Mormons are regular people, President Gordon B. Hinckley said during a 1995 interview on "60 Minutes" that thrilled American church members who longed for their neighbors to see them as normal.

The moment he told Mike Wallace "We are not a weird people" was the high-profile zenith of what scholars inside the church and out say was a successful 73-year effort, first as the leader of the church's publicity committee and later for almost a quarter century as its de facto president, to change how others viewed the church.

Along the way, he changed Mormon culture, altering the way members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints talk, the way they worship and, in doing so, scholars say, was instrumental in seeing that they were accepted into mainstream America.

"What really made a difference that he personally engineered was the church's engagement with the wider world," said Philip Barlow, the Leonard Arrington Chair of Mormon History and Culture at Utah State University. "He was the face of Mormonism for a long time because he was acting or de facto president of the church for nearly 25 years. His skill with the media and his personality has led to an engagement with the world that I think might be history-changing."

As the church grew to 13 million members from 730,000 in 1934, when President Hinckley took over as secretary of the Radio, Publicity and Mission Literature Committee of the church, the man who had aspired to be a journalist created or oversaw the messages the church presented to members and to the world through the media and its missionary program.

"It wasn't just amazing growth but amazing growth that led to a kind of acceptance of Mormons as a part of the American social and cultural mainstream," said Jan Shipps, professor emeritus of history and religious studies at Indiana University-Purdue University. "Not necessarily the religious mainstream, which we're finding with Mitt Romney's presidential campaign, but culturally and socially, Mormons aren't weird."

President Hinckley's obvious wisdom, goodness and stability challenged outside views of LDS beliefs, said Richard Bushman, the Howard W. Hunter Professor of Mormon Studies at Claremont College.

"The beliefs can't be that strange if they can produce that kind of person," Bushman said.

Internally, Shipps, who is not LDS, said Hinckley's legacy was the way he managed church growth.

"I heard a lot of conversation in the late 1970s and early '80s, about the time he became the essential leader because Spencer Kimball was incapacitated and later Ezra Taft Benson was incapacitated, that there was a lot of distinction growing between those born into the church and the many converts who were joining the church," she said. "It looked in many ways as this would be a divide in the church that would be dramatic."