The Hill Cumorah Legacy Project

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Part of Interview with Patricia (Toi) Clawson, Thursday, April 7, 2022

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Interview with Patricia (Toi) Clawson
Thursday, April 7, 2022
The Hill Cumorah Legacy Project
Recorded over Zoom
Interviewee: Patricia (Toi) Clawson
Interviewers: Leo Makalsky and Nikita Massaria
Duration: 47:21
Transcript
[00:00]
Nikita Massaria: OK. So, to start, we’re just going to start by introducing ourselves, and we
would like you to introduce yourself as well. My name is Nikita Massaria. And, Leo, do you
want to introduce yourself?
Leo Makalsky: I’m Leo Makalsky.
Nikita Massaria: And could you please introduce yourself, Toi?
Toi Clawson: Sure. My name is Toi Clawson, and the purpose of the video has to do with my
responsibilities with the Hill Cumorah Pageant, as I worked in public affairs for seven years back
in the mid… 2002 to—2005, actually—2005 to 2012.
Nikita Massaria: Great. Thank you so much. We’ll start with the first question. Leo?
Leo Makalsky: You stated your name. Where are you from?
Toi Clawson: Okay. My father was in the Army, so I grew up all over the continental United
States. I’d even lived in Hawaii before it was a state. So, when my parents settled down, they
went back to where they were both from, which happened to be Utah. So, I grew up, my high
school—junior high and high school years were in Utah, and then my husband and I moved here
in 1986, and we have been in the Rochester area since 1986. So, I—it’s been 35 years of being
from New York, and we love it here.
Leo Makalsky: Does that mean that you were—that you went to Brigham Young University?

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Toi Clawson: I did go to Brigham Young. My husband was born in Germany, and he also
attended Brigham Young, and that’s where we met and got married, and started our family in
Colorado. And then, as I said, in ‘86, we moved here and had two more kids after moving to
New York.
Leo Makalsky: Did you—do you have a profession outside of the work you do for the Church?
Toi Clawson: Yes. I was [an] architectural illustrator doing rendering for architects and interior
designers. I started that business, let’s see—19–—this is ancient history now—1980, I registered
in Colorado, doing illustration, and then, when I moved here, I continued doing some illustration
and then got into some other art. I taught at—the Rochester [Museum &] Science Center had art
classes for many years, and I have taught adult education and even did substitute art teaching for
public schools.
Leo Makalsky: So, do you still do that now?
Toi Clawson: OK, I’ll try to be brief about this. In 2015, my husband and I were asked to be
mission leaders of the Sierra Leone Freetown Mission in West Africa, and that is usually a threeyear assignment, but due to Ebola, the country had been closed, so we got in in the fall of 2015.
And as we were approaching our second—going into our third year, we asked if they would like
us to stay an additional year, and that was accepted by the Church, so we were 4 years in Africa.
And during that time, our home was rented out to other families. And when we came back during
the pandemic, in 2020, we decided we wanted to move back into our own home, so, as one
renting family moved out, we moved in. So, other than that time in Africa, Rochester has been
our home. So, we have had experiences with almost 300 African American [and] Polynesian
young men and young women, from 21 different countries, [who] were in our mission. So, I had
a lot of experience during those years doing public affairs [laughs] in a kind of different way

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with those young people, and that was really great. I am no longer doing art classes or other
things like that, though I do organize an online group here, the Genesee Valley Calligraphy
Guild. I do that every month.
Leo Makalsky: Cool. Nikita?
Nikita Massaria: That’s very interesting, thank you. Would you mind telling us when and why
did you join the faith?
Toi Clawson: Okay. I was a child growing up in a family that were very active, and so I got
baptized when I was eight, but I would say, like many other people, I wasn’t really converted to
the Church until I was about 15 years old and had a very personal, wonderful experience, where
it wasn’t just, “I’m doing this because of my parents.” It was like, “[5:00] I personally believe
this,” and so that has infused all the other decisions I’ve made since then.
[Leo says something indistinctly]
Toi Clawson: And I guess that’s one of the reasons that, when you talk about Hill Cumorah
Pageant, that’s one of the things that, for many of the young people—teenagers, young adults,
even some adults—they have very personal experiences while they were in the cast or crew of
the Hill Cumorah Pageant. So, it was kind of nice to be around people who were experiencing
some of those same things.
Nikita Massaria: Yeah, that sounds great. Thank you for answering that. Leo, do you have our
next question?
Leo Makalsky: So, what led you to joining the Pageant?
Toi Clawson: So, if someone—we moved here in ’86, and from the time we came, our children
were hearing from other Latter-day Saints in the area, you know, teenagers saying, “Oh, this is so
cool, and it’s so wonderful if you get to be in it, but your whole family has to do it together.”

