Charles J. Woodworth

Charles (Chuck) John Woodworth, beloved husband, father and grandfather, counselor, mentor and friend, passed away surrounded by his devoted wife and children on December 18, 2011, at Utah Valley Regional Medical Center in Provo, after a brief battle with complications from non-Hodgkin's lymphoma.
Chuck was born in Joplin, Missouri on November 10, 1932, the third of six children of Erle Clinton Woodworth and Lois Maurine Lambert. Erle was the son of a boiler room stoker in Joplin, Lois the daughter of farmers in nearby Wheaton. They met at Joplin High School and married a few months after she graduated. Children soon followed: Lois (b. 1929), Richard (b. 1930), Charles (b. 1932), Judy (b. 1934), Raymond (b. 1937), and Linda (b. 1941).
Erle worked odd jobs trying to scratch out a living during the Great Depression. He moved the young family frequently among Joplin's rentals looking for better terms as his income fluctuated and the children multiplied. In later years Chuck often said that he actually lived Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath" while other people merely read it. Eventually Erle trained as a journeyman electrician, and the income allowed him to build a humble four-room home located on an acre of land about five miles southeast of Joplin. (The home was leveled by the great Joplin tornado of 2011.) Despite their poverty, life in the country had its benefits, too. Chuck nostalgically recalled walking barefoot through the woods to and from Duquesne School, a four-room schoolhouse located about a mile from the family homestead. For recreation, the children swam in nearby Turkey Creek.
Erle was often away for weeks at a time on jobs contracted with the local electrician's union. The work took him across the Ozarks and as far south as Texas. By the early 1940s, when Chuck was about twelve, Erle left the family for good, leaving Lois to raise the six children alone. To supplement the family income Chuck and his older brother Richard washed dishes, sold newspapers, and bagged groceries. The family milked their own cow, butchered their own chickens, and hauled water from a well located across the street. Chuck remained an indefatigable worker throughout his life and instilled the value of hard work in own children.
The most formative influence on Chuck's youth was his mother Lois. A kind, large-souled woman with a soothing southern accent, she was tenaciously devoted to her children and determined to provide for them. After Erle left, she went back to school and gained her nursing license. She worked nights at a local hospital, putting the children to bed before she left and returning the next morning in time to put breakfast on the table. She impressed others as level-headed and assertive. She led local nursing associations and eventually ascended to the presidency of the Practical Nursing Association of the state of Missouri. Chuck's devotion to the plight of single mothers during his professional career emerged out of this upbringing. He wanted to empower women to believe they could rescue and redeem their children just as his mother had done with him.
Chuck shared his mother's interest in education. He was an honor roll student and ROTC cadet at Joplin High School. Seeking a way for her boys to burn off energy, Lois bought them boxing gloves. While she was at away at work, Chuck and Richard cleared out the furniture and sparred in the family kitchen as they listened to the fights of their rugged hero, Joe Louis, on the radio. This was the Golden Age of boxing, and Chuck passionately pursued the sport. In ninth grade he entered the local Golden Gloves tournament as a 98-pound flyweight and finished runner-up in his division. He went on to win Joplin's Golden Gloves tournament three times and was later offered a full-ride boxing scholarship to Idaho State College. (The scholarship had to be revoked when it was found that Chuck had fought in too many fights to still be considered an amateur.) In 1952 Churck turned professional as a light heavyweight, using the prize money to pay for college and graduate school.
After graduating from Joplin High School in 1950, Chuck planned to enter the armed forces immediately, but his mother insisted he enroll in college. He matriculated at Joplin Junior College (now Missouri Southern State University) that fall and played left guard on the football team, which he jokingly described as a squad that was "never undefeated." Although he was not a standout on the gridiron, Chuck meshed with the squad. When his girlfriend Mary Lou was named homecoming queen he arranged for his fellow footballers to vote him in as homecoming king on the condition that he beat the legendary Mo Manier of Springfield in his next boxing match. Chuck won the fight, and he and Mary Lou went to the dance as honored royalty.
Besides his mother, the other large influence in Chuck's life was religion, which he found when he was a teenager. His grandmother Clara, Erle's mother, joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the late 1910s after missionaries knocked on her door. At the time, the Joplin branch consisted of just a few dozen members. Erle became a member but never took to the church. Lois, however, was more receptive, and early in married life she converted from Methodism. Her work schedule, however, made her family's church attendance irregular. Chuck dated his conversion to the time when Al Alderman, a Joplin furniture storeowner and LDS church member, started picking him up for young men's activities. Chuck looked to Al and the LDS missionaries for role models, and he quickly became a stalwart in their little branch, which met in a rented, leaky basement invisible from street level.
