In the early-morning darkness of August 1, 1984, flames shot some fifty or sixty feet into the sky. By daybreak, as word spread through the local Mormon community, members’ hearts sank. Their gleaming new Belmont chapel, nearly complete, had been gutted by fire. And the blaze, they feared, was no coincidence. For a faith that had known its share of persecution, the suspicious nature of the fire was deeply unsettling. “I don’t know when I’ve felt lower,” Kent Bowen, a local church leader, said later.
Tensions had been growing among Belmont’s Mormons and others in town. Some locals objected to the $1.6 million chapel going up on the church-owned wooded plot on Belmont Hill—opposition that church members felt had anti-Mormon overtones. Neighbors said their property values would decline. The local zoning board had initially refused to allow parking on the site, before a compromise was reached. The church urgently needed the new building. Several wards were now crammed into the Cambridge meetinghouse. Space had run out, and parking was a nightmare. The new Belmont chapel not only would host new wards in Belmont and neighboring Arlington, it would be a jewel befitting a flourishing church. Members had given additional money for the building fund, including widows on fixed incomes who insisted on helping. Some church members had worked as a group doing inventory at area department stores to raise funds. Others had started a small consulting firm and donated the proceeds to the cause.
It fell to Mitt Romney to heal his hurting congregation. A few years earlier, in 1981, Romney had been called to lead a Cambridge ward, which had led to his becoming bishop of the Belmont ward when it was created in 1984. As bishop, Romney was intimately involved in families’ lives, counseling and guiding them through marital problems, illness, unemployment, and other struggles. He orchestrated church efforts to help the needy within the congregation. He led lessons on scripture and delivered sermons on Sundays. And he interviewed members to determine their fitness to enter the sacred Mormon temple outside Washington, D.C. But the fire presented a new challenge for Romney, who cut short his vacation on Cape Cod to return to the scene. His ward was barely a few months old, and already it faced a serious crisis. Not only did the congregation lack a gathering place, members felt demoralized. Romney said later that, in addition to the parking dispute with the town, there had been other hints that the Mormons weren’t welcome. “Some people in Belmont thought of Latter-day Saints as bizarre, and we were not part of the church community,” he recalled in an interview with a Mormon magazine.
Then something unexpected happened. As the church embers cooled, so did the tensions. The day of the fire, offers of help began pouring in from other churches in Belmont and from town officials. As Grant Bennett recalled, “Many of the religious communities in town approached Mitt and said, ‘We want you to know that we welcome the Mormons to Belmont, and we think what’s happened is terrible, and you are welcome to meet in our building.’ ” Romney, knowing the fire had set the chapel project back months, wanted to accept all the offers, but some of the other church buildings simply wouldn’t work. So he and his fellow leaders accepted help from three of them—a local Catholic parish, an Armenian church, and a Congregational church. They also accepted the town’s offer to use the town hall.
It was a complex situation, both logistically and emotionally, and church members said that Romney handled it deftly. “One of the things that impressed me was how fast he thought on his feet,” recalled Connie Eddington, a church member from Belmont. Romney, mindful that they were worshipping in borrowed space, established ground rules for his congregation. He outlawed food, which church members had routinely used to keep their children quiet on Sundays. “It was hard, but we did it,” Eddington said. “I had little ones, and they did not have Cheerios.” And Romney organized a cleaning plan, assigning Mormon families to return to the churches early Monday morning to mop the floors and leave the facilities cleaner than when they’d found them. The experience of sharing buildings with other denominations resulted in the Mormons feeling more at home in Belmont, and Belmont becoming more accepting in return. “It turned out to be a huge blessing to all of us to worship in their churches that year,” Eddington said. “Everyone’s feelings softened toward one another.” It also led to new friendships and new traditions, some of which persist almost thirty years later. One of the churches whose space they used, First Armenian Church, invited members of the Mormon congregation to sing and play instruments in its annual Christmas Eve concert. “There are still members of our congregation who go to that service,” Bennett said. When the rebuilt Belmont chapel held an open house the year after the fire, nearly three thousand people came.
Within the family, Romney’s zany side was well known, causing both laughter and eye rolls. He loved to goof around with his sons, loved making jokes, even if they sometimes fell flat. As a missionary, he had sometimes assumed the voices of cartoon characters in letters home. Now, as he took on larger roles within the church as an adult, his fellow Mormons got glimpses of this mirthful instinct.
On one Saturday morning at Romney’s home in Belmont, Philip Barlow and another counselor were meeting with Romney, their bishop, to review the state of their congregation. For some reason that Barlow can’t remember, Romney brought up the singer Michael Jackson. “I was a little surprised at his pop-icon consciousness,” Barlow recalled. But he was even more surprised at what came next. “He just said, ‘Oh, yeah!’ and he stood up theatrically and started to ooze out a pretty credible rendition of ‘Billie Jean’ and moonwalked gracefully backwards,” Barlow said. He couldn’t believe what he had just seen.