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And my husband was working for a data processing company here in Rochester (I’ll just say, it’s
Paychex), and for him to take 17 days off—completely [laughs] take 17 days off—was a huge
ask. And so, the first time that became possible was 1995, and so our family applied along with,
you know, 13- to 15-hundred other cast members who were applying, and we were accepted in
1995. We did that, and it was an immersive experience, unlike anything that our family had ever
done before, ’cause you go on vacation, and you have downtime and everything, and the Hill
Cumorah Pageant, there is almost no downtime. Our children loved it. We—by the time we did
it, we had a 16-year-old, 14-year-old, like, an 11-year-old, and a five-year-old. And all four of
them, as we finished, the first [laughs] thing they said is, “Can we do this again next year?” and
my husband was like, “Absolutely not.” [laughs] It’s just like, it was very intense, and for
families, it’s like 10 to 12 hours a day. My husband did get a major role, and so that meant we
would frequently be staying out there longer because he had to go through the dress rehearsals
and stay until 11:00 or so. So, it was it was really intense, but incredibly fun, and I knew that, as
much as my children wanted to do that, it wasn’t going to happen for Dad.
So, some more years went by. My oldest kids went off to college, and my two sons said,
“Please, can we do this?” So, in 2000, I volunteered to work on the beard and wig staff, where
you’re actually helping the cast get ready every night, and putting the beards on the major
characters, and the wigs and hairpieces and headdresses and stuff. So, that was a volunteer where
I was opting in and saying, “I’d like to help.” The next year, I did not work to continue that. But
then, the following year, I was asked if I would handle the food services, feeding over 400
people every evening during the performances, and that experience was a different side. So, I
was a cast member in ’95, I was support staff in 2000, and then it was 2003 and 2004 that I did
the food services. And that was—again, it takes a lot of people to help. You know, it’s not just

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the six or seven hundred who are onstage; it’s all the people who are helping with other pieces of
that.
Leo Makalsky: So, when were you able to become the public affairs director for the Pageant?
Toi Clawson: That took place in 2005, and that was something that my husband and I were
asked if we would take that on together. So, in 2005, it was our first time to do that. The
responsibilities for that were really to try and help the—to help draw media attention, and then,
once the media came to get stories, to help them get things that would be interesting to tell their
readership or, in the case of television, what their viewers would be interested in. So, we learned
as we went, what things were. There had been some other people before us who gave us
information of how they had done things. That—my husband, because he got other
responsibilities—I continued [10:00] doing that from 2006 to 2012 and had some high points of
interest. In 2008, when Mitt Romney was looking to be a potential Republican nominee [for
President of the United States], the first time, we had some interest by NBC [sic; ABC] Nightline
to come, and they wanted to film about the Pageant. In fact, I sent a link to both of you of that
snippet, from the ten-minute thing that NBC [sic; ABC] did.1
Leo Makalsky: Oh, I was able to catch that.
Toi Clawson: Okay. In those cases, NBC [sic; ABC] Nightline had to send their contracts of
what their stipulations are, and our Church headquarters countered with, “Here’s what you have

1

An article based on the Nightline segment is available on the ABC News website: Dan Harris and Mary Marsh,
“Mormon Pageant Unites Hundreds,” ABC Nightline, Aug. 10, 2007, 9:52 AM, saved in the Internet Archive
Wayback Machine on Sun., May 8, 2022,
https://web.archive.org/web/20220508221436/https://abcnews.go.com/Nightline/story?id=3459111&page=1. A
bootleg copy of the Nightline segment is available on YouTube: Jeramy Richter [YouTube user], “‘Mitt Romney,
Mormonism, & Hill Cumorah Pageant On Nightline’” [videotape of the August 2007 ABC Nightline segment “The
Romney Effect”], YouTube, uploaded Oct. 24, 2008, https://youtu.be/g1lNW7-sVFo, saved in the Internet Archive
Wayback Machine on Sun., May 8, 2022,
https://web.archive.org/web/20220508222325/https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1lNW7sVFo&list=PLEfs9naIlNhSbkPz-Wjo13V5TCvnHP0Lg&index=5.#.

