I was just over leaving pearls of wisdom in the comment section on Provopulse.com regarding the I Can't I'm Mormon website, and reminded myself of a great little nugget of life in Provo back when I was a starving student.
Back in 87-88, my sophomore year at BYU, I created and sold t-shirts, artwork, and whatever else I could to make enough cash to pay my paltry and yet, back then, painfully high rent. Two of the t-shirts I came up with actually did pretty well, and at $20 a pop, helped pay the rent and feed me for a short while. The first was clean and simple: "Brigham Young University: The Collective Unconscious" which did alright. I had read some Jung, and thought it a funny play on words. The ignorant were offended, when actually, its a fairly innocuous slogan. I sold maybe two dozen of these.
For the second, I was reading through some history of the old Brigham Young Academy, and came across this gem: "You can go to Provo or you can go to hell" - Brigham Young. Which is exactly how the shirt read.
The quote is from a conversation between Brigham and Abraham Smoot, who the Prophet was telling to go down to Provo to start the academy. Smoot apparently had just built a house up in Salt Lake, possibly had a child die or his wife suffer through a tough labor - don't remember the details now, but essentially he was not really interested in uprooting his family yet again, and so Brigham put some emphasis into the request.
I sold 50 or more of this t-shirt, and paid my rent for a couple months. As I mentioned over on Provopulse, if anyone decides to use either of these and make new t-shirts, let me know and I'll buy one.
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