Those who worked closely with Romney said he was serious about his faith but frequently made wisecracks or injected levity into their work. Ken Hutchins, who held leadership positions under Romney during Romney’s tenure as stake president, said that church meetings could sometimes feel like a duty. But not when Romney was leading them. “He had an engaging personality, and that didn’t stop at the door just because he was ministering over spiritual things,” Hutchins said. “You’d go away, and you’d say, ‘I gotta tell my wife about that.’ ” Romney’s church colleagues said he was warm, accessible, and a good listener, if not terribly good at remembering names. “He was reasonable, accommodating, and imaginative,” Barlow said. In fact, Barlow was so taken with Romney’s analytic mind and executive ability that he wrote to his mother at the time and told her that his bishop could be president of the United States. Douglas Anderson, the family friend, is a Democrat who doesn’t share Romney’s politics, but he said, “His leadership has been obvious to the people who know him best and who’ve known him longest.”
At times Romney was a willing delegator. “He let the people around him kind of fulfill their responsibilities and drew out of them what their strengths were,” Hutchins said. “And that made them feel better about who they were.” But there were many times when Romney just wanted to take care of things himself. This seemed to be his nature: headstrong and self-assured, at times stubbornly so. He put it to a church friend once that Romneys were built to swim upstream. In other words, leave it to him when things got sticky. When Tony Kimball became Romney’s executive secretary in the Boston stake, one of the first things Romney told him was that he need not keep Romney’s schedule. He would keep his own. Later, while Romney was still stake president, a group of nine or ten Laotian youths from the Lowell area, north of Boston, needed a ride to a church gathering in Cambridge. “Next thing I know, he’s driving them in a van,” said David Gillette, who led the church’s Boston mission program from 1991 to 1994. “He could have asked a hundred guys to do that for him, but he did it himself.”
This hands-on mentality extended far beyond the confines of his official church duties. One Saturday, Grant Bennett got up on a ladder outside his two-story Belmont Colonial intent on dislodging a hornets’ nest, which had formed between an air-conditioning unit and a second-floor window. Things didn’t go so well. The hornets went right at him, and he fell off the ladder, breaking his foot. The ne
xt day, Bennett was forced to skip a leadership meeting with Romney at the church. Romney noticed his absence, learned what had happened, and went over that afternoon to see if there was anything he could do. He and Bennett chatted for a few minutes, and then Romney left. Around nine thirty that Sunday night, Romney reappeared. Only this time, it was dark out, Romney was in jeans and a polo shirt instead of his suit, and he was carrying a bucket, a piece of hose, and a couple of screwdrivers. “He said, ‘I noticed you hadn’t gotten rid of the hornets,’ ” Bennett recalled. “I said, ‘Mitt, you don’t need to do that.’ He said, ‘I’m here, and I’m going to do it. . . . You demonstrated that doing it on a ladder is not a good idea.’ ” Romney went at it from inside the house, opening the window enough to dislodge it. Soon the hornets’ nest was gone.
Everyone who has known Romney in the church community seems to have a story like this, about him and his family pitching in to help in ways big and small. They took chicken and asparagus soup to sick parishioners. They invited unsettled Mormon transplants to their home for lasagna. Helen Claire Sievers and her husband once loaned a friend from church a six-figure sum and weren’t getting paid back, putting a serious financial strain on the family. Suddenly they couldn’t pay their daughter’s Harvard College tuition. Romney, who was stake president at the time, not only worked closely with Sievers’s family and the loan recipient to try to resolve the problem, he offered to give Sievers and her husband money and tried to help her find a job. “He spent an infinite amount of time with us, all the time we needed,” Sievers said. “It was way above and beyond what he had to do.” Romney has also upheld his obligation to tithe, which means he has personally given millions of dollars to the Mormon church over the years.
On Super Bowl Sunday 1989, Douglas Anderson was at home in Belmont with his four children when a fire broke out. The blaze spread quickly, and all Anderson could think of was racing his family to safety. “There was no thought in my mind other than ‘Get my kids out,’ ” he said. “I was not thinking about saving anything.” He doesn’t remember exactly when Romney, who lived nearby, showed up. But he got there quickly. Immediately, Romney organized the gathered neighbors, and they began dashing into the house to rescue what they could: a desk, couches, books. “Whatever they could lift off the main floor,” Anderson said. “They saved some important things for us, and Mitt was the general in charge of that.” This went on until firefighters ordered them to stop. “Literally,” Anderson said, “they were finally kicked out by the firemen as they were bringing hoses and stuff in.” After the fire was finally out, Anderson, Romney, and other church members shared a spiritual moment on the front steps of the charred house. A few weeks earlier, Romney had given a talk on what he called his father’s favorite Mormon scripture, which reads in part, “Search diligently, pray always, and be believing, and all things shall work together for your good.” By coincidence, Anderson and his teenage daughter had been in their study discussing that very passage when the fire began. Outside on the steps, Anderson recalled, “we talked about how even in a case like this, if we tried to be true to the faith, it could turn out to be a positive thing.” Over the many years since, Anderson said, his family has seen that come true.