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to do if you’re going to be on Church property, and you’re filming,” and so forth. It was it was
very interesting to have Dan Harris come and be interviewing different cast members and then to
see what the final edit looked like when they actually put it up. Another highpoint came—you
can imagine, in Western New York, you are very limited in how many outlets there are. When I
first started, faxing people was how you were getting your message out to news outlets, and then
it’d be, “Send it in an email,” and hashtags came into use while we were doing this, and—just
Facebook and the rise of social media and all kinds of things were just kind of coming on.
So, in 2011, as we were looking ahead to the 2012 season, the next year, another friend
and I put up a very rudimentary Facebook page that essentially was just saying, “Here are going
to be the dates for the 2012 Pageant,” and just a little bit about that. And the Church at that point
had not gone into social media, and so Dwight Schwendiman, who was the Pageant President at
that time, got a phone call from Salt Lake, saying, “We don’t want you to get ahead of us. Please
take down your Facebook page.” So, we obediently took it offline.
And—then, about February, an interesting thing happened where, in Mesa, Arizona,
where the Church has another large Pageant for Easter, the people put up a Facebook page, and,
in two weeks, they had 24,000 likes. And that made the Missionary Department at Salt Lake kind
of re-evaluate what their aversion to Facebook had been. And they said, “Hold on. You know,
maybe you’ve got an idea here.” There were six different Pageants around the United States that
were related to the Latter-day Saints, and they got all of us on—this was pre-Zoom, but—they
got us on a phone call where we were all getting information about how to set up webpages and
looking at different things that we might use for—because each Pageant is a little bit different.
Some of them are musical; some of them are pageants more like what the Hill Cumorah was. But
as we put all these different things together, and we were starting to look at, “How do we want to

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message and what are the things we want to say to those potential people who might be coming
to watch the Pageant?” it really became an exercise for us to recognize what a great tool
Facebook would be for the people out west, California, around the world, who wanted to know
the dates, and what had hitherto been very much a—you know, put it on the Church’s message
boards, and then try to get it out to congregations and to get into newspapers and everything
else—Facebook just leapfrogged right into where people were getting their information from. So,
that was really nice, and my final year, 2012, was the first year that we really got into that.
And it also coincided with the 75th anniversary of the Pageant, that it was, at that point,
the longest-running outdoor pageant in the United States. And soo, we had some celebrations
that year of specific things that showcased what the Pageant had been like back in the late ’30s,
World War Two, when it was—one year where it wasn’t shown, and doing a whole tent that was
focused on the 75th anniversary. Well, then, the Book of Mormon musical and Mitt Romney’s
second presidential bid meant that we had a very different environment. And, whereas before, we
had been shaking the bushes, trying to get people [15:00] to come, like, “Can we get the Finger
Lakes paper?” and “can we get Syracuse?” and somebody downstate, and so forth, in 2012, we
had AFP TV from France. We had Discovery Channel. We had the Disney Channel. We had Al
Jazeera. We had New York Times, New York Times religion editor, the L.A. Times, NPR Radio,
Wall Street Journal. We had everybody coming, and it was a whole [laughs] different ballgame
because then, each morning, as I would be doing a press review of that day of who’s coming into
town, what kind of interviews are they looking for, how are we going to—who will we assign to
be with them as they’re [craning?]—you know, doing audience interviews and that sort of
thing—it was an exceedingly wonderful thing to have, but at times a little bit overwhelming.
And one of the nice things that happened was that many people came just because they were

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very tired of covering Mitt Romney on the road or, you know, other things, and they were just
looking for a different angle to talk about, some background thing about Latter-day Saints, and
the Pageant provided a little-known, interesting trivia bit. But what they went away with were
[sic] very different than what they thought they were coming for.
The New York Times had sent a film crew because they really wanted to say, you know,
“Who are these Mormons, and what’s it like at Pageant?” And we allowed them to go backstage
and to be in where the cast were. They came to the devotionals before performances. They came
to rehearsals. They came to all kinds of things. And finally, the last night they were there, the
producer pulled me aside, and she said, “I just don’t get this at all.” And I said, “What?” [laughs]
She said, “I have been here three days, and I have never even heard Mitt Romney’s name
mentioned until I asked someone, ‘Well, what do you think of Mitt Romney running for
president?’” She said, “I expected to find this being a love fest because you’ve got this Mormon
person running for president, and that there would be banners and paraphernalia for Mitt
Romney,” and she said, “there are people here who have not even decided if they want to vote
for him.” And she said, “This isn’t what I thought it was at all.”
And so, I asked her, I said, “What’s the story you’re going to tell?” She said, “I’m
dumbfounded by all these people who are willing to come together to do something at great
personal sacrifice, that the only reason is: They believe it!” And so, she talked about—she said,
“I had no idea they did service projects; they did all these things.” And she said, “And just to get
a Broadway-sized musical up,” you know, “having over seven thousand lighting instruments, to
have soundboards that are bigger than are used for rock concerts, the sound system that is
trucked in—I mean, all the things”—everywhere she went, she just kept saying, “this is so much
bigger than I thought it was. I thought it was just, you know, a few hundred people get together

