I sat down on New Year's Eve in 2016 because Jeremy had given me the opportunity to record a living history. At seventy-eight, I could look back on a life that had been dynamic, surprising, and much richer than I could have planned. I had crossed oceans as a boy, returned to Australia as a missionary, tried several careers, found the work that suited me, and built a family with Judy.

Of all the people I wanted to know me, I thought especially of my grandchildren. I wanted them to understand not only where our family came from but how much gratitude I felt for their parents and for the lives opening in front of them.

A life history is not a list of accomplishments. The meaning is usually found in ordinary decisions: whether a family accepts an adventure, whether a young man keeps working for tuition, whether two people find their way back to each other, and whether a home becomes a place where children know they are wanted.

I also wanted the family to know my parents and grandparents through me. Their courage, faith, thrift, and willingness to work made my own choices possible. None of us begins alone, no matter how independent we may imagine ourselves to be.

George and I were born in Caldwell, Idaho, on May 13, 1938, two months before we were expected. He weighed two pounds ten ounces, and I weighed two pounds twelve. The place where we were born was closer to a nursing home than the hospitals families know today. The doctor asked my father whether he wanted to try to raise us. Of course he did.

The staff fashioned incubators from long wooden orange crates. Pillows went in the bottom, and light bulbs above us supplied warmth. It sounds impossibly primitive now, but those boxes gave two very small boys a chance. At larger hospitals, premature babies were being exposed to oxygen concentrations that later left many of them blind. Our improvised beginning may have protected us from a danger no one there understood.

My parents came from southeastern Idaho families whose lives were tied to land, church, and one another. The names and exact relationships could take pages, but what mattered to me as a child was that there were grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins who already knew where we belonged. Family history was not an abstract chart. It was a farmhouse, a table, a field, and stories repeated until they became part of us.

We lived in Denver, but summers returned us to the farm. For a city boy, it was magical. We rode horses, discovered the scale of farm work, and had freedoms that did not exist on a city block. The adults had chores and worries we only partly understood. We had cousins, animals, dirt, and the sense that the day could go on indefinitely.

My father's work with the Bureau of Reclamation brought us to Denver in 1940. Civil engineers often moved from project to project, but his expertise in concrete gave our family unusual stability. He became an authority in a field most people misunderstood. We learned early that cement was only one ingredient in concrete and that the quality of a structure depended on knowledge hidden inside what looked ordinary.

World War II turned Denver into a staging and transportation center. Servicemen moved through the city, families displayed flags for loved ones in uniform, and even a child knew that the country was organized around the war. Meat was scarce, butter disappeared, shoes were rationed, and anything made of metal or rubber had to be conserved.

My mother made use of what she could find. I remember beef heart and head cheese because protein could not be taken for granted. We took care of clothing and repaired things because replacements might not exist. These habits did not feel like a philosophy then. They were simply the way a household operated when the larger world needed nearly everything it could produce.

For years our family car was a 1934 Studebaker. It had running boards, the shape of an earlier era, and eventually the wear of a machine asked to serve beyond anyone's expectations. We lived with a coal furnace and the routines that came with it. Comfort arrived gradually, one improvement at a time, and each improvement had a story behind it.

The most unusual story began when my father learned there was demand for rabbit brains used in producing thromboplastin. He developed a side business collecting and preparing them. The work was messy and exacting, and the whole idea sounded unlikely, but it nearly doubled his government salary. Opportunity did not always arrive in respectable packaging.

When my father was invited to Australia as an engineering adviser, he gathered the family and asked whether we should go. No one wanted to stay behind. The answer was immediate: adventure, bring it on. I lay awake for several nights thinking about the new life ahead of us. At fifteen, Australia was almost beyond imagination.

In February 1954, I took my first airplane flight, first to Salt Lake City and then to San Francisco. Air travel itself was an event. From San Francisco we boarded an Orient Line passenger ship for the Pacific crossing. The transcript leaves the exact vessel uncertain, and that detail deserves family confirmation rather than a confident guess.

