I am presently a septuagenarian. For the better part of my life, I have trodden a path with William Wines Phelps (1792–1872) near my side. How did my intimate relationship with such an interesting and eccentric man come about?I am a war baby, the first child born to my war-veteran father and my war-industries working mother who married in the Salt Lake Temple at the tail end of World War II. My father took employment as a law enforcement officer connected to the Union Pacific Railroad. In 1952 Dad was transferred from Salt Lake to noted railroad hub North Platte, Nebraska. As Latter-day Saints, we met as a small branch in a house. Beginning in the fourth grade, my parents got me started with piano lessons with an aim to help me become an accompanist in the various church auxiliaries in the branch. As the years progressed and our branch obtained a small chapel, I also took organ lessons at the church. I did well with both instruments.Our hymnbook was the standard blue 1948 edition. Our branch members loved to sing, and we typically sang each of the hymns from the book in our various meetings. I practiced every single hymn and learned to play them all. I became an official accompanist in primary and MIA and often played the organ in sacrament meeting and received praise for being diligent and effective.I also was a devoted student in school and loved to read and investigate information on the written page. In the hymnbook I noticed that over ten of the hymns I played in church were written by William W. Phelps, including some of the fun ones to play like “Praise to the Man Who Communed with Jehovah” (with its notable bouncing down the scale in the chorus), “The Spirit of God Like a Fire is Burning,” and “Now Let Us Rejoice in the Day of Salvation.” As I was developing my testimony of the gospel, I mentally noted that this Phelps guy must have really understood the Restoration and would have been a friend of Joseph Smith.My dad was transferred back to Salt Lake City when I started high school. I continued to use my piano abilities to accompany in seminary, MIA, and priesthood meeting. The Phelps hymns were always my favorite to play, which I always did with gusto. When I went as a freshman to BYU, my ward calling was piano accompanist for MIA activities.Then, as I was called to the South German Mission, I ended up playing piano accompaniment in the German Zone of the Language Training Mission and for a mission-wide conference. I remember mission president Ernest Wilkins praising me for my enthusiastic accompaniment of “The Spirit of God” for all the missionaries in the conference. This was top fun for me. On my mission in Germany, I continued to accompany singing in all sorts of congregational settings. Often over there, it was on a harmonium, a foot-pump organ. When I served as branch leader in Ansbach for six months, I ensured that we sang at least one Phelps hymn in church services each week.German Latter-day Saints are renowned for their enthusiastic devotional singing. I surely joined them in this practice. From those moments on my mission to the present, I have relied upon singing hymns as my favorite form of worship and the hymns have become the bedrock of my testimony of the gospel, even having become as familiar as I now am with all the thorny problems and challenges in church history, doctrine, and practices. I frequently travel to Germany where I continue to use my second language in conversation and speech giving. Privately, I often go to the piano and sing to myself the hymns in German, always bringing the Phelps songs to the fore.As a newly returned missionary at BYU, I attended an orientation meeting for young men who might be interested in becoming full-time LDS seminary teachers. (Women were not considered as prospective seminary teachers in those days.) I was struck by the happy enthusiasm exhibited by these seminary leaders. I had enjoyed teaching groups on my mission. From that moment on, I prepared myself in every way I could to become a professional teacher in the Church Educational System.I met my bride, Karen Hoyal, in the BYU 36th Ward and we married in her family's special Los Angeles Temple during our junior year in college. During the summer prior to our senior year, we lived with her parents while I worked at a good paying labor job. Karen's mother was an early morning seminary teacher, was well-educated generally and in the gospel particularly, and had so many books. Prior to living with them, I had never really seen the not so widely distributed seven-volume set of History of the Church edited by B. H. Roberts. I jumped into reading the so-called journals of Joseph Smith. I was struck by how frequently W. W. Phelps was mentioned and the roles he played in Missouri and Ohio and Nauvoo. For the first time I learned of Phelps's apostasy and