CHILDREN & SHEEP.

His grandfather, John Watkins, a bricklayer, converted to Mormonism in Great Britain, walked into Utah in 1856 with a handcart full of belongings, a wife and two children. There he acquired two more wives, sired 30 more children (his descendants number about 750). Arthur Watkins, the Senator's father, was John's fifth child by his second wife; the Senator was the first of Arthur's nine children. He grew to be a mild, bookish boy who read whatever he could find in print, including the old newspapers that papered the walls of the Watkins home.

After becoming a basketball star at Brigham Young University, he dropped out to make some money teaching the fourth and fifth grades in the Maeser (pop. 600), Utah elementary school. When he was told that his salary would be only $40 a month, Watkins asked how much sheepherders were paid. One of the school trustees, a sheep rancher, replied that the herders were paid $60 a month, because they were responsible for valuable property. Retorted Watkins: "I won't work for less than the sheepherders; children are a lot more valuable than sheep." He was paid $60 a month.

In 1907, Watkins went to New York City as a missionary, distributed pamphlets from one slammed door to another, conducted hundreds of sidewalk rallies on Fifth Avenue. He stayed on to graduate from Columbia University Law School in 1912, and to win Andrea Rich, a granddaughter of onetime Mormon Apostle Charles C. Rich (who had six wives and 51 children). Married in 1913, Andrea and Arthur have one son, four daughters.

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