Romney’s acts of charity extended beyond just the church community. After his friend and neighbor Joseph O’Donnell lost a son, Joey, to cystic fibrosis—he died in 1986 at age twelve—Romney helped lead a community effort to build Joey’s Park, a playground at the Winn Brook School in Belmont. “There he was, with a hammer in his belt, the Mitt nobody sees,” O’Donnell said. Romney didn’t stop there. About a year later, it became apparent that the park would need regular maintenance and repairs. “The next thing I know, my wife calls me up and says, ‘You’re not going to believe this, but Mitt Romney is down with a bunch of Boy Scouts and kids and they’re working on the park,’ ” said O’Donnell, who coached some of Romney’s sons in youth sports. “He did it for like the next five years, without ever calling to say, ‘We’re doing this,’ without a reporter in tow, not looking for any credit.”
Though the Romneys established themselves as the go-to family when people required help, there were times they were the ones who needed support. On one occasion, Romney, feeling soreness in one of his legs, believed he had pulled a tendon. A couple of days went by, and his leg began changing color. “By the time he got to the hospital, he had some kind of very serious, massive infection,” Grant Bennett recalled. When the severity of it became clear, Romney asked if members of the church would come to the hospital and administer a priesthood blessing, which is given to the sick. In his own moment of vulnerability, Romney looked to the same source of strength that he so often drew on for others.
In the spring of 1993, Helen Claire Sievers performed a bit of shuttle diplomacy to resolve a thorny problem confronting church leaders in Boston: resentment among progressive Mormon women at their subservient status within the church. Sievers was active in an organization of liberal women called Exponent II, which published a periodical. The group had been chewing over the challenges of being a woman in the male-led faith. So Sievers went to Romney, who was stake president, with a proposal. “I said, ‘Why don’t you have a meeting and have an open forum and let women talk to you?’ ” she recalled. The idea was that although there were many church rules stake presidents and bishops could not change, they did have some leeway to do things their own way.
Romney wasn’t sure about holding such a meeting, but he ultimately agreed to it. Sievers went back to the Exponent II group and said they should be realistic and not demand things Romney could never deliver, such as allowing women to hold the priesthood. On the day of the meeting, about 250 women filled the pews of the Belmont chapel. After an opening song, prayer, and some housekeeping items, the floor was open. Women began proposing changes that would include them more in the life of the church. In the end, the group came up with some seventy suggestions—from letting women speak after men in church to putting changing tables in men’s bathrooms—as Romney and one of his counselors listened and took careful notes.
Romney was essentially willing to grant any request he couldn’t see a reason to reject, Sievers said. “Pretty much, he said yes to everything that I would have said yes to, and I’m kind of a liberal Mormon,” she said. “I was pretty impressed.” Tony Kimball said that when they reviewed the list a year later, right before Romney left the stake presidency, he was amazed at how many of the women’s suggestions had been implemented. Many were small, procedural matters, but they added up to a significant concession. One shift Romney allowed was to let women who led auxiliaries within the stake speak to congregations in a monthly address on behalf of the stake presidency. The role had historically been afforded only to men who served on the twelve-member High Council. Sievers was afterward assigned to address a Boston congregation. She felt it was about time women had a chance to stand up as the men always did; say to the congregation, “I bring you greetings from the stake presidency”; and deliver the sermon. Ann Romney was not considered to be sympathetic to the agitation of liberal women within the stake. She was invited to social events sponsored by Exponent II but did not attend. She was, in the words of one member, understood to be “not that kind of woman.”
Mitt Romney showed flexibility, too, in choosing his leadership teams. While he was stake president, one of his counselors went through a divorce. The counselor asked to be released from his duties, knowing the church wanted only married men in the role. But Romney refused. His executive secretary at the time was Tony Kimball, who was single and therefore, in Kimball’s own words, also an “iffy” choice for someone serving in a position of authority. “Mitt was kind of proud of the fact that he had a counselor who was now divorced and an executive secretary who was single,” Kimball said. Romney had once said that he felt strongly about tapping single Mormons for leadership posts within the stake. “They feel needed and wanted,” he said. “And that’s part of our church experience.” That church experi
ence under Romney’s leadership was not so rosy for everyone, though. As both bishop and stake president, he at times clashed with women he felt strayed too far from church beliefs and practice. To them, he lacked the empathy and courage that they had known in other leaders, putting the church first even at times of great personal vulnerability.
Peggie Hayes had joined the church as a teenager along with her mother and siblings. They’d had a difficult life. Mormonism offered the serenity and stability her mother craved. “It was,” Hayes said, “the answer to everything.” Her family, though poorer than many of the well-off members, felt accepted within the faith. Everyone was so nice. The church provided emotional and, at times, financial support. As a teenager, Hayes babysat for Mitt and Ann Romney and other couples in the ward. Then Hayes’s mother abruptly moved the family to Salt Lake City for Hayes’s senior year of high school. Restless and unhappy, Hayes moved to Los Angeles once she turned eighteen. She got married, had a daughter, and then got divorced shortly after. But she remained part of the church.
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