his return, having been warmly welcomed back to the fold by a magnanimous Joseph Smith. I even gave a sacrament meeting sermon that summer where I talked about Phelps's return, Joseph Smith's forgiveness, and Phelps's writing “Praise to the Man” after the death of the Prophet. This was a theme I would return to time and again in my future teaching and writing.Upon graduating from BYU, I went immediately into my seminary teaching career. I taught adjacent to my alma mater, Skyline High School in Salt Lake County. Some of my colleagues were budding scholars who motivated me to delve deeply into church history in addition to the holy scriptures. I became more and more familiar with Brother Phelps and brought up anecdotes about him in my classes. I made sure that we sang a lot in my seminary classes; often I accompanied the singing on the piano. I made sure that we sang many Phelps hymns.As the years went by, my career in the Church Educational System went through various iterations: institute teacher in Southern California, curriculum writer in the Church Office Building, obtaining my master's degree in ancient scripture and my PhD in history, and eventually landing a professorship in the Department of Church History and Doctrine in Religious Education at Brigham Young University. I also served in numerous ecclesiastical callings such as teacher in many organizations, stake missionary seventy, high councilman, and bishop. I took many opportunities to speak about the messages of my favorite Phelps hymns and to speak about his return to the fold, along with the forgiving acceptance of Joseph Smith. I still determined to write that biography of W. W. Phelps.In graduate school I learned the historical method and wrote many pieces for my classes, some of which were published. I was recognized with various awards from my graduate school. I focused a great deal on how to write biography and to be as honest as possible, not simply reverential, in dealing with human biographical subjects. Indeed, my doctoral dissertation was a biography of George Reynolds, who was the famous polygamy test case before the Supreme Court, dutiful historical and scriptural commentator, and secretary to five church presidents. I chose to write about him because I had ready access through his family to major documents. I won the best dissertation award from the Mormon History Association.As I began my professorship at BYU, I started to focus on researching the life and times of W. W. Phelps and formulating outlines for chapters that would be included in his biography. Being a new professor, I had numerous other assignments in teaching and committees and also went about publishing articles on a whole variety of both scriptural and historical themes. Four of these articles focused on the contributions of Phelps in New York, Ohio, and Illinois.1 I took research trips to states where Phelps lived and contributed and looked up newspapers and other documents in private, public, and university archives. I became well acquainted with the locations and events of Phelps's youth, early professional life, and his labors in the church through 1836.I actually was making quite a bit of progress in my research and early drafts of the first fourteen chapters of the Phelps biography. This was in addition to so many other events and assignments I experienced at BYU. Opportunities came to me to head up the university's Washington Seminar (for interns) for a semester, direct Vienna Study Abroad four years later, and yet later teach for a year at the Jerusalem Center. I also served as a bishop of a BYU singles ward and as a member of the church's Pioneer Sesquicentennial Committee, where I wrote and published many articles. My professional teaching and writing assignments also entered into the field of the international church, where I also published books and articles.As far as Phelps was concerned, I felt good about the first fourteen chapters, which I believe emphasized his greatest accomplishments in Missouri and Ohio. I knew that he was involved in developing Far West, Missouri, but that he fell into apostasy and was excommunicated. I hadn't done thorough research of his 1836 to 1840 period, but I didn't think there was a great deal more to learn other than that he had turned on the prophet. I figured I could fill in the blanks easily enough when I got back from Jerusalem.Of course, I knew of Phelps's pathos-filled letter in 1840 from Ohio to Joseph Smith and Smith's swift response inviting him back. I had recounted that story so many times in my teaching. I also knew that Phelps had served as a political clerk for Joseph in Nauvoo, and I had published an article to that effect in BYU Studies. However, I didn't believe there would be a great deal more to narrate about Phelps in Nauvoo. I knew that Phelps had obtained