Hugh Nibley Observed: Reminiscences of Nibley

Stephen D. Ricks

“My recollections of Hugh Nibley go back a generation. My father, Marc Ricks, and Nibley were both doctoral students at the University of California, Berkeley, in the late 1930s, my father majoring in chemistry and Nibley in ancient history. Both attended church services at the Berkeley Ward in a lovely chapel with a venerable history located on the corner of Walnut and Vine in Berkeley. Dad said that he and Nibley were given a service assignment of cleaning up the grounds around the chapel. They worked together on the grounds until Brother Nibley became bored or distracted, at which point he walked to the chapel upstairs to play the organ, which he could do with real finesse. My dad referred to Nibley as an ‘information man’ rather than a ‘people person’—but, with all due respect to my father’s point of view, permit me to observe that the Lord, in order to achieve his purposes, needs people from a whole range of backgrounds, even ‘information men’ who are not particularly ‘people persons.’”

Part of our book chapter reprint series, this article originally appeared in Hugh Nibley Observed, edited by Jeffrey M. Bradshaw, Shirley S. Ricks, and Stephen T. Whitlock. For more information, go to https://interpreterfoundation.org/books/hugh-nibley-observed/.

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About the Interpreter Foundation Book Chapter Reprint Series

The purpose of this reprint series is to make individual chapters from books published by The Interpreter Foundation more accessible to readers. Although in some instances the formatting and pagination may have been changed, the content of this chapter, like others in this reprint series, is identical to what appeared in its original book publication. It has not been updated to incorporate research that has appeared subsequently nor to reflect the current practice of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints to use the full name of the Church and to avoid terms such as “Mormon” and “LDS.”

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