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and put on a little show.” And she said, “This really is so much more than I thought it was, but
the reason behind it is what I didn’t understand.”
When the Wall Street Journal sent—[thinking] well, let’s see—John Turner is his
name—and he actually is a professor—at that time, he was a professor, I think at George
Washington University. [Editor’s Note: As of spring 2022, John Turner is a professor of
religious studies at George Mason University.] And John is very familiar with Latter-day Saints;
he’s done several books on Brigham Young and other early Church historians—er, history
figures. And when he came, he called me ahead of time, and he said, “I can’t be there for
performances; my family’s going through, but I really want to do a story.” So, we brought him
backstage and had him just interview some of the people who were going to be major characters
and so forth. And he stopped me as we were on the pathways behind where the costume center
was, and he said, “I just have to tell you something.” He said, “I’m a father with kids,” and he
said, “every single teenager that you’ve stopped or who’s said, ‘Oh, hi, who are you?’”—he said,
“I have never met so many respectful teenagers in my life.” And he said, “My kids, my oldest is
only 12.” And he said, “But if I could have a 16-year-old who is willing to just stop [laughs] on a
sidewalk and have a conversation with me, like all of these young people that I’ve met here, I
would be the luckiest dad alive.” And I’ve kept up [20:00] with John a couple of years after that,
when he was doing another book on Mormonism, and he said, “My experience among the cast
there still stands out as one of the most respectful and awe-inspiring things about the families
who made that commitment to be in the Pageant.” So, his piece on the Hill Cumorah Pageant
was very different than other people[’s].
But, in 2012, we also had Slate Magazine come, and Max Mueller came, and he said,
“I’m not interested in who those Mormons are. I want to talk to the anti-Mormons.” So, he went

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out front, because there are lots of protesters who come the nights of the performances, and Max
Mueller just interviewed them. He let them share all [laughs] that they wanted to, and then he did
his piece for Slate, and in his, he said, “These people obviously have no idea what they’re talking
about.” And then, he took the five or six points they made and talked about how misguided they
were.2 It was [laughs] definitely surprising to me to read his piece, but it was also great.
Discovery Channel, they were with us for three days. They actually wanted to film in the
Sacred Grove, which took some more Church clearance to have that happen. But they wanted to
have some experiences with cast members who could essentially tell the Joseph Smith story, or
who could talk about their personal reasons for “Why did you come here with your family?” And
so, being the point person for all of the media, that was my opportunity to set up interviews, and
for the most part, because of how the Church tries to run public affairs, I needed to be close by,
because as they had questions or, like, “Did we hear that right?” or whatever, a few times we had
to interrupt some of the… The Church has a number of Church history sites around—the Joseph
Smith Farm and some other places—and so, at times, we had to interrupt things, and that’s where
my credentials with the Pageant, I would say, “I’m sorry. Film crew’s going to come through.
You’ll have to wait half an hour while they are going through the Joseph Smith log cabin,” or
something like that.
So, as we were orchestrating all of those different pieces, I think the stories that came out
of that afterwards were helpful, and they weren’t stories that I crafted. They were individual
interviews with real people. And in some cases, the reporter who had come from Paris, he—after
being in the Sacred Grove, he said, “Would you mind if I just went back and spent half an hour

2

The article in question is Max Perry Mueller, “‘A Spirit of Persecution,’” Slate, July 19, 2012, 9:11 AM, saved in
the Internet Archive Wayback Machine on Sun., May 8, 2022,
https://web.archive.org/web/20220509010714/https://slate.com/human-interest/2012/07/the-hill-cumorah-pageanthelps-explain-mormon-identity-photos.html.

