Elder D. Lee Tobler

Of the Seventy

“The most significant shaping of who I was and what I could become was set on my mission,” says Elder D. Lee Tobler, who served in the Swiss Austrian Mission from 1953 to 1956. “I was raised with sound, solid gospel underpinnings, but I had some difficulty as a youth with self-confidence. On my mission I came to better understand the Lord and who I was and what he would do for me. That was the turning point. My life since then has been full of growth and rising confidence, with periodic setbacks but an overall upward trend. I’m grateful for the Lord’s blessings.”

Born in Provo, Utah, on 25 July 1933 to Donald and Louise Shoell Tobler, Lee is the second of four children. He grew up in Nevada and Idaho and earned a bachelor’s degree at Brigham Young University and a master of business administration degree at Northwestern University in Chicago. He started his career at Exxon in New York City, and 14 years later he began a decade of employment at Aetna Life and Casualty in Hartford, Connecticut. After returning to the oil industry for four years in Houston, Texas, he joined the BF Goodrich Company in Akron, Ohio, from which he retires in July 1998 as executive vice president and chief financial officer.

Lee married Darlene Thueson in 1956 in the Salt Lake Temple, and the couple have 6 children and 12 grandchildren. The Toblers have been living in Marshallville, Ohio, on a five-acre farm where Lee has been an avid landscape gardener with flowers, shrubs, and vegetables. He also likes to read histories and biographies and play tennis.

His Church service has included serving as an Area Authority Seventy in the North America Northeast Area since April 1996, and he has served as a stake president and stake presidency counselor and twice as a bishop. “I particularly enjoyed the calling of bishop,” Elder Tobler says. “It’s very intensive and demanding, but loving and caring for members of a ward is a real blessing. In fact, love is the whole reason for any calling, priesthood or otherwise. First of all we love the Savior, and if that love is real we will love our brothers and sisters.”