President Howard W. Hunter

By Don L. Searle

Acting President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles

John Hunter knew that his father, President Howard W. Hunter of the Pasadena (California) Stake, was no sports fan. Still, his father seemed unusually preoccupied that autumn evening in 1959 as he quietly stared at the players, almost unseeing, throughout the Brigham Young University–University of Utah football game. Howard Hunter could not tell his son that he was reflecting on an interview he had had with President David O. McKay a few hours earlier.

President Hunter, visiting in Salt Lake City for general conference, had not been surprised by the message he had received asking him to come to President McKay’s office between sessions that day. He had been working on a project for the First Presidency and assumed that the President wanted a report.

But President McKay’s greeting was astounding: “Oh, I’m glad you’re here, because tomorrow you’re going to be sustained as a member of the Council of the Twelve.”

“I was shocked at the call,” President Hunter remembers, even though he had broad experience in Church leadership positions. He had been a stake president for nearly ten years and had previously served as a bishop for almost seven years. He was also chairman of the regional council of stake presidents in Southern California.

President Hunter has been a member of the Quorum of the Twelve since 1959. (Photo courtesy of Busath Photography.)

Howard Hunter listened as President McKay told him how much he would enjoy his new calling and how it would change his life. Then President McKay asked him not to share the news with anyone but his wife until his name could be presented for a sustaining vote in conference the next day.

Clara May Hunter [Clairel was seventy-two kilometers away in Provo at that moment, visiting John and his wife, Louine, who had recently given birth to the Hunters’ first grandchild. Elder Hunter telephoned to tell “Claire” the news, but after he got the words out, there was silence on the line as both were overcome by emotion.

“I went to the afternoon session and sat down, and the weight of the responsibility started to rest down on me. I got so nervous I couldn’t sit there, so I got up and started to walk. I don’t know where I went,” President Hunter remembers, but the time was spent thinking about how the new calling would affect him.

It would mean giving up his law practice and the life he and Claire had built in Southern California during nearly thirty years of marriage. But, along with thinking of the sacrifices they would have to make, President and Sister Hunter also thought of the covenants they had made in the temple to serve the Lord at all costs. “We expected to honor the commitment we had given,” he says.

That was, after all, what they had always done. And President Hunter was accustomed to taking on responsibility and living up to it. He had grown up that way.

Howard William Hunter was born in Boise, Idaho, 14 November 1907—the older of two children of John William and Nellie Marie Rasmussen Hunter.

His father was a fine man, but he was not a member of the Church when Howard was a boy. It was not until Howard was of deacon age and participating in the ward’s Boy Scout troop that he and his sister received permission to be baptized. Their father finally joined the Church himself in 1927 and was eventually sealed to his family.

Howard was known as a polite young man, popular with young people of his own age and eager to serve. He did not call attention to himself; he just did the things he felt were important in his own “quiet, sweet way,” his sister, Dorothy Hunter Rasmussen, says. “He was very good to me, and I can truthfully say I have never known my brother to do a wrong thing in his life,” she adds.

Howard took piano and violin lessons as a boy, and he learned to play several more instruments on his own—including the marimba he won in a contest while in high school. Before he was out of high school, he was playing in his own band.

After graduation in 1926, he enrolled briefly at the University of Washington in Seattle, Washington. But a band he had recently formed, “Hunter’s Croonaders,” was awarded a contract to perform on a cruise ship, the SS Jackson, and so the band spent five months on a tour of Asia.

After the tour, Howard traveled to Southern California to visit the family of the band’s piano player. He liked the area and decided to stay. He found work in a bank and supplemented his income by playing on a radio program.

It was at a Church dance that he met Clara May Jeffs, a former fashion model who had worked her way up to personnel manager of a prestigious Los Angeles clothing store. They spent most of their dates involved in Church activities.

Howard had never planned to spend his life as a professional musician, and as he approached marriage to Claire, he decided that a musician’s uncertain employment and odd hours would not permit the family life he wanted. So on the Saturday in 1931 before they were to be married, he played his last professional engagement, packed away his instruments, and prepared to go to Salt Lake City to be married in the temple.

The General Authority who married Brother and Sister Hunter gave them some advice they took very seriously: Stay out of debt; never buy anything until you have the money to pay for it. They followed that counsel, sticking with it throughout their married life and teaching it to their children.

That counsel proved to be extremely valuable when the bank where Howard was employed failed during the Great Depression of the early 1930s. Out of work, but also out of debt, Brother Hunter quickly found other employment.

