This is the biggest mystery of his tenure at BYU.  He received confirmation from a powerful group of people BEFORE he was hired that he would be empowered to work toward the construction of a museum for the earth sciences. He undertood that charge whole heartedly and it was probably the over-riding consideration for the first years he was there.  Dr. Ken Bullock, Dr. Armin Hill and Dr. Robert Thomas has blessed his objective of building the museum in a meeting before he even accepted the job. So he felt empowered to proceed. In the beginning he was part of the Geology Department although he had expressed reservations about that arrangement.  His first business card reflected that organizational assignment.  He had reasonable working relationships in the beginning with the department and even had dinner parties at his home for them, the preparation for which shows in this photo. Mom loved to put on dinners and had a small dining room in which to do it so they entertained the geology department several times in the first 2 years. I went to live with them for a few month in 1964 and by then the friendly relationships had ended I can say from personal knowledge.

Somewere alont the line dad grew apart from the Geology department. Plus he grew in publicity, and he was always able to finagle a small amount of money from the president’s office of another office which the other geology faculty members couldn’t. Put those things together with the fact that he hadn’t finished high school, and you have a mixture ripe for severe attacks of jealousy, indeed outright hostility. That happened.

But during the time that things were still going well, dad envisioned a joint department of geology and paleontology and created a logo to reflect that relationship:

  I have the original of the logo so it appears that the ide never went anywhere.

His plans for a museum led to a model which he showed to the dean and the department chairman.  He created a “Birth Announcement” which he mailed internationally:  

At the same time, he revised his busines card, using the logo of the pterodactyl:

 There was a major eruption after the cards had been mailed and the end result was that dad destroyed the museum and the dream.
   The basic idea was the build the museum around a continuous ramp that started at the enry point and ran upward going through the geological eras of the earth, ending on the top floor in the “PResent”. A musical score was to be commissioned that with special segments for each era. He drafter ideas about what the music would be on the next page MUSICAL IDEAS.
     I speculate a fair among on this page SPECULATION about what happened. I don’t know the truth and no one is alive today who does.  But I happened to be living in Provo for 10 months while this story was going on. I saw the players and I saw the model so I know it was real