NRI
NRI. Nauvoo Restoration, Incorporated. NRI.
Rather than being a conscientious author on this point, I wanted to very plainly and nonsubtly drive home what NRI is. For I although I will not too speak much about NRI directly, I will often refer to it. Perhaps the main reason I will not laud NRI very specifically is because they do not seem interested in any such laurels o’ mine. I contacted NRI’s public relations early in the writing of this book and they told me, essentially, to buzz off. While I lived in Nauvoo, Elder and Sister Burton, whom I greatly respected, ran NRI’s PR. But they left not long after I did. Of course, perhaps PR’s only responsibility is talking to newspapers and TIME magazine—people they cannot be assured will love them. Since I am already firmly placed in the loving category, I suppose that perhaps I was not considered to be of much importance. PR people can be hard to fathom. They’re a lot like business people, and if one thing is certain, I am the Anti-Businessman. It gives me the willies, business does. I’m against it.1
[ill-shiver]
While I was in Nauvoo, I very much enjoyed the company of NRI people. (Although I stayed off their hallway as much as possible [because I didn’t want to startle anyone of importance who may have been visiting with my ugly toes.]) NRI’s offices were in the same building we lived in, you see. A floor above our computer lab, a floor below our classrooms, a tunnel away from the cafeteria which was, in turn, a floor below the Parlor and our dorm rooms. Such a loving sense of labyrinthine interconnectedness in the Joseph Smith Academy!
History: A man named LeRoy Kimball began restoring Heber C. Kimball’s home, one thing led to another, and the church formed a nonprofit organization called NRI, with Brother Kimball serving as president for twenty-five years (although according to one of my sources, the final fifteen years of his service were given after his death—further evidence you should not believe everything you read).2
But, as I said just a couple pages ago, we will speak of this later. What I’ve said so far should be plenty. As I said, this isn’t a terribly artistic essay designed to move you to either tears or laughter, but simply to tell you what NRI is, laying some uninteresting—and possibly even boring—groundwork without expending any extraneous effort. I hate extraneous effort.
But if you insist on every essay having critical worth, chalk this one up under postmodernism and be done with it.
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Thanks for revisiting Nauvoo with me. I would love to hear your thoughts.