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Show 'Death of an American': The story is familiar, but it was never told this way amazing and quite objective. objec-tive. If there is any slant, it is that we see the story more intensively through the eyes of the Singers. We are immersed im-mersed in Vicki's journal, John's speeches, their scriptures scrip-tures and rituals. Maybe there's too much of this, but the authors want very much for non-Utah readers to understand the workings of the Mormon culture, and the thinking of .the Singers. There are empathetic figures on the other side: Ulcer-ridden Sheriff Ron Robinson was called gutless when he failed to capture John Singer, and became a "murderer" after he did. Juvenile Court Judge L. Kent Bachman had to grapple grap-ple with the Singer dilemma after being on the bench for a few weeks. Arresting officer Lewis Jolley cried when he heard his bullets had killed Singer. I wish the authors could have explored the drama of South Summit Superintendent Superinten-dent Val Edrington. His son had once been saved from drowning by John Singer. Later, he reluctantly signed the complaint to charge Singer with child neglect. And ultimately, he was credited with one of the most notorious statements in the book, when he allegedly said, "John Singer has broken the law, and if pressing the issue means that John Singer will be killed, then that's the way it will be." The authors don't ignore the less-than-perfect aspects of Singer's life. They detail the conflicts in Singer's group, particularly two disciples who wanted to marry Singer's teenaged daughter. "Death of an American" will fascinate locals because many of the main characters are our friends and neighbors. neigh-bors. To us, the Singer case is like an airplane that crashed in our back yard. We feel awed by it. We can also feel proud, too, of local author Fleisher. He and Freedman have supplied sup-plied not only a thorough document of a tragedy, but a book that sparks questions about the paradoxes of the Religious Soul and the American Character. by Rick Brough In 1945, the Nazi empire lad crumbled into ruins, fourteen-year-old John Singer was traveling 300 miles across the war-torn :ountry to join his family in Munich. At Leipzig, his train was stopped by damaged track, and John, on foot, quickly got lost. But a kindly German Ger-man sergeant said, "Follow me" and led him for seven hours across the city to a train that was headed for Munich. Singer boarded, and turned tur-ned to look at the sergeant. But the soldier had disappeared. disap-peared. Later, he testified that his "sergeant" was one of the Three Nephites in the Book of Mormon disciples who were given immortality so they could continue their good works. This incident and others convinced John Singer that the Lord protected him and sanctified his principles. So why should he worry about what the South Summit School District thought of him? Of course, nobody thought a minor dispute over home education would end in bloodshed and nationwide controversy. The whole story is brought to life in "Death of an American" by David Fleisher and David Freedman. That title is accurate. Despite his accent, John Singer was born in Brooklyn. During his childhood in Hitler's Germany, he resisted his father's Nazism (coming to hate any form of regimentation) and turned to his mother's LDS faith. He emigrated to the U.S. after the World War, served in Korea, then came to Marion, Utah to work for his uncle Gustav Weller and learn the fundamentalist Mormon faith at his knee. In the Kamas area Singer was known as a TV repair man who put people off with his loud, laughing talk. In church, he had an aversion to women teachers, and challenged LDS lessons with quotes from Scripture. Certainly he didn't seem like a bridegroom for Vicki Lemon, the South Summit High homecoming queen. When they announced their engagement in 1963, Vicki's relatives said she'd been hypnotized, and tried to forcibly for-cibly drag her away from Singer intending to take her to a mental institution! The elopement was high drama. Singer drove off from his farm one night, seconds ahead of an angry auto posse, rendezvoused with Vicki in Salt Lake, and took her to Nevada to be married. It was a hint of what was to come 15 years later, on a cold January day. In 1973, John Singer, now an excommunicated Mormon, Mor-mon, withdrew his three children from the South Summit school system. He considered it a Sodom and Gomorrah that purveyed drugs, immorality and race-mixing. race-mixing. (The final straw for him was a textbook that showed Washington, Martin Luther King, and Betsy Ross together.) The singers decided they would educate their children at their home (a small parcel par-cel given to John by Gustav Weller.) The curriculum would be from bought textbooks, McGuffey's Readers, and John's wealth of practical skills. When the school board told him he was breaking Utah's compulsory-attendance law, Singer's letter replied, in part, "Go to hell, you and your kind, for making such unrighteous demands." It's heartbreaking to see that, despite strenuous efforts effor-ts to reach some compromise, com-promise, Singer and the county officials were never speaking the same language. The book shows that, for Singer, it was a simple question of his freedom of religion, which the juvenile court refused to grant him. Following a Book of Mormon scripture, he wrote three appeals ap-peals to be left alone, which the courts rebuffed. But the law felt Singer could only claim his constitutional con-stitutional rights through proper legal channels. And in the meantime he had ignored the state's programs to test or supervise his home education. After being on the verge of arrest a couple of times, John holed up on his farm, with his family and a few disciples. The media spotlight fell on him, and intensified in-tensified when he took a good friend, Shirley Black, as his second wife. With enemies arrayed around him, Singer came to believe the Last Days were imminent. The Marion farm, stockpiled with guns and ammunition, would become a refuge from the mobs. Maybe he thought he would be protected, as in those last days of the World War. Fleisher and Freedman have put together the story we got in glimpses in our newspapers. Singer confronts confron-ts the Establishment in several episodes of lively narrative. And the book climaxes with a tense, meticulous account of the arrest attempt that ended in Singer's death. The authors opted not to write in a New Journalism style. (At its best, New Journalism Jour-nalism combines empathy with cool analysis of news events; at worst it paints an event as a good guy-bad guy story with lachrymose ranting.) ran-ting.) Fleisher and Freed-man's Freed-man's "just the facts" technique makes the turbulent tur-bulent events all the more |