THE MORMON HOUSE. A John Hajicek home.
John Hajicek might be the best kept secret among Mormon philanthropists. So why don’t you read about Hajicek in Utah? It might be because he’s tucked away with Midwesterner values and a studious demeanor—his turquoise desk surrounded by wobbly stacks of cottony books and fluttering newspapers from the 1830s, with a smell of leather and varnish wafting into the air. You can forget you’re in his house, because this is a museum.
Hajicek, who’s spent 40 years assembling a library even prestigious universities can’t match, is a keep-to-himself kind of Mormon with an affinity toward the Latter Day Saints who stayed in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Michigan in the 1844s, when most Mormons trekked westward. Hajicek explained to us that he spent his youth in a Mormon ghost-town on a county-line highway called Mormon Road, up in Voree, Wisconsin. In his 20s he was restoring a quarry-stone house built by Mormons who settled there in 1835. His initiation into Mormon history came from the deep-rooted grandchildren of Mormons from the cradle of the faith at Palmyra and its historical zenith at Nauvoo, Illinois. Those were historic stalwarts who preached loudly in a one-room block church into their 90s, but invited him into a reticent inner circle when he was just 18.
As a teenager, Hajicek searched used-bookstores in Utah for his first Joseph Smith-period Book of Mormon. And he never stopped gathering. Soon, it was tactile portraits of Joseph Smith and his family, painted from life. Then it was thousands of handwritten documents penned by Joseph Smith and his contemporaries in Mormon origins. Maps, prints, and broadsides were tucked into narrow drawers. More than one hundred copies of the first edition Book of Mormon fell his way, from eager sellers of heirlooms who heard of his limitless appetite and generosity.
Moving on to Nauvoo, Hajicek spent 25 years on a campaign to save four sunstones, the iconic image Mormon history—a folk sculpture of a brooding but emblazoned face with hand-held trumpets, which was the capital on each temple pilaster (the owners wanted to ditch the monoliths or sink them in the Mississippi River). His talent for finding lost, legendary, and sacred objects and paying whatever he has to pay to get them, has caused angst among his rivals.
There was a long pause. Hajicek enjoyed a corporate career as a top restaurateur, and a hotelier with some of prestigious four-diamond brands from the Chicago-area to south Florida—an elite Playboy golf and ski resort, then an architectural masterpiece from the art-deco period, then grand hotels including several majestic downtown Hyatts, and finally a historic Tobacco Company eatery where southern tenderloin and lobster brought late-night crowds onto a marble dance floor under the chandelier from Gone with the Wind. You can see the influence of taste in Hajicek’s Mormon house, when you step back from the oil paintings and walk into a chef’s kitchen and what can only be called another exhibit—this time in a contemporary museum of art—with boundless sets of modern-design dinnerware versions and vivid Mormon watercolors, which juxtaposes perfectly against so much wood and leather in the house.
This is pure authenticity. Don’t expect Hajicek to have one of those replica-village bookstores, with a proprietor sitting near a golden cash register, reselling popular British novels and famous movie scripts bought cheaply enough to cover the lease of a storefront. Hajicek has outbid them unflinchingly in the niche of Mormon books, buying a disproportionate share of the scarce books appearing on the market, making life difficult for resellers who need to profit. No wonder one bookseller groused to us that Hajicek didn’t return a library book to his college when he was in his 20s. Hajicek responded to the story with a friendlier smile showing lines of seasoning and genuineness, and recalled that his only infraction in life was driving faster than others, racing to his next discovery, while they were idle in their knickknackery shops. He has bought what appeared to us to be hundreds of thousands of rarities—titles we’ve never heard of—meticulously curated by hands that seem to gently take their time.
What’s Hajicek going to do with all of that, in the end? We asked him. Hajicek claims he’s writing a book that’ll challenge what we think we know about the roots of the faith—and at the same time make us love the Smith family and their Church more than ever. He’s been saying that for decades. We did find him credited in the Joseph Smith Papers, and as a contributor to the Encyclopedia of Latter-Day Saint History published by Deseret Book. But he’s not throwing together books like a scholar seeking tenure. Can a man who reads only about American-Georgian folkways, even write for today’s audience? Time will tell if he’s able to craft a magnum opus from his insurmountable piles of the rarest Mormon documents, or if his donations to several research universities will make it possible for other scholars to someday make sense of his vast troves of tomes.
In the meantime, go visit Hajicek’s sophisticated blend of mid-century modern art, American walnut furniture, artifact-filled glass cases and vaults of 19th-century books—this genuine Mormon house is a must-see on any Mormon tour that takes you to the temple lots of Missouri, Liberty Jail, Adam-ondi-Ahman, Far West, Hawn’s Mill, and the other sacred sites of Zion in Missouri. Headed to the famous Mormon city of Nauvoo? Or even the first temple, at Kirtland, Ohio? Start or finish your trip in Kansas City, and meet the most intriguing Mormon left on earth.
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