a printing press for use in the Saints’ new home in Deseret. Certainly, he must have played somewhat of a political role in Utah Territory, but I figured that his last twenty years in Utah could be covered in a single chapter. Most of all, I desired to analyze his contributions as a hymn writer. I figured I could complete the Phelps biography in a year or two upon returning from Jerusalem.However, my life and career took an enormous turn back at BYU. I faced a professional crisis that I recount in an essay entitled “Coping with a Tension: Writing History While Teaching for the Church” that is to appear in a forthcoming volume Writing Mormon History, Vol. 2, edited by Joseph Geisner and published by Signature Books. The upshot of this crisis is that I totally left the history-writing field and spent the rest of my professional career primarily engaged in promoting and teaching in BYU's “Freshman Academy” and teaching Book of Mormon and Family History/Genealogy courses. My work on W. W. Phelps lay fallow.Occasionally, through the years I tried to get back into writing my unfinished biography of W. W. Phelps. My wife, Karen, kept encouraging me, stating clearly, “You need to do this.” Some Phelps descendants with whom I had worked earlier inquired from time to time and asked me to continue. I paid attention to the beginnings of the Joseph Smith Paper Project (JSPP) and its early publications in the late 2000s and early 2010s and realized that Phelps and his activities were surfacing prominently again. Gradually, but slowly, I decided I probably should get going again. In late 2013, various historical colleagues from my past persuaded me to move forward and promised aid with documents.As I started researching and writing again, the biggest change was that significant documents were now more approachable. I started reviewing, and in some cases rewriting, my first fourteen chapters written years earlier. I appropriately substituted JSP sources and bibliographic designations in footnotes for documents that I had earlier searched out in the LDS Church Historical Archives or from the official History of the Church. I also learned new insights that had gone unnoticed earlier, such as how much Phelps emphasized Joseph Smith's revelations in his first newspaper. I discovered many documents, including key letters, were now available digitally. Where once I had to scramble to find hard copies of newspapers Phelps had written for and edited, I now had digital access to The Evening and the Morning Star in Missouri, the Latter Day Saints’ Messenger and Advocate in Kirtland, the Wasp, the Times and Seasons, the Nauvoo Neighbor (these last three in Nauvoo), and in Utah the Deseret News and the Deseret Almanac. Writing began to be fun again. I was able to burst forward in the biography from the time frame of 1835, where I had left off with Phelps, and move productively forward through his later Missouri years, into his apostasy, and on to Nauvoo.Once I began researching and writing during this second phase starting in 2014, I was stunned by new discoveries. I dug deeply into Phelps's activities and writings along with analyzing the generally accepted mythology associated with him. Among these discoveries were: Phelps had been accused of responsibility for Joseph Smith's Liberty Jail incarceration and the atrocities wrought upon the Saints in their forced exile from Missouri.2 Popular tradition even had Phelps writing an affidavit accusing Smith and other leaders of unspeakable atrocities that led to Governor Lilburn Boggs's extermination order. Until recently, seminary students were taught that Phelps wrote that damning affidavit.3 Actually, Thomas Marsh and Orson Hyde wrote this incriminating affidavit. In reality, Phelps did everything he could to be a peacemaker to protect the Mormons from a vicious onslaught in the “siege of Far West.” Interrogated at the point of bayonet in the Richmond court of inquiry in November 1838, Phelps merely laid out the heinous activities of the Mormon Danites as he had witnessed them over the previous five months. Additional historical evidence points to the truthfulness of Phelps's testimony. One of my readers previous to the publication of the biography said, “You appropriately defended his honor.”I learned that once Phelps came to Nauvoo in 1841, he did a whole lot more than I or most other observers thought he did. I ended up writing six chapters about Phelps's activities in Nauvoo, rather than the two I originally projected. The titles were “Historical Scribe in Nauvoo,” “Newspaper Editing and Ghostwriting,” “Political Clerk in Nauvoo,” “Martyrdom and Succession,” “Interpreter of Joseph Smith's Nauvoo Doctrines,” and “Aide to the Apostles.” After deep diving into all the articles in the three Nauvoo newspapers and other contemporary documents, both