SHE FIGURED, as she always did, that things would work out for the best. So on that June day in 1951, fresh up from Pioche, Nev., she walked into the Deseret News and asked for a job. A reporter's job is what she had in mind, although she had only graduated from high school two weeks before.
She had no experience, unless you count her time as Pioche society correspondent ("The Smiths spent last weekend in Las Vegas") for the Caliente, Nev., Herald. She wanted to be a writer, but she was thrilled when the Deseret News offered her a job as an errand runner. She was on the premises, at least, and she figured, as she always did, that things would only get better.And in fact they did. She went on, eventually, to interview governors and senators, to cover ground-breaking medical stories, to write education articles that affected legislation and policy in Utah. And now, 44 years after that first hopeful day, Twila Van Leer is retiring.
"Big talent, small ego," an editor once said about her. So of course she'll be embarrassed by all this attention. "I just sort of flopped into it and slopped through it," she says, in typical Twila understatement, about her career and her life.
For several months this past winter a bright yellow sign hung in the news room: "Caution: You are now entering the Twila Zone," it warned. The sign hung over her desk, which indeed has always been a twilight zone kind of spot, a little realm of surreal calmness in spite of the usual clutter and flutter of paper and deadlines. Through any chaos, Twila has always been unflappable.
Of course chaos is relative, especially when your relatives include 12 children. Twila's have included two step-children, eight of her own and two adopted children. "I used to have this impression that I could do anything," she explains now.
She chronicled some of that anything in "Life Is Just a Bowl of Kumquats," published by Saturday Review Press in 1972.
The Van Leers were living in Montana then, where Twila was a part-time reporter and weekly columnist for the Great Falls Tribune in between stints at the Deseret News. These were the days when children would spill pudding in her typewriter or wind bubble gum around the platen and get their tongues frozen to neighbor's doorknobs, and Twila would march placidly onward. It was during this time, just several months after giving birth to baby No. 8, that the Van Leers decided to adopt a baby from the nearby Indian reservation.
She knew that, to an outsider, it looked like an impulsive and foolhardy plan. What they didn't understand, she explained in her book, was The Van Leer Theory of Vanishing Returns: If something is not going to matter in 50 years, there's no point in worrying about it now.
"In the matter of adoption," she wrote, "the reasoning went like this: If in 1968 we adopt a ninth child, thereby doubling the number of diapers to be washed, meals to be spoon fed, trips to the doctor, cookies crumbled on the floor, etc., etc., ad infinitum, will it really matter in 2018?
"Not nearly so much as the fact that we'd have had the association of another unique human being in the give and take of life, which is, after all, the essence of living."
Twila's give and take included another adoption and a baby lost to SIDS. One of the adopted children turned out to have fetal alcohol syndrome, which has left her retarded. Now an adult, she still lives with Twila, as does a Chilean student whose family Twila met while reporting a story in Chile.
Those of us who have worked with her over the years have noticed that the give and take of Twila's life mostly involves giving on her part. "If I get to Heaven and Twila's not there, I'll know I'm in the wrong place," says Deseret News assistant city editor Angie Hutchinson.
Hutchinson first met Twila when they both were covering the medical beat, Twila for the Deseret News, Hutchinson for the Salt Lake Tribune. They would run into each other as they covered various medical stories, but they were competitors, not best friends. So Hutchinson was surprised when, at her wedding, Twila presented her with a homemade quilt.
Twila gifts are legendary. Most new Deseret News progeny get a hand-knitted sweater or booties, and there are always vegetable gifts from Twila's garden. She makes her own bread and sews or knits many Christmas presents and does her own plumbing. She once raised a 165-pound pumpkin. She raised five of her children as a single parent.
She's a fast writer and a fast learner and she does her crossword puzzles in ink. She inherited her love of words from her mother, and for years, while Twila was living in Montana, the two carried on a correspondence in verse.
The first story she ever wrote for the Deseret News was an obituary, which she cut out and pasted in a scrapbook, long since mislaid. Since then there have been thousands of stories, and more than 50 writing awards.
She won an American Academy of Pediatrics Journalism Award in 1979 for her story on the conjoined Hansen twins. Four years later she won the American Heart Association's national Blakeslee Award for her coverage of Barney Clark's artificial heart.
And sometimes the accolades were more subtle. After her 1991 series on Utah trust lands, detailing how students were getting shortchanged, the Legislature appointed a task force to look into the allegations. One state education official has called her "the mother of Utah trust land bills."
Lately she's been spending her time bleary-eyed in front of microfilm, combing back issues of the Deseret News and other sources for her centennial history series. She plans to continue the series after her retirement. She also plans to volunteer in the schools, continue her volunteer work with the State Library for the Blind, spend time with her 26 grandchildren, and go to college to get the degree she always wanted. She hates being idle almost as much as she hates having someone write a tribute about her.
Anyway, she's leaving tomorrow, and the rest of us will have to muddle on without her dreadful puns on the interoffice e-mail, and her crazy pumpkins at Halloween, without her quiet strength and her talent and her kindness.
"I know you're supposed to become cynical somewhere along the way," she said recently. "But I forgot."