The summer of 1952, immediately after graduating from Joplin Junior College, Chuck served a short-term LDS mission in Jefferson City, Missouri. The experience convinced him that his future lay west. That fall he moved to Provo and enrolled in Brigham Young University. He found board and room with a dozen returned missionaries who had piled into a two-story house in a self-styled fraternity called the "House of Israel." The men, who took on the nicknames of Jacob's twelve sons, called Chuck "Issachar" for reasons that made all of them laugh (see Gen. 49:14). The Israelites ate breakfast and dinner together around a common table and shared many happy moments. As breakfast cook, Chuck mastered making what he called "pancakes with runny middles." Several of Chuck's House of Israel buddies became his closest lifelong friends.
While at BYU, Chuck pursued his boxing avocation, primarily in Salt Lake City. It was here that "Charles," as he was known in Joplin, became "Chuck." On weekends he hitchhiked up to LoZan's gym on Fifth South and West Temple (where the Little America Hotel now stands), where he trained before walking to the Salt Lake Fairgrounds for his fights. In his prime he stood 6 feet tall and weighed about 190 pounds, with a broad chest and huge fists.
Chuck showed such promise as a boxer that John Mooney, the Salt Lake Tribune sports writer, called him "Utah's Golden Boy," a moniker that stuck. In the summers of 1953 and 1954, Chuck trained in San Francisco with Billy Newman, a gritty old manager and promoter (Chuck later compared him to the Burgess Meredith character in the film "Rocky") who had spent decades operating what is now credited as the oldest boxing gym in America. Chuck was known as a patient fighter with an iron jaw. In over twenty professional fights, he never got knocked out. He might have made a lucrative career in boxing had he not been more of a student. He looked at boxing more as a means of attaining the career he truly wanted and less as an end in itself.
More than anything Chuck wanted to work with troubled youth. During his junior college years he had worked evenings as a guidance counselor at the Joplin YMCA. Later, after graduating from BYU with a B.S. in sociology in 1954, he entered the Master's of Social Work program at the University of Utah. Following his first year of graduate school, his life changed dramatically when he suspended his studies to serve an LDS mission. Not all young men were expected to go on missions, and Chuck, now 22, had not been asked. He felt he needed to go to Tonga, in the South Pacific, though he knew nothing about Tonga or her people. Not knowing established protocol, he first knocked on the door of the Missionary Department at the Church Administration Building. Gordon B. Hinckley, then secretary of the department, answered. "I feel I need to serve a mission to Tonga," Chuck told him. "That's fine. Go see your bishop," Hinckley replied, according to Chuck's later recollection. The bishop processed the paperwork, and Chuck received his call in the summer of 1955. It read "Tongan Mission."
On the train ride home to Joplin that summer to bid farewell to his family, Chuck met seventeen-year-old Marsha Davis, a charming East High School senior. She was on her way to visit her sister, whose husband was stationed at an air force base in Oklahoma. She and Chuck chatted across the aisle during the first leg of the ride, sharing her boxed lunch, and were up most of the night talking. By the end of the ride they were holding hands on the same seat, having talked another passenger into switching positions. Their three-year courtship consisted mostly of letters written to and from the South Pacific.
Chuck spent all two-and-a-half years of his mission on Niue (pronounced New-way), a tiny volcanic island and protectorate of New Zealand. He lived in a hut with a thatched roof and drank rainwater that fell into a giant cistern. Based mainly in the village of Alofi, the missionaries were expected to do a little of everything: besides meeting with potential converts, they taught English, gave sacrament meeting talks, issued callings, handled disputes among members, translated materials into the Niuean language, gave priesthood blessings, and negotiated with local government officials. Chuck served as district president, and while there helped lead a team of workers that dug a foundation for the first LDS chapel on the island.
On Niue, Chuck met Mosese and Salavia Muti, who had been called from Tonga to move to Niue with their four children (several more remained behind) and build the chapel. Mosese, a humble man with seemingly infinite patience, exerted a strong influence on Chuck. Fundamentally shy and retreating, Chuck became more assertive. Easily irritated, he became more forgiving. Mosese went on to serve as the first Tongan LDS patriarch and his family became one of the bulwarks of the church in the region.
During the middle ten months of his mission, Chuck and his trusted companion, Ronald Mortensen of Tremonton, Utah, lived with the Mutis and ate meals with them. Together they pooled their meager resources so that everyone had enough. Chuck's time to repay the Mutis for their generosity soon came. Near the end of his mission, he conceived of the idea of arranging a boxing match and using the proceeds to send Mosese and Salavia to New Zealand where they could be sealed together as a couple in the newly constructed Mormon temple at Hamilton. Chuck's mission president approved the idea. The Auckland Boxing Association paired Chuck with Kitione Lave, a bruising Tongan heavyweight contender known as the "Tongan Torpedo" who was the unrivaled champion of the entire South Pacific.