It was a momentous decision for the Hunters when Howard decided to go to law school, beginning in 1934. “I worked eight hours a day and took most of my classes at night. I did my studying at night and over the weekend,” President Hunter recalls. At first, he would study until two o’clock in the morning. Then he found it was less tiring if he went to bed earlier and got up at two in the morning to study.

It was, he says, a period of rigorous training that helped him learn the discipline required to handle the demands of a career, Church work, and family life. He graduated with honors, passed the California law examination, and began his law practice in 1939.

The Hunters’ three sons were born during those years in law school: Howard William, Jr. (who died in infancy), John, and Richard. It wasn’t long after the young attorney began his law practice that he was called, in 1941, as bishop of the newly organized E1 Sereno Ward of the Pasadena (California) Stake. And these two influences—family and Church—shaped the years of his law career.

Those were busy years. He was called as president of the Pasadena Stake in 1950 and served on the temple committee while the Los Angeles Temple was constructed. Through the business associations he found so satisfying he was named to the board of directors of a number of corporations.

Still, he found time for his sons. One of several notable activities which he enjoyed with them was their Scout troop’s journey down a fast-flowing Oregon river in homemade kayaks. President Hunter was paired with his youngest son on the river. Like most of the other kayaks, theirs did not survive the trip. Richard still laughs about going over a waterfall backwards with his father.

President Hunter enjoyed camping. Many times the boys and their father camped in a grove of trees on an undeveloped piece of land near their home.

Howard also liked camping while they were traveling. John and Richard both recall the night the three of them were jolted from sleep by the noise and the headlight of a train coming straight at them! Just a short distance away, it changed direction, passing within six meters. In the dark, they had rolled out their sleeping bags at the base of a railroad track.

In many ways, President Hunter taught his sons without saying a word. “What I know about honesty and integrity has come in large measure by what people have told me about my father,” Richard says. He tells of one Saturday when he accompanied his father to a business meeting in a nearby town. After a while, one of the business men stepped out of the room for a breath of fresh air, and he and Richard talked about what was happening in the meeting.

Richard commented that surely it would be a long time before the project under discussion could begin, since there would be so much legal paperwork involved. No, the man assured him, those involved in the discussion could proceed confidently before all the paperwork was finalized, because they knew that whatever Howard Hunter said he would do, he would do.

Elder Hunter has taken great efforts to visit his children and their families in California whenever possible. While John was studying law in Los Angeles, Elder Hunter would arrange a visit when he passed through on Church assignments; John would take his older children to pick up their grandfather at the air terminal. It happened frequently enough that John’s older children came to know Elder Hunter as “the grandpa who lives at the airport.”

As the grandchildren grew up, and while some of them lived in Utah during their university schooling, Elder Hunter made opportunities to enjoy their presence at general conference times or at other events and activities.

“When I think of Grandpa Hunter, I think more than anything else of an example of a loving husband,” says Robert, his oldest grandson, manager of a branch bank in a Salt Lake City suburb. Family members watched with love and admiration for more than eight years as Elder Hunter nursed his beloved Claire through the illness that finally took her life in 1983.

“You could really sense a loving bond between the two of them,” Robert says. Elder Hunter insisted on caring for her as much as possible himself during the years when a series of strokes left her increasingly dependent. Meanwhile, he continued to handle his Church assignments. He suffered a minor heart attack, but it did not seem to slow him down, his sister says. She and others helped care for Claire as he would allow it.

When finally he was forced to leave his wife in a nursing care facility, he called the place often to check on her, even while he was traveling on Church assignments. Stopping to see her was his first priority after leaving the Church offices for the day or when returning from an out-of-town trip. When she could no longer converse with him, he continued to talk to her during visits.

“He was always in a hurry to see her, to be by her side, and take care of her,” Robert says.

“He did so much for her—so much,” Sister Rasmussen emphasizes.

The wife of a member of the Council of the Twelve, President Hunter says, exerts a “quiet, sustaining influence” which helps her husband to bear the burdens he must carry. Frequently, she must speak, bear testimony, and contribute in a number of other ways. She makes a “great contribution” to a husband’s success in his calling. “I haven’t had my wife to do so now for two years,” he adds. “I guess I didn’t realize what a great support and influence she was until she died. I realize it more now than I ever have.”

There is another love that has helped sustain him through the years of his wife’s illness and since her loss—not a love that could ever take her place, to be sure, but one that uplifts, supports, and cheers. It is