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by myself?” And I said [chuckling], “You’re—this is open to the public. It’s just when we have
film crews that I have to be present.” And he said, “I may never make it back to the United States
again, and I want to go back and feel in that Sacred Grove what I just felt for an hour and a half.”
And so, he went back into the Sacred Grove by himself and just sat on a bench and pondered.
Later that day, when he found me at the Hill Cumorah Pageant, he said, “That’s one of those
moments that I’m going to treasure.”
So, some of the people who came were just getting a story, getting back, trying to edit it,
trying to make their deadlines, and they were in a big rush, but the cameraman of the Discovery
Channel, he said, “My wife and I have four kids,” and he said, “the family’s here.” He said,
“When I go into dressing rooms, and we were doing things, and I saw how much love there was
between dads helping their kids get ready and moms getting their daughters’ hair braided and all
these things,” he said, “when I go back to my wife, I’m going to tell her we need religion in our
life, because my kids don’t treat each other [laughs] this way. I want to do something to capture
what you guys have here.” So, those were some of the things that the average person in the Hill
Cumorah Pageant would never see, would never know, would never be privy to, but because of
my role for those seven years, I got a front-row seat to those kinds of things.
There were times that the news agencies had a certain angle, and they came with their
story already written about how the Mormons were, and all I could do is, you know, give them
an opportunity to find out for themselves why people came, what their motivations were, what
the experiences were [that] they had while they were there, and it was always educational.
[laughs] Every year, as I would wind down from the 17 days, I would just—I would always be
[25:00] intrigued at what I learned that I never had imagined would happen at the beginning of
the season.

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e: I understand that you said that people experienced a lot of growth in their faith during the
Pageant. Do you think this is mainly because of a personal experience with the Pageant itself or
because of the bonds formed socially during the Pageant?
Toi Clawson: Oh, no doubt that the two are interrelated. The first year that we were in it, our 16year-old—I mean, if you think back, 1995 was probably before you two were born. It—it was
[laughs]—I don’t know how old you are, but back then, if you wanted to stay connected to
somebody, you got their phone number, but it would usually be their mom or dad’s because, you
know, back inv’95, no teenagers were having phones, and you had a phone that was connected to
the wall. So, for my children to stay connected to the friends they made in Pageant in 1995, it
really took a lot of work. You would snail-mail letters, and you would try to call a home number
and hope that you could get somebody. So, by the time my youngest child, the fifth of our
children, was going through it, if she wanted to stay in touch with somebody, she’d get their
email, she’d get their personal phone number, she’d get all that information, and staying
connected was much easier. We had some families that my children got to know because I was in
it for those consistent seven years back-to-back, so there were times where we’d be coming back
together with people who were from California or Arizona or Texas or Canada or wherever, but
we were coming back together to spend those 17 days, and so, during that time, there are a lot of
wonderful experiences you have together. It’s almost like a family reunion of sorts. And even
though it is 17 days of grueling [laughs] time, it really forms a bond.
So, my youngest child had to make my schedule happen. Even though she was younger,
she had to be going out with me, and if I had a 5 AM call, because one of the local television
networks was going to be trying to get their feed to get their morning show in, I had to meet the
truck out there at five o’clock in the morning, which means my daughter had to go with me at 5

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AM, and then we would be there all day long. And if we were staying till the close, because she
would be in the cast, would stay until the end of the run-through or the cast rehearsals, we
wouldn’t be going home, back to our home, like, 20 miles away, till midnight. So, it was not
something that you do lightly or that you say, “Yeah, I’ll go out for an eight-hour day.” 16 to 19
hours was kind of all the performance nights. That’s what it was for me because I had early
mornings, and I had to stay till all the reporters went home.
Leo Makalsky: Thank you for that story. So, on a bit of a less light note, how did you react to
the cancellation announcement in 2019?
Toi Clawson: I actually was in Africa when it was announced that it would be closing. And the
first thought that I had was, “Wow. I’m surprised it lasted as long as it did,” for two reasons. It is
a ton of work, and it’s not just local people. It involves people, as I say, from all over the
country. I had several friends who lived in Texas, who came every single year to work in the
beards and wigs. The beards and wigs were fabricated on a level that is only known for television
and close-ups because they were really high-class. It was not just, you know, something that’s
slapped on and very poor quality. It was television-quality. And so, those things were being
made and fabricated by some of the women who worked in the beards and wigs. They would
take things home and be working all year long to actually fabricate those pieces. So, when all of
those people were coming together so frequently and doing so much that’s very intense in
whatever their specialty is, it [30:00] was a huge drain on families, frankly. And the people here
in Upstate New York, I think—Rochester, Palmyra—it was almost more than they could bear. It
was really, really a lot of work. People loved doing it, but it meant that they couldn’t do
something else for that time every July. So, I think that was starting to be fraying for some
people.