The fight took place on February 27, 1958, before a record crowd of almost 15,000 at Carlaw Park in Auckland. Lave may have underestimated the Mormon missionary. Although Chuck hadn't been in the ring for almost three years, his work on the chapel in Niue had made him lean and chiseled. Though Lave outweighed him by twenty pounds (207 lbs. to 187 lbs.), the Mormon missionary shocked the crowd by outpunching Lave and winning in a unanimous decision. The Mutis, listening by short wave radio in Niue, were overjoyed. The couple was sealed in the temple six weeks later.
His mission now completed, Chuck continued his study at the University of Utah and graduated with his MSW degree in May of 1959. Marsha Davis, meanwhile, now a junior at the U of U, had her sites set on Chuck. They married on December 19, 1958, in the Salt Lake Temple, in a ceremony performed by Elder Richard L. Evans.
Chuck couldn't get enough of the islands. Six months after their marriage, the newlyweds accepted faculty positions at Liahona College (later Liahona High School), the LDS-operated secondary school in Tonga, where they taught for two years. Chuck taught human relations and worked as the staff counselor, and Marsha taught home economics, English, and history. They relished their time in the islands and made lifelong friends and contacts among the faculty and students.
One day while Chuck was leafing through the latest BYU course catalogue in the faculty lounge, he saw that the university had started a new Ph.D. program in marriage and family counseling. BYU president Ernest Wilkinson was trying to build the university into a great graduate institution, and Ph.D. programs were popping out all over. Chuck had never planned on a doctorate, he later admitted, but in that instant he knew he must pursue it. After returning to Utah, he was accepted into the program and received the Ph.D. in June 1965. His dissertation, "Family Oriented Therapy and Delinquency Rehabilitation: A Proposed Delinquency Rehabilitation Program for the Utah State Juvenile Courts," argued that family systems techniques were effective in helping juvenile delinquents rather the traditional counselor-probation officer approach.
Chuck put his research to immediate use. In July 1965, he moved with Marsha and two-year-old Bradley, born in Salt Lake City in February 1963, to Miami, Florida, where he had been hired to conduct a training program on juvenile delinquency for police officers in the Dade County Sheriff's Department. He remained there two years through the end of the contract. Their second child, Rebecca, was born in Miami on December 20, 1965.
Returning again to Provo, Chuck was hired by the BYU Counseling Center, where he worked for the next five years. While there Chuck and Marsha had their third child, Jed, born in Provo in November 1969.
The BYU job proved confining for Chuck; he wanted to apply his training in more expansive ways. In June 1970 he resigned from the BYU Counseling Center and moved to Tempe, Arizona where he opened up a private practice. He also taught night classes at Phoenix College. The Arizona experiment proved ill-fitting, Chuck later explained, primarily because he discovered that he was a poor businessman. He didn't have the heart to collect payment from people who couldn't keep up the payments. In April 1972, Chuck closed down his private practice and the family returned to Salt Lake City.
Three months later, Chuck received a call from N. Eldon Tanner of the LDS First Presidency. Chuck, now 39, was called to be president of the Tongan Mission. The next two years were among the busiest and most fulfilling of his life. Presiding over some 400 missionaries in all, the leadership and counseling skills he had honed in his professional career came into sharp relief. Stationed at the mission home located on the bright shores of the Pacific in the village of Sopu on the main island of Tongatapu, Chuck and Marsha hosted dozens of local and church dignitaries. Becky and Brad attended local schools, and Jed attended a preschool taught by the daughter of the King of Tonga. All the Woodworths cherish their time spent in the islands.
When President Spencer W. Kimball became president of the church in late 1973, missionary work policy changed. Every young man was now expected to serve, and local members were encouraged to take responsibility for as much of their own ecclesiastical needs as possible. Tonga, which had the largest percentage of LDS membership of any country in the world, was primed for change. Chuck sensed it was time for Tongans to lead the mission, and in July 1974, he turned over the reins of the mission to a new president, Tonga Toutai Paletu'a.
Returning again to Utah, Chuck again found work as a counselor, this time with LDS Social Services. He remained there until his retirement in 1997. Working initially in the downtown Salt Lake office, he later moved to the Centerville and Bountiful branch offices. Besides doing individual therapy, Chuck accepted assignments in Indian Placement and adoption. He took countless trips to the reservations in the Four Corners region and served as the legal authority between young single mothers and LDS couples looking to adopt.
The work in adoption may have spurred the family's desire to adopt themselves. Marsha had always imagined having a big family; when that didn't happen, they looked for other outlets. Chuck and Marsha had family friends with contacts in Torreé³n, Mexico, who helped American couples adopt Mexican babies. One of Chuck's friends had successfully adopted through that channel. After three trips to Mexico and considerable personal expense, Chuck and Marsha finally found their baby. Rachel, born in Torreé³n on January 20, 1977, joined the Woodworth family a week later. She was sealed to her new family in a ceremony conducted in the Salt Lake Temple a few months after her arrival.
