STUDIBERT REVEALED

When we got back home to Salt Lake City, Utah, I couldn’t shut up about my experiences in Poland. The first person I burdened with my stories was one of my best friends Martha Rycicles. She had been the head of a charitable foundation that had gathered food and blankets for Poland during Martial Law. She was doing this before I even CARED that there was such a country. She was eager to know everything about the trip – and before long, she and her husband, Craig were figuring out ways they could get involved.

This was my whole goal – to get people involved and doing something for this emerging democracy. It’s all-too easy to go and see all the horrible things in the world, but to be energized and then keep the energy going to accomplish the goals you promised with all your heart you’d do was a difficult task all by itself. So now we were about to embark on a slew of remarkable activities.

The first thing we did was to create a corporation – Phoenix Ventures – as a vehicle by which we would work in and for Solidarity and Poland. On the Board of Directors was a prominent lawyer, a couple of prominent businessmen, a psychiatrist (don’t know why???), and Doug Carton (not his real name), who turned out to be a cousin by marriage.

Doug’s aunt was the second wife of my Uncle Johnny (who I lived with when I attended high school in Switzerland). OK – my uncle Johnny married my mother’s sister – so he was my uncle by marriage, and when his wife died (my aunt Mary), he re-married a gal we all called “Nanny” and she had a nephew named Doug Carton. So Doug was a cousin by a marriage that was not between any of my blood relatives.This is a long way to the point about Doug. He became a pivotal acquaintance for me, because he was able to give me insights into the nature of Studibert long before I had need of it. As we met as a Board, the discussion eventually got around to Studibert.

Craig was an entrepreneur who had a PhD in English Literature. He was extremely successful in his business of writing (for newspapers and brochures for companies), so he had a lot of influence and a lot of contacts. So Fred and I introduced Craig to Studibert, and Craig had a few “lunch meetings” with him about Poland. So as Craig was re-hashing his various encounters with Studibert, Doug squinted his eyes a little bit and then interrupted: “Steve Studibert?” he asked. Craig answered in the affirmative, ad then Doug began to turn red and roll his eyes.

Doug then began to relate to everyone his encounters with Studibert while growing up, starting with Jr. High. It seemed that Studibert was from a family of about 8 children. His mom was a regular bride – and by “regular,” I believe the number 6 was mentioned in conjunction with the number of husbands/fathers she went through in Studibert’s lifetime. His childhood was one of abuse and neglect (but aren’t all childhoods?). And so as he became of Jr. High School age, he desired to be the Student Body President. He was not very popular, because he was strange (from his childhood), and he wanted everyone to like him (he was also extremely ugly and thick), so he ran. But he was poor at the same time, and so as he needed to “buy” people’s votes, and populate the Jr. High School with propaganda, he saw an opportunity to raise some money by selling all of the typewriters in the school. So one night, he stole all they typewriters – pawned them somehow, and suddenly had enough money to finance a very successful campaign.

He won. And no one was ever caught or charged for the theft of the typewriters. So how did Doug know Studibert had stolen them? Because the day before the typewriters were stolen Studibert couldn’t afford even a poster, and after the theft, there were candy-bars, T-shirts, and posters of Studibert’s campaign plastered all over the school. Doug couldn’t prove anything, but he knew – and everyone in the school knew, but somehow Studibert was elected as Student Body President by a very thin margin anyway.

The next time Studibert reared his ugly head was at BYU. Here, Doug knew him as a student “spy” for the university’s honor code, and if he didn’t know of any students who were breaking the “code,” he’d set them up so he would appear to be a force to be reckoned with on the subject of honor (later on -- this "setting up" of his would foil a decent man's campain for U.S. Senator).

From BYU, he became a policeman in Brigham City,UT and then Police Chief. It was as a Police Chief that he became acquainted with the FBI and eventually the Secret Service. Studibert managed to massage his Secret Service contacts enough to get him into White House Duty. Here is where he made his contacts at The White House, and was eventually appointed as an Advance Man to President Reagan. The man that briefed us on the Pacific Rim at the White House Annex was Jon Huntsman, Jr. – and he had been an Advance Man for Reagan at the same time. What an eerie coincidence!

An interesting fact about Doug that added to his credibility as a Studibert detractor was the fact that he had been in a little organization called the C.I.A. Here, his operations overseas were fronted by an international newspaper. In fact, when it came time to deciding who would go on the next trip to Poland, Doug had to bow out stating that he was not allowed to travel to the Eastern European countries. There were still enough bad guys hanging around that would not only put him in danger, but the very issuance of a visa would alert international spies that he was coming, and he was just not allowed to travel to those places yet.

That’s as far as I learned about my cousin Doug and his input on Studibert. Except for this one time, we never spoke of any of this again. As I absorbed these revelations from Doug, and remembered what the fund-raiser for the Republican Party had said about Studibert, I began to wonder how someone who appeared so fair, could feel so foul.