Because of the arrangements made for the engineering families, we traveled first class. Meals had assigned places and rules, and the ship carried the social structure of another age. We stopped in Honolulu, Fiji, and New Zealand. Each port offered only a glimpse, but together they made the map of the Pacific real.

We arrived in Sydney, then flew to Canberra and traveled by car toward Cooma. A newly completed cottage waited for our family near the community serving the Snowy Mountains Scheme. The landscape, the accent, and the institutions were unfamiliar, but the purpose of my father's work was clear.

The Australian government had invited a small group of American engineers with Bureau of Reclamation experience to advise on the project. The scheme joined dams, tunnels, power stations, and the diversion of water through mountains. It was infrastructure on a scale that could change regions, and it depended on thousands of people from many countries.

My father brought knowledge about concrete and large public works. He and the other advisers were credited with helping the project move ahead of schedule and under budget. I was young, but I understood that expertise mattered. Years of work on earlier projects could become leverage when a new country attempted something ambitious.

George and I entered an educational system that did not line up neatly with the one we had left. The Leaving Certificate demanded serious preparation, and we had roughly eighteen months to complete work that normally occupied much longer. School uniforms, manners, terminology, and expectations all reminded us that English-speaking countries could still be profoundly different.

I initially faced French, but the mismatch in preparation became obvious. Music offered another route. I studied theory and piano and continued developing an understanding that had begun with violin. The work was technical, not merely expressive: notation, harmony, intervals, and disciplined practice. Music gave me a language that traveled more easily than my accent did.

I played rugby until a knee injury altered what I imagined might be possible, including thoughts about a naval path. I learned Scottish dancing and made friendships that survived distance and time. I also listened to arguments about labor, class, and politics that were unlike the conversations around our table in Denver.

When our Australian years ended, we did not simply reverse the Pacific crossing. We boarded another ship and continued west. A dock strike complicated the departure and the ship's cargo, including newsprint, became part of the delay. Sydney, Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth marked the beginning of a voyage whose schedule seemed to belong to forces outside our control.

The Indian Ocean was vast, and shipboard life developed its own routines. At one point the vessel rolled severely enough that the angle became part of the family story. Julie was still very young, which added the practical details of caring for a small child to the romance of crossing the world.

We passed through the Suez Canal and entered the Mediterranean. Europe followed: ports, rail travel, London, and the accumulated history I would later study more formally. I was not yet eighteen, but I had seen societies shaped by war, empire, engineering, class, and migration.

Back in Denver, I found work at the American Crystal Sugar Company, first in the mailroom and then in other responsibilities. George and I entered the University of Denver under unusual circumstances because the Australian Leaving Certificate did not resemble an American high school diploma. On paper, we were treated almost like foreign students in our own country.

We lived at home and worked to pay tuition. The arrangement required long days, but it allowed us to move through university without the student debt that later became common. Money was not theoretical. Every course represented hours already worked or hours that still had to be worked.

I spent time at Brigham Young University and became involved in student activity with more enthusiasm than financial restraint. That experience, including overspending connected to an event, taught me that energy did not excuse poor stewardship. I returned to Denver with a clearer sense of responsibility.

Australia called me back, this time for a two-year mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. I returned not as an engineer's son but as a missionary responsible for meeting people, teaching, organizing, and living closely with companions whose strengths and habits differed from my own.

Missionary service made faith practical. Belief had to survive fatigue, rejection, schedules, personality differences, and the obligation to keep serving when a day had not gone well. It also brought friendships and reunions that continued long after the formal assignment ended.

At the University of Denver, I joined Alpha Kappa Psi, the professional business fraternity. The organization offered friendship, leadership, and a network that reached beyond campus. I later served in national roles and traveled through that connection, but its first value was teaching me how institutions are held together by people willing to do unglamorous work.

I represented the business school in the student senate and played violin in the university orchestra. Those activities might seem unrelated, but both required attention to the whole. In an orchestra, one part has meaning only in relation to every other part. In student government, a proposal matters only if people can understand, support, and carry it out.