During his years with LDS Social Services, Chuck and Marsha lived in Bountiful, initially in the Val Verda region. Their older children attended South Davis Jr. High and Woods Cross High School. In 1989 the family downsized to a home on Elaine Drive near the Browns Park area of Bountiful. Rachel, now the only child at home, attended Mueller Park Jr. High and Bountiful High. By 2000 Chuck and Marsha had become empty nesters. They moved that year to Utah County to a condominium in Orem. In 2006, they made their final move, building a new home in Lindon located on a lot next to daughter Becky and her husband Reed.
As a father, Chuck was gentle and kind, though he had pulses of austerity. He insisted that all the children help in washing the evening dishes and in weeding the family garden every Saturday morning. To drive down the gas and electric bill, he encouraged short showers and minimal lighting. But the restraint masked a playful wit and wry sense of humor only seen by those who knew him well. He never withheld affection and his fundamental nature was caring. He could spend hours rubbing sore temples when a child had a headache. The teenage children often came home at night to discover little notes of affection he and Marsha had left on their pillows. He attended the children's music concerts and athletic contests with relish and took great pride in their accomplishments.
His influence crept in quietly but filled a very large space. His children so respected him that they never wanted to disappoint him.
Chuck and Marsha proudly saw their family grow. Brad married Cherie Kartchner of Ridgecrest, California in 1985. Becky married Reed Hainsworth of Murray, Kentucky in 1987. Rachel married Brad Watt of Pingree, Idaho in 1997. And Jed married Shawna Cluff of Tucson, Arizona in 2003. By the time of Chuck's passing, he was "Papa" to 15 grandchildren. He delighted in the time he spent reading to them, wrestling with them, and when he could, spoiling them. In addition to loving his grandchildren, he took great pleasure in watching BYU basketball and football on television with Marsha.
Through the 1970s and early 80s, Chuck held weekly group therapy sessions in the living room of his Bountiful home, charging nothing for this service. In his post-retirement years he continued to see clients at home, without fee, as he began formulating a more explicitly LDS-centered treatment plan. Secular treatments fell short of complete healing, he believed, because they left out Christ, the ultimate source of freedom from misdeed, which included sin heaped upon innocents. Working through referrals provided by LDS bishops and stake presidents, Chuck started informal therapy groups, often with women who had been abused when they were young or otherwise mistreated by men. Knowing that he would not be around forever, he trained women to lead these groups and carry on the healer's art without him.

Chuck appreciated the power of symbolism. In these small groups he encouraged the women to write out their resentments towards their perpetrators and to confront their victimizers if possible. In the end they were encouraged to rip up the angry letters either in an open field or at the Christus statue in the visitor's center on Temple Square. The letter blew into the wind or was dropped in a trash can. His main point was a simple yet profound one: by laying our burdens at the feet of the Savior, we are free to move on with life.
In his later years Chuck spent the bulk of his days seeing clients or talking on the phone with them. People were his hobby. He called some individuals daily for a year or more. His most satisfying church callings were those that allowed him to merge his professional and religious lives. In the 2000s, these included serving in the branch presidencies of an Orem nursing home and at the Provo Missionary Training Center, and in leading addiction recovery groups with Marsha's assistance.
He often said that the individual and group counseling in his retirement years was the most satisfying of his professional life. He felt frustrated when anything derailed him from this work. In 1996 he beat prostate cancer, and a decade later a cancerous kidney was removed. He was seeing clients right down to Thanksgiving Day of 2011 when he was admitted to the hospital with a high fever. When it was discovered that he had a slow-growing, highly treatable form of lymphoma, his family felt confident he would recover. The man with the iron jaw had proved so invincible that it seemed impossible to imagine any other outcome.

Chuck's legacy is beyond calculation. He served his Master by doing the works of Jesus. He went about doing good and changed countless lives as a result. His interest was always the hurt, the maimed, and the mistreated. He wanted them all healed. Above his desk in his home office hangs a large print of the famous Harry Anderson painting of Christ kneeling in Gethsemane in front of a gnarled, old olive tree. Chuck acknowledged his own debt to Christ and saw Him as the only way or means through which human beings can be free of their pain and suffering. At the time of his passing, his copy of the Book of Mormon sat on the desk in his study, open to the page with his favorite scripture, one that he often shared with clients: "Will ye not now return unto me, and repent of your sins, and be converted, that I may heal you?" (3 Nephi 9:13)

For more on Chuck Woodworth, see Vai Skahema's recent article in the Deseret News online: http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700209568/Vais-View-Farewell-to-Charles-Woodworth-a-champion-inside-and-outside-the-ring.html