William J. Critchlow Jr. · 1967 October General Conference · 1967-09-30
Transcribed from the official printed Conference Report of the One Hundred Thirty-seventh Semiannual (October 1967) General Conference, digitized by the Church History Library and hosted at the Internet Archive (item conferencereport1967sa), pp. 87-91. Reading order rebuilt from the item's DjVu OCR word coordinates (scripts/ingest/cr-reading-order.py). Never previously ingested into the vault; flagged missing by the 2026 heavyweight review of this conference. This address's closing paragraphs (the "Act 1/Act 2/Act 3" nested-drama conclusion and testimony) had been misattributed to Elder Gordon B. Hinckley and merged onto the front of his own file due to a running-head bleed (leaf 91's running head already read "ELDER GORDON B. HINCKLEY" because his talk begins later on that same page); this pass splits that closing portion back into this new, full-length file and recovers Hinckley's own missing true opening separately (see 1967-10-hinckley-in-their-spirit-state-the-future-act.md). President Joseph Fielding Smith's introduction identifies him as "Elder William J. Critchlow, Jr., Assistant to the Twelve," followed by Elder Gordon B. Hinckley, "our concluding speaker." Running heads, page numbers, and leaf markers removed; de-hyphenated line breaks and reflowed paragraphs; printed editorial side-heads preserved as Markdown headings without altering wording.
No witness list recorded beyond the primary source.
Proofread against the source text.
Light review: in-context proofread against the heavyweight collation already on file; no additional wording changes needed.
Collated word-by-word against the original scan.
Ingested from the conferencereport1967sa DjVu XML reading order (leaf 87-91) to fill a gap flagged in the prior heavyweight review pass (progress/reports/conference-reports/1967-10.md), which found Elder William J. Critchlow, Jr.'s address never ingested. While pulling it, discovered the address's own closing section had been separately (and correctly, per the running head at that point) misfiled onto the front of the Hinckley file below it -- a second running-head bleed the prior pass did not catch, since Critchlow's talk runs onto the same leaf where Hinckley's running head starts. Split that closing section back here and recovered the true opening of Hinckley's talk in a companion pass. Collated directly against the reconstructed page text; verbatim from opening to closing 'Amen' with only mechanical OCR/hyphenation cleanup and restoration of the printed side-heads, no paraphrase.
This is a living critical edition. If you find a transcription, metadata, or sourcing error in this talk, report it to the editors →Reports are collated against the page scan and land as corrections in the vault.