official and otherwise, my most remarkable discoveries were that Phelps wrote or helped write major portions of the official history of Joseph Smith; was the de facto editor of the Nauvoo newspapers starting in February 1842; ghostwrote numerous doctrinal, historical, and political treatises for Joseph Smith; was a driving force behind the publication of the Book of Abraham in the Times and Seasons, and then promulgating the Abrahamic doctrines in the same newspaper; and was an enormous contributor to the transactional activities and decisions both in the Nauvoo City Council and the Council of Fifty.Once in Utah, Phelps helped edit and write for the Deseret News and edited and published by himself the annual Deseret Almanac from 1851 to 1865, all printed on a press that he obtained in Boston in 1846 for the church. Many impressive, but also numerous quirky articles appeared as authored by Phelps in these publications. He also helped direct early endeavors of the University of Deseret, including producing the Deseret Alphabet and then promoting its use.I studied every hymn from the Phelps-produced 1835/1836 Sacred Hymns as well as all other published hymns attributed to him. A key discovery: “He penned twenty-five hymns [of ninety in the first hymnal] entirely by himself. More surprisingly, he adapted in various ways another thirty-seven pieces, making sixty-two in all in which his words are part of the hymn texts!”4My biography of W. W. Phelps was published in 2018. Over the years through podcasts, professional conferences, Church Educational System groups, empty-nester firesides, family groups, Sons of Utah Pioneers presentations, Family History Center classes, and Zoom presentations, I have recounted contributions and stories of Brother Phelps in many states and two European countries. I've delighted in letting interested people learn of this talented, unusual, eccentric, and often controversial man.Throughout my complicated odyssey with W. W. Phelps, particularly as I wrote about him for weeks on end, I fancied myself living day-to-day with Phelps and his family. I sailed with him on river crafts, wandered with him on lengthy journeys, sat with him in church councils, sat at his side as he composed countless essays in his grandiloquent manner, smelled with him the ink in the printing offices, enjoyed with him many pleasant moments with Joseph Smith, and listened to him give his odd and unusual public addresses. I sang hymns with him and contemplated the importance of his poetry about the Restoration and Zion.I became fully aware of both the strengths and weaknesses of this flamboyant man, W. W. Phelps. I honestly feel that my biography of him was an honest portrayal of all sides of his work, his talents, and his personality.I looked in as Phelps, Oliver Cowdery, and Joseph Smith came up with the curious “Grammar and Alphabet of the Egyptian Language” during the translation process of the Book of Abraham. I anguished with William and Sally as they lost three little children to death. I felt frustrated with Phelps as he was unfairly slandered in Far West. I rejoiced with him in reading the Prophet's invitation to rejoin the Saints in full fellowship. I sat with Phelps and Joseph Smith as they together composed the “Wentworth Letter” that rehearsed the history of the church to that point in 1842 and included the thirteen statements now known as the “Articles of Faith.” I joined Phelps and Willard Richards in the Joseph Smith store office in Nauvoo as they put together early portions of “Joseph Smith's History” and began publishing it in the Times and Seasons. I traversed the dusty Mormon Trail with the exiled Phelps family in 1848 toward the valley of the Great Salt Lake. I was embarrassed as I watched Phelps clumsily try to practice plural marriage with numerous disappointments along the way. I considered how frustrated Phelps must have felt to see that all but two of his children with Sally left the church in one way or another. I was pained as William pathetically pleaded with Brigham Young and others for sustaining remuneration simply to be able to live in his twilight years. My heart really went out to William, Sally, and the rest of the family as this once significant man fell into dementia his last four years. I am actually now at the same age when Phelps lost his capacity to think and act rationally. All in all, I have felt empathy for this eccentric man, realizing that I manifest some of the same traits in my own ministry.I am grateful to have known William Wines Phelps intimately and having spent so much of my own life learning about him. Knowing him as I do, I feel love and compassion for him and his family. I continue to sing and discuss his hymns with reverence and spirituality. I hope to meet him some day and reflect upon our common experiences.