The end of the Hill Cumorah Pageant is like a death in the family. Except that faith teaches us that death is only a temporary separation, while the end of the pageant is, forever and always, an end.
Days and dreams, associations and joys, all gone, never to return. The traditions of a lifetime and most of a century cancelled from two time zones away, never to bear fruit in the lives of children and grandchildren and rising generations of believers and friends.
But it is what it is and you can’t kick against the pricks.
But you can run through decades of memories, to say thank you and good bye. Because for me, like untold others, the Hill Cumorah Pageant has been a constant, and a joy, and a constant joy.
It is where, in a moment, I knew that I believed in The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Built on the odd claim that a farm kid from Palmyra, Joseph Smith, visited with God and talked to angels and was led to some inscribed plates of gold in the side of a hill, it is a story that you either believe in or laugh at. And I came to believe in it one summer afternoon waiting to cross Route 21 from a vast expanse of parked cars over to the bowl before the hill where a few thousand chairs had been set up for the evening’s performance.
A lot of people don’t like the church, and each year they protest the pageant, standing on the public right of way along the road, typically shouting crudities and insults, usually into loud speakers that try to penetrate the din of the crowd. That day they were there, yelling at the people crossing the road, insulting and mocking Joseph Smith and his claims. And I heard them, waiting for the deputies to stop traffic and let us pass, and I listened. And as I did, I started to cry. Tears down my cheeks. And in that moment, I knew they were wrong. In a spiritual way, inside me, whispered from above, in a moment of Pentecost, I knew that they were wrong. And I knew that I believed what I believed, and that it was right and true.
And then I crossed the road.
I was in the Hill Cumorah Pageant myself, in its 40th-anniversary year, and reported with a friend from church on my 18thbirthday. It was a great experience, but he got under my skin, and I got under his skin, and our second night there I had a dream. I saw two numbers. I’ve never had another dream like it. Two numbers. And the next morning thinking about it while getting dressed I picked up my scriptures and looked the numbers up as a combination of chapter and verse, and there was counsel for my friend and I, telling us to resolve our problems and get back to our work.
I didn’t come back to the pageant for years. Life took me different places, and it wasn’t until I was married and there were little children that we went back. For a decade or more, we went the first Saturday to see the pageant. I had a thing about sitting in the front row, and in those days you couldn’t save seats, so we’d show up by 9 in the morning, 12 hours before the show was to begin, and set up camp in our seats. Nobody in the family told me I was an idiot, so we did it, year after year. And we had a pretty good view. One year, I invited our congressman to come and I wanted to have good seats so, before work in the morning, I dropped off my son Lee, who was maybe 12 or 14 then, to hold them through the day. It rained. But he sat there. And that night the congressman had a good view, too.
The Hill Cumorah Pageant has always been something of a reunion. You get there early and crane your neck around looking for familiar faces, and usually you find them. People unseen for years, or known from far away, bumping into each other, with happy stories and catching up. A series of beaming arm-around pictures in the family album.
The pageant was also work. Members of the church each summer were given volunteer assignments to attend to various tasks. Usually, for me anyway, it was parking. Standing in a broad pasture waving your arm and smiling, your white shirt and tie gradually covered with the dust of pulverized New York soil. For a string of years I worked security, a plum assignment. You got to carry around a radio and make sure nobody trampled anybody or wandered into places reserved for the cast. One year I spent several nights on a chair at the top of the hill, sitting in the dark through the performance, on the watch for rapscallions who never appeared. Another year, when my EMT card was up to date, they had me unobtrusively shadow a couple of bigwigs, with a medical bag on my shoulder, in case something went wrong.
Over the years, for work, I interviewed various VIPs who were in the pageant cast. The CEO of Kodak, back when that was a thing, the governor of Utah, and Donny Osmond. Donny Osmond who, later, as I sat in the audience and my children stood in the scrum of youngsters accosting him as he walked past, told my kids that he knew me and that I was a pretty good guy.
Those kids, after a few years, would be in the pageant themselves, and the pageant would be in them. My wife was asked to be the volunteer public relations coordinator for the pageant, dealing with reporters and producing stories and videos and pictures to promote and chronicle the play. She said she could do it if she could bring the kids along, and so it has been for about five years that each summer my wife and children have gone off for three weeks or so, to live in an RV beside the Hill Cumorah and spend 12 or 14 hours a day attending to various duties and, for the kids, dressing each night in costume and putting on, with some 600 others, the big play on the hillside.
It is impossible to overstate the impact for good the Hill Cumorah Pageant has had on my wife and young children. They have made some of the best friends they have in life, made the best memories, and tied their hearts to a place and an activity and a way of life. Our years have run from summer to summer, with happy anticipation of the next pageant beginning as soon as the last one ended.
But last year there was covid, and for a year there was doubt, and now there is doom.
The church has largely decided to scuttle all its pageants. And the grand farewell anticipated for this year won’t even be a whimper. After more than 80 years, the Hill Cumorah Pageant won’t be a part of the upstate New York summer. Fortunately, my wife put together a good video of a pageant performance from 2019, and that will be posted on a website. But, beyond that, it is done. No more pageants, and soon drastic changes to the Hill Cumorah and its surroundings, after nearly a century, and it is all gone.
The end of the Hill Cumorah Pageant is like a death in the family.
Because it is.