History drew me increasingly strongly. Professors opened periods and personalities that made the present feel less inevitable. Graduate study required sustained reading and writing, and I completed a master's thesis on Abraham Alonzo Kimball. Research taught me to distinguish what a record supported from what a storyteller wished it said.

After graduate study, IBM appeared to be the job of jobs. The company carried prestige and represented the future, but the work demanded technical abilities that were not my strengths. Wanting an opportunity to fit does not make it fit. Leaving was humbling, but it was also honest.

I worked in a men's clothing store and considered retailing more seriously. I entered real estate and learned the emotional and financial weight attached to property. Every position added another view of selling: not persuasion for its own sake, but the effort to understand what another person valued and whether the thing offered actually served that need.

I completed an MBA and accepted work with General Mills in the Carolinas. That position was later eliminated. A mobile-home sales opportunity followed. From the outside, the sequence might look unsettled. From inside it, I was gathering evidence about where I was useful and what sort of responsibility I could sustain.

A municipal bond firm was looking for a Latter-day Saint salesman who could work with banks and institutions in Utah. The description was unusually specific, and I happened to fit it. What began as another possibility became the profession I kept for more than thirty years.

Municipal finance connects private capital with public work. The instruments may look like numbers on paper, but behind them are schools, roads, utilities, and communities making promises about the future. My responsibility was to understand the offering, represent it accurately, and protect relationships built on confidence.

The career took me through several firms and required travel, persistence, and sensitivity to markets that could change quickly. I did not become rich, but the work supported a good home and a full life. It also let me participate in politics, professional organizations, and civic causes without separating my livelihood from the larger community.

I first met Judy in 1964 on a blind date that lasted most of the day. It was long enough for two people to move beyond formal conversation and begin seeing the person underneath. We cared for each other, but distance, work, and timing kept the relationship uneven.

Judy moved to California. I continued working and dating, but the comparison was always present. Other possibilities were measured against the woman I had not quite been able to keep. Years passed, which can make a person believe a story has ended when it has only paused.

After I moved to Salt Lake City, I learned that Judy would be home for three weeks. We went to see Butterflies Are Free, spent as much time together as circumstances allowed, and attended political events during a busy season. Before she returned to California, I told her I wanted to marry her. She said she would think about it.

In September 1977, at about three on a Friday afternoon, Church Social Services called my office. If Judy and I could be at headquarters by four-thirty, they said, we could have a beautiful little baby boy. We had ninety minutes to cross from hoping to becoming parents.

I called Judy, but coherent words were difficult. All I could do was giggle. On the way, she suggested the name Jeremy James. Jeremy honored my grandfather Jeremiah Hatch, and James carried her family name. We arrived to meet a five-pound baby whose tiny legs later became the strong legs of a champion swimmer.

I gave out candy instead of cigars. The gesture suited the joy of the day: uncomplicated, almost unbelievable happiness. A house changes when a baby enters it. Rooms that belonged to adults become part of a future organized around feeding, sleeping, worry, and wonder.

Judy and I moved through several homes before settling at 925 Donner Way. She had a gift for improving a house, seeing what a room could become, and making decisions that turned property into a home. We redecorated and replaced nearly everything needed so the house could carry us through the later part of life. I became deeply comfortable there.

Church service placed me in quorums, a high council, and a university ward bishopric. The work could be joyful and heavy. One community idea began modestly: a Fourth of July breakfast in the park, cooked on simple equipment. Another ward joined, and the breakfast eventually grew to roughly five hundred people. For years it gave the neighborhood a tradition that belonged to everyone.

Later life included travel with family, winters near the California coast, cruises through the Panama Canal and to Alaska and Mexico, and memories of the trips my own parents had made possible. I remembered seeing citrus on trees in Phoenix, Lake Louise, Niagara Falls, New York, and my first sight of the Atlantic. Each journey enlarged the family story.

My father's investment in 480 acres outside Denver eventually benefited all six children. He had bought land so he could keep horses and hold onto part of the cowboy life, but the city's growth changed its value. I tried more than once to duplicate that kind of investment without equal success. The lesson was not that every risk wins. It was to remain alert, learn economics, save, invest, and understand opportunity.