Fawn M. Brodie - Early Life

Early Life

Fawn McKay was the second of five children of Thomas E. McKay and Fawn Brimhall. Born in Ogden, Utah, she grew up in Huntsville, about ten miles (16 km) east. Both her parents descended from families influential in early Mormonism. Her maternal grandfather, George H. Brimhall, was president of Brigham Young University. Her father, Thomas Evans McKay, was a bishop, president of the LDS Swiss-Austrian mission, and an Assistant to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. Brodie's paternal uncle was David O. McKay, an apostle in the LDS Church when Brodie was born, who later became the ninth president of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.

Despite the prominence of her family in the church, they lived in genteel poverty, their property burdened by unpayable debt. The young Fawn was perpetually embarrassed that their house did not have indoor plumbing.

Fawn early demonstrated precociousness. At three she memorized and recited lengthy poems. When a whooping cough epidemic convinced Brodie's mother to homeschool Fawn's sister Flora, who was two years older, Fawn more than kept pace. Introduced to school in 1921, the six-year-old Fawn was advanced to the fourth grade; when she lost the school spelling bee to a twelve- year-old, "she cried and cried that this bright boy, twice her age, had spelled her down." At ten she had a poem printed in the LDS youth periodical, The Juvenile Instructor; at fourteen she was salutatorian of Weber High School.

Although Fawn grew to maturity in a rigorously religious environment that included strict Sabbatarianism and evening prayers on her knees, her mother was a closet skeptic who thought the LDS Church a "wonderful social order" but who doubted its dogma. According to Brodie, in the late 1930s, while her father headed Mormon mission activities in German-speaking Europe, her mother became a "thoroughgoing heretic."