BYU professor revels in teaching

Black at least has some company now. Four of BYU's 73 religion teachers are women. "Without a doubt," Woodger notes, "Susan blazed the trail for those of us who followed. She was the right woman at the right time. I would not be here without her."

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Harvey Black wasn't exactly what Susan was looking for in a prospective husband. She was looking for tall, dark and handsome — "someone like my first husband, only nice," she says. Black, a professor of clinical psychology at BYU, pulled up to her house for their first date in a Dodge Dart with a bike rack. He was bald, gray, a grandfather and 19 years her senior.

Susan had been single for 14 years and felt like a fish out of water on the singles scene. If her three children didn't frighten potential suitors, there was that other thing. "Want the biggest turnoff ever? Tell 'em you're a religion teacher," she says. She heard Harvey speak at a church singles function.

"Susan made the mistake of coming up and saying she liked my talk, and I wouldn't leave her alone after that," recalls Harvey, whose first wife had died a year earlier after a long struggle with cancer.

Harvey and Susan hit it off. They shared their love of books, genealogy, research and writing. "And he adored me," she says. "It's never changed. ... He's a rock. He's provided the most joy in my whole life."

Harvey, now 83, and Susan have been married 23 years. He's quiet and scholarly; she's noisy and scholarly. They share a home just a couple of blocks from the BYU campus. He works in his office in the front of the house, she works in her combination office/library in the back of the house. Like his wife, Harvey has authored several books.

"He is the consummate scholar," says his wife.

When she isn't teaching, Susan is writing. Shortly after she was hired by the religion department, she accepted an assignment to document church members during Joseph Smith's lifetime, mostly because no one else volunteered for such a dull task. After poring over records in Nauvoo, she produced 50 volumes of names and data, some 48,000 pages in all. She produced another 29 volumes of similarly esoteric data (including passenger lists from Copenhagen to America).