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And another piece of it is, starting in 2017, the Church began filming, using a different
medium, to tell the stories of the Book of Mormon, and that essentially is what the Hill Cumorah
Pageant was [sic] its purpose, was to tell about Jesus Christ through the lens of the Book of
Mormon. So, as the Church began to do filming out in Utah at a fantastic set out there in Goshen,
Utah, the way to reach a larger audience had started being put in place. The first of those films
actually was released in the fall of 2019. My husband and I came back from Africa in early July
of 2019. So, a few months later, as the Church released the first of these Book of Mormon
videos, they were segmenting some of the stories that were told in the Hill Cumorah Pageant and
doing it in a very different way, with a new medium that was much more personal, could be
translated into different languages, [and] could have worldwide impact.
It really was astonishing for many of my friends, who—in Sierra Leone—who are not
literate. They believe the Book of Mormon to be the word of God, but they don’t know how to
read because, for one thing, they had a ten-year civil war, and 1,200 schools across the country
were blown up and demolished and learning—70 percent of the population in Sierra Leone is
illiterate. The adult population just can’t read. For those people to be able to access stories of the
Book of Mormon on their phone? It was [an] incredible thing. Those same people would never
have the opportunity to come to the United States, to a small place in Western New York, and
see the Hill Cumorah Pageant. It was thoroughly exciting to me to see that. And my husband and
I continue to have contacts in West Africa and it’s—obviously, not everybody has a smartphone,
but for people who do, to be able to share that with friends and family, and to watch something
and to hear it, that is communicating the message that the Pageant was trying for those seventyplus years to do.

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Leo Makalsky: I just had a quick follow-up. Were you glad that they had pursued this different
avenue to tell the story of the Book of Mormon, instead of doing the Pageant?
Toi Clawson: When I heard that they were starting to film, I had mixed feelings, partly because I
know how the personal experience of being in, like, a Broadway show, how that impacted my
children. Leo, you asked me how I felt about the Pageant being announced that it was going to
close versus my children. Let me share with you for a moment [laughing], to put my two
daughters, who are married and have teenagers—both said, “Mom! How could they stop this? I
really wanted to come and bring my kids to be in the Hill Cumorah Pageant because I’d like them
to experience what I got to experience.” So, when I said that I could see it was wearing on the
local people, and that it’s a huge expense for the Church—it also was a big risk when people
come together, and you have people breaking their ankle or falling off a stage or doing other
things. Risk management did not like [laughs] the Pageant was going on because you have
children as young as two years old on stages that are 30 feet up in the air, in pitch dark, and when
you do a “lights out,” the only thing you have is the track lighting at the edge of the stage to say,
“Do not step over this barrier, or you could fall 30 feet.” That’s not something that OSHA
[Occupational Safety and Health Administration] wants to have, and it’s not something that the
Church wants to keep having. [laughs] So, on one hand, I was recognizing that the risk
management had been assumed for a long time by the Church, that they felt it was worth having
those risks. [35:00] But the other side of that, with my own family saying, “I would have loved
to have come and have my children experience the same thing I did,” there’s always a point
where that’s going to end, and you’ll be the last ones to be doing something.
Leo Makalsky: Our final question, if, Nikita, you want to ask it.

