married to more than one woman. I might have slightly wondered why I never met a family with two or more wives in it that first time, but it didn't sink in enough to cause me any distress.
- In the summer between 1st and 2nd grade (this was 1961), I re-read the Bible all the way through this time without skipping the boring parts. In September, I had a new Sunday School teacher, so I asked her why we never talked in Sunday School about men having more than one wife (blank stare), whether Lutherans were allowed to do it ("No!"), followed by inquiring into which Protestant denominations might find it acceptable ("None that I know of!), and why no one seemed to have more than one wife in the New Testament ("Well, maybe that's why Jesus didn't get to have any wives, to make up for all the sin in the Old Testament!"), after which I was basically sent to the Principal's office (which in this case was the Pastor's office), a practice with which I had already become familiar in 1st grade at regular school. This ended up being the day I decided to become a pastor myself (which lasted until I was a senior in high school, when my then-pastor informed me that Christ being Resurrected was a myth), and I'm sure it had everything to do with the fact that, even though he very strategically never answered my question about no extra wives in the New Testament, at least he didn't pull the old shades over my eyes like almost every subsequent 'man of God' by telling me that it was abolished somewhere in there -- and he emphasized that the Sunday School teacher must have been overly flustered but had been entirely wrong about Jesus Christ being punished for any specific sins of the past but instead had laid down his life to absolve all the sins of every believer.
- I did some more reading here and there of the Bible but didn't do any further comprehensive reading of it until my next cover-to-cover in Summer 1963.
- Prior to that I had my first poly experience (did I mention that I never went through latency?; you'll have to look it up, if not). Second grade was kind of dry ground for me as far as girl action went, but in 3rd grade I ended up with a sweet girlfriend who was both a Roman Catholic and an identical twin. My parents ultimately forbade me from associating with her or her sister because of my parents' abhorrence of Catholicism, but that was months later, and in the meantime, the two twins started pulling tricks on me so that I would often not know who was which, and, because we were just in 3rd grade and never got around to actually discussing anything, I'm really not sure to what extent either of them ever became aware how long I very eagerly played along as if I didn't have a clue -- because I was quite enamored with both of them.
So, the first time I heard of Biblical plural marriage was in 1959 the summer before Kindergarten, and the first time I realized that it was something I wanted to do was in 1962 with the twins. I have given up on it altogether more than once, but since then I have never stopped knowing that it was something I desired to participate in.
My father -- I know, he keeps popping up in this story -- would probably also say that I was aware of plural marriage even earlier than all that, because he had been hinting to me for years back then that the extra woman who was always 'visiting' at one of his brothers' house was actually a second wife, and that had begun back before I was born, beginning during the pregnancy of my oldest cousin on that side of the family, back when my uncle and his wives were all just turning 17, in 1950.
but at least they looked clean and their kids looked happy aside from the storm troopers in their homes.
