By Michael Patrick O’Brien–
“I once was lost, but now am found…” – John Newton, Amazing Grace
In 1925, during a visit to her mother’s home town in Corning, Ohio, girl scouts from the local United Brethren Church gave little Catherine Longmore a brown leather bound edition of the New Testament. The 11 year old carried the book back home to Colorado, launching it on a remarkable journey that ended just recently.
With her book nearby, Catherine grew into a fine and intelligent young woman. She earned a degree from Colorado State University and, in 1936, about a decade after bringing the treasured volume home to Fort Collins, met and married Dr. Floyd R. Mencimer, a new veterinarian. The young couple then moved to my hometown, Ogden, Utah, to begin Floyd’s vet practice and start a family together.
They had two daughters and a son. During the World War II years, Floyd was a captain in the U.S. Army and the family moved around. They lived in Denver, Chicago, San Francisco, and Monterey, before returning to Ogden. The book went with them. Back in Utah, to supplement Floyd’s income from treating both large and small animal patients, the Mencimers started a veterinary supply business.
Almost every day for two years I walked past their downtown business office, a converted old house, on my way to St. Joseph’s Grade school in Ogden’s West Side. The vet supply business thrived. One of their regular customers was the Abbey of the Holy Trinity, established in 1947 in nearby Huntsville, Utah. The Utah Trappist monks kept many herds and flocks of animals on their 1800 acre farm, including beef cattle, horses, dairy cows, and chickens.
Catherine was a hard worker, and a skilled businesswoman, but she was not blessed with long life. She died unexpectedly in 1970 at age 55, leaving her son Skip to care for the family business along with his father Floyd, and setting her book off on the next phase of its amazing journey…to the Trappist monk library in Huntsville.
I am not completely sure how it got there. The Mencimer family was Methodist, but one of them may have donated the book to friends who were local Catholic school officials, and who then later gifted it to the monks. Or, maybe Floyd himself gave it to his monastic friends and customers, in honor and memory of his dearly departed wife, who had known and worked with the monks too.
Whatever the means, the beautiful brown Bible excerpt soon stood with some 25,000 other volumes in the monks’ library. Occupying a significant corner of the Quonset hut monastery, the library was wonderful indeed, featuring works in English, Latin, Greek, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and other languages.
As devoted scholars, historians, and theologians, the monks used their books to teach, study, write, and learn, and to advance their spiritual quests. They must have just enjoyed reading a good book from time to time too, because the library also included some Zane Grey western novels. The most popular item in the library? The daily edition of the local newspaper, The Ogden Standard-Examiner.
As often happens for even the most worthy of human endeavors, however, the books endured longer than the monks. With their numbers too few and too old, the beloved monastery closed in 2017 after 70 years nestled in the picturesque Ogden Valley. The final two librarians, Brother David McManus and volunteer Don Morrissey, had to find new homes for the monks’ books.
The story of that noble effort could be its own whole blog post, but in summary they contacted schools, other libraries, different monasteries, and many other places with any possible interest in monk books. They placed many of them, but the task was challenging because the titles are not all ones of general interest and we do live in the electronic age of Google and YouTube.
Thus, the valiant efforts of these last librarians fell short. Many boxes of the books ended up at Weber State University in Ogden for a general book clearance sale. When most of these volumes did not fly off the shelves (apparently, few folks today need Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologica in French), Weber State contacted my friend Gary Topping, an historian and the archivist for the Catholic Diocese of Salt Lake City.
“Hey Mike, do you want to help me figure out what to do with the rest of the Utah monastery’s library?” Gary said one day over the phone. I had spent many a happy boyhood day at the Abbey so Gary knew a monk-o-phile like me could hardly resist such an offer. Together, we traveled to Ogden and reviewed hundreds of books and since then have tried to find them a new home.
We added some books to our own personal collections and sent some to friends. My mostly non-Catholic co-workers at the law firm were fascinated by the collection (now housed on shelves in an empty office near mine) and, to my surprise, have claimed about a hundred or so of the books. They were slightly disappointed, however, that no hand-illustrated medieval monk parchments were available.
During this find-a-monk-book-a-home process, I stumbled upon the weathered brown New Testament dedicated by a handwritten inscription to Catherine Longmore. Immediately, I could see that someone had loved this book. The leather cover is soft and supple. Its pages leave a dusty old paper smell on your fingers and hands. Several gospel passages are dog-eared. My daughter Megan even found a tiny dried four leaf clover pressed between the chapters of one of the epistles.
I was enamored, intrigued, and tempted to keep it, but then I grew curious…just who was this Catherine Longmore and what was the backstory behind this 100 year old book?
Thanks to newspapers.com, I soon learned of Catherine’s Ogden connections and about the Mencimer family. A Google search led me to Catherine’s granddaughter, Stephanie Mencimer. Stephanie also attended my high school (St. Joseph’s in Ogden) and works as an investigative journalist in Washington D.C. I sent her an email through the “scoops hotline” of her magazine.
Stephanie connected me with her father Skip, Catherine’s only son, who now lives in Park City, Utah. Skip and I exchanged emails and then met in early December. He told me the family’s story, including how he lost his mother when he was only about 25. I told him about the monks’ library, and gave him back his mother’s book. He was grateful, delighted, and immediately took it home to show the precious heirloom to his sisters, wife, children, and grandchildren.
Kurt Vonnegut once wrote, “The death of a library, any library, suggests that the community has lost its soul.” I am still sad about the demise of my friends the monks’ library, but maybe putting Catherine’s Bible back in her family’s hands has helped us get a little bit of that soul back.
Now, for the rest of the monks’ books…