16
Nikita Massaria: Yup. Thank you so much. Our last question is, how did you feel personally
when COVID impacted your involvement with the Church, and how did it affect your
relationships with other people who were involved with the Church? Were you able to see them
as often? And did you feel like you were able to communicate as effectively?
Toi Clawson: Hmm. So, COVID didn’t bring an end to my connection with the Pageant because
mine ended back in 2012. But are you talking about, just, organizationally? How did COVID
affect us and our worshiping?
Nikita Massaria: I just meant the Church, not the Pageant.
Toi Clawson: The Church, okay. When—let me back up a little bit—when we were in Africa in
2018, the Church announced that they were going to be moving to a new way of doing their
Sunday meetings. I’m not sure if you’re familiar, but Latter-day Saints usually have three hours
of church [laughs] up until that point, where you would have a sacrament service for the first
hour, and then you would have a Sunday School, and then you would have youth and children
and the women’s group and the men’s group, and… So, it’d be three hours. And in 2018, they
changed the pattern, and they said, “From now on, we’re going to have two hours of Church, and
we want people to have more Church teaching happening at—in their homes.” And, as part of
that, they introduced a new curriculum called Come, Follow Me, and it was taking each of the
major scriptures, the four different scriptural texts that Mormons have, and they would have a
home-centered study program.
So, as I say, literacy is a challenge where we were. The specific country we were in, in
West Africa, has much higher illiteracy than Ghana or Cote d’Ivoire or other places in West
Africa. So, for Sierra Leone to have a Come, Follow Me program, and to be having people teach
at home, was a real stretch because many of the people couldn’t read those lessons to their

17
children. They loved having the colored pictures and so forth, but they needed someone who
could read to help them with that.
When we got home from our mission in 2019, we were staying with family because our
home was being rented out to another family at that time, so we stayed with our daughter and her
husband and four kids. When COVID hit, all over the world, people already had a home study
program right in their own home that would guide them through weekly messages that they could
study as a family. So, with my grandchildren and my daughter and her husband, my husband and
myself, we continued having Church every Sunday even though there was no meeting house to
go to, and we weren’t singing hymns with other people and having the Church services that we
were connected to normally for the rest of our lives. During those pretty much—let’s see—twothousand… 2020, in the fall, we started meeting again—so, for the six months or so, we were
still having Church every Sunday, but it looked very different. It was very personalized. It was
very unique. And we found a lot of comfort in this fact that we had something set up beforehand
that would help guide us in a scripture study.
And it was also kind of wonderful that, periodically during that time, more of the Book of
Mormon videos were being released. So, it kind of aided, kind of like teacher’s aides for parents,
to be able to have these videos, that they could show something [40:00] and then, on a more
intimate level, talk to their kids, you know, on whatever level they were at. I had different
conversations with my teenage grandsons about some of the things that they were watching. The
Book of Mormon begins with a story of a family, and Nephi is the main character, and he’s—it’s
the Book of Nephi that has been written. But his brothers, who don’t believe their father, and
they’re, you know, kind of saying, “Our father’s a visionary man. We don’t believe he’s a
prophet. We don’t want to—” and they show a little bit of the questioning between those two

18
brothers, where one of them asks the other one and says to his older brother, “What if it’s real?
What if God really did speak to our father and told him to leave Jerusalem?” And the older
brother replies and said, “Well, even if it’s real, he should keep it to himself.” And that little
interchange, it’s not scriptural, but it’s conducive with what we learn about their characters. That
little interchange allowed me to have a conversation with my grandson to say, “What do you
think of that? If someone is questioning, ‘Is this person really speaking with God?’ and someone
else says, ‘Well, even if they speak with God, they should just keep it to themselves,’ what do
you think of that?”
So, I felt like, during the pandemic, we’d been given tools so that we could keep having
the sacrament. We don’t have a paid ministry where you have to go to a priest for having, you
know, the sacraments and those kinds of things. We have a lay ministry, so every father—
grandfather, in our case—young men who are 16 years of age—they have the priesthood, and
they could bless and administer the sacrament every Sunday. So, my husband is in his 60s. He
hadn’t been blessing the sacrament for many, many years. But the sacrament prayers are right in
the scriptures, so Church continued at home as a home-centered Church all through those
months. And in some places, especially in Polynesia, where we’re doing some of our literacy
work, and also in West Africa, they’ve had [COVID] resurgences, where they’ve had a mandate
where no one can meet together. So, in those cases, where a father can read, he’s been able to
bless the sacrament and still give that to his family.
Leo Makalsky: Okay. We want to thank you for joining us today and giving us such delightful
insight on your experiences with the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
Toi Clawson: Thank you for using the whole name, Leo.
Leo Makalsky: I tried. [laughs]

