Word: mormon
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...some 40-odd purported Hughes wills have surfaced, but none have borne the earmarks of Hughes' painstaking attention to detail. The most famous one is the "Mormon will," so called because it was found on an official's desk in the headquarters of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Salt Lake City. The will contains misspellings and references totally atypical of Hughes. It also leaves one-sixteenth of Hughes' money to a former Utah gas-station operator, Melvin Dummar, who claimed to have picked up Hughes in the desert and driven him back...
...Lummis, Hughes' heirs, who number 23 in all, are contesting the Mormon will. They want the estate to be divided according to a formula that would give nearly one-quarter to Lummis' mother and distribute the rest among the others. Davis, meanwhile, is starting his own case in which he will argue that although a written will has not been found, Hughes' real and declared intent was to leave his whole fortune to the medical institute. Even in Las Vegas, no one is willing to bet how long these trials will take or what the outcome will...
...then physical deterioration. Boston Irishmen, he notes, have a far higher coronary death rate than their brothers left behind in the more closely knit culture of the old sod. Nevada, a freewheeling singles-oriented state, has a higher rate of death from heart disease than neighboring Utah, with its Mormon tradition of close family ties. One study showed that in Roseto, an Italian American community in Pennsylvania, there were only one-third as many heart attacks as in culturally diversified surrounding towns. The study's conclusion: unusually close family and community ties in this town helped keep down...
Unknown Scribe. On the Mormon side, the church's historian, Leonard Arrington, responded that the new attack on the Book of Mormon meant "absolutely nothing." The writing of the unknown scribe, he said, "follows on the same page and precedes on another page material written" by others. How, he asked, could twelve pages written by Spalding match the paper of pages that precede and follow them...
Officially the Mormon Church remains unruffled. It is welcoming the researchers and handwriting experts to Salt Lake City to study the original documents. Said a spokesman: "We still declare that the Book of Mormon is precisely what we have always said it was-a divinely revealed scripture of ancient American people...