Harold Bingham Lee (March 28, 1899 – December 26, 1973) was an American religious leader and educator who served as the 11th president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church) from July 1972 until his death in December 1973.
Early life
Lee was born in Clifton, Idaho, to Samuel Lee and Louisa Emeline Bingham and was the second of six children. The Lee family lived the rural life and Lee and his siblings spent most of their youth doing farm chores. During his childhood, his mother saved him from death several times. When he was eight, he was sent to get a can of lye from the shelf and spilled the deadly product all over himself. His mother opened a vat of pickled beets and poured cup after cup of the red vinegar all over him, which neutralized the lye. When Harold was a teen, he punctured an artery on a broken bottle. His mother cleaned it, but it became badly infected. She burned a black stocking to ashes and rubbed it in the open wound and it soon healed.
Lee was fortunate to receive a good education. He finished eighth grade at a grammar school in Clifton and his parents allowed him to continue his education at Oneida Stake Academy in Preston, Idaho. The first few years, Lee focused on music and played the alto, French, and baritone horns. Later, he played basketball and was a reporter for the school newspaper. He graduated in the spring of 1916.
The summer following his graduation Lee worked to receive his teaching certificate from Albion State Normal School at Albion, Idaho. After two summers of study in 1916 and 1917, Lee passed the state's fifteen-subject test to receive his second- and third-class certificates. Lee held his first teaching position in the fall of 1916. He taught a class of 25 students, grades one to eight, in Weston, Idaho. His salary was $60 a month. When he was eighteen, he became principal of a school in Oxford, Idaho. In September 1920, then church president Heber J. Grant called Lee on a mission to the western states, with headquarters in Denver, Colorado. He was twenty-one and served until December 1922.
Marriages
While on his mission, Lee met a sister missionary from Utah, Fern Lucinda Tanner. They renewed their acquaintance when they returned from their missions and were married on November 14, 1923, in the Salt Lake Temple. Fern died in 1962 and on June 17, 1963, Lee married Freda Joan Jensen, a former mission companion's girlfriend who had remained unmarried. She died on July 1, 1981.
Civic and community leadership
In 1932, at the age of thirty-three, Lee became a community leader when he was appointed to fill a vacancy in the Salt Lake City Commission. He was assigned to direct the Department of Streets and Public Improvements. A year later his political career was launched when he was elected to the same position.
Service in the LDS Church
In 1930, Lee was called as president of the LDS Church's Pioneer Stake in Salt Lake City. At the time of his setting apart, he was the youngest stake president then serving in the church.
As the 1929 Great Depression in the United States had left more than half of the stakes' members without jobs, Lee established a stake welfare program to aid members in distress. In 1932, the stake organized a Bishop's Storehouse to provide members with basic food necessities. In 1936, Lee became managing director of the Church Welfare Program, overseeing the implementation of a churchwide welfare program based on the Pioneer Stake's. This program—including Bishop's Storehouses—remains in place to this day.
Although he also pursued a political career, he began full-time church service when he was called to the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles in 1941.
Lee served on a committee to streamline church organization and functions. For two decades Lee studied the subject and prepared proposals. Lee was the chairman of the Priesthood Correlation Committee under LDS Church president David O. McKay. The committee restructured church organization in the 1960s, including labeling the children's and women's organizations as auxiliary to the priesthood organization.