19
Toi Clawson: There was one thing that I thought of last night that happened—and I can’t tell
you the year for sure; I think it was either 2010 or ’11—but NPR had sent a reporter, NPR Radio.
And when the guy arrived at the Hill Cumorah Pageant, it was a Saturday morning, and I said, “I
don’t know what you’re going to do with radio because this is a visual thing. You know,
television comes, and we have people taking pictures for the New York Times and that kind of
thing. How can you capture this with sounds?” And he said, “Well, I’m going to get a different
take on it.” And so, he went to the costume area and so forth, and he was—he dragged his hand
along the costumes that had all these beads and things that looked like bone and other things
from a distance. And then, he started to describe what the costumes were like and what different
things were. And so, he stayed for the performance, and at the end of it, he said, “Do you mind if
I catch some audience members as they’re leaving?” And I said, “That’s fine.” You know, I just
had to be the one to introduce and say—to introduce him, so that they knew that this was being
recorded for NPR Radio.
And—so, this elderly couple was getting up, and they had brought their own lawn chairs,
and they were starting to walk out of the Pageant[’s] grassy area. And so, I asked if they had a
moment for an interview. They said yes. And so, he started to ask them questions, and he asked
them, you know, what their favorite part was, how far they travel to come, and that sort of thing.
And the wife was describing—she said they live near Buffalo, New York, and that they have
been coming almost every year for more than ten years. And he said, “Well, what brings you
back?” And she said, “It’s the feeling I have here. There is just something special about seeing
Christ and feeling that he knows me. [45:00] And I always leave feeling like I want to be better.”
And so, he thanked them, reached over, and thought he’d turned off his recorder. And
then, they started to move away, and he said, “Oh, and you are Latter-day Saints, right?” And she

20
turned back around, and she said, “No! I’m a very active Catholic.” And then, they just
proceeded to go to their car in the dark, and he looked at me, and he said, “OK, I’m Jewish. I had
no idea that you were telling a story that begins in Jerusalem 600 years before the time of
Christ.” And he said, “I know why I might be interested in this. I don’t understand why someone
who’s a Catholic would be interested in this.” And then, he looked—because he said, “It’s
almost like that couple were a plant. Everything they said was how spiritual this was and how it
just made them feel so good, and that they kept coming back year after year.”
And then, he realized his tape had ended. He didn’t get any of the interview that he
thought he had. And as he was getting ready to go, I said, “I hope you realize this is one of the
reasons that our Church does this. To have something that you come and feel so good about
when you leave is essentially our gift to the community, a reminder that God knows each one of
us, and that this is really our task to care for one another and to bring each other along.” And he
nodded. He had a wonderful day there, but it had been an experience that reminded me that it
wasn’t just telling our story about the Book of Mormon. For every person, they saw what we did
through the lens of their own experience, and that story was powerful for them. However they
came, we hope that they left better.
Leo Makalsky: Thank you. That’s unfortunately all the time that we’ve got. I know Nikita has
classes to get to.
Toi Clawson: All right, thank you both.
Nikita Massaria: Thank you so much.
Toi Clawson: All right. Have a good rest of your week.
Nikita Massaria: You, too.
All three, staggered: Bye.

21

Dublin Core Metadata for the Interview
Title: Interview with Patricia (Toi) Clawson, Thursday, April 7, 2022
Subject: Hill Cumorah Project, Theatre, Social Media, Public Relations, Journalism, Print News,
Television News
Description: Toi Clawson was a public affairs director for the Hill Cumorah Pageant. She was a
cast member in 1995 for the Pageant. In 2005, Toi and her husband were asked to do public
affairs for the pageant. They did this until 2012. She worked long hours, with early mornings,
and she had to stay until all of the reporters went home. She and her family were disappointed by
yet understanding of the 2018 announcement of the Pageant’s ending. One of her notable social
media attempts was when Toi shared information about the Pageant on Facebook around 2012.
Unfortunately, she was contacted and asked to take down the social media page by the Church.
Then, sometime later, a similar situation happened with another pageant in Arizona, but their
page got so much positive attention in such a short amount of time that the Missionary
Department re-evaluated its stance and began to think of Facebook and other forms of social
media as tools to use for spreading religious information.
Creator: Patricia (Toi) Clawson, Nikita Massaria, and Leo Makalsky
Source: Hill Cumorah Legacy Project
Date: Thursday, April 7, 2022
Contributor: Nikita Massaria and Leo Makalsky
Rights: Produced under an oral history collaborative deed of gift agreement with no restrictions
and nonexclusive license.
Format: M4A (audio), PDF (transcript)
Language: English
Identifier:
• Massaria_Makalsky_ToiClawsonInterview_04-07-2022.m4a
• Makalsky_Massaria_ToiClawsonTranscript_04-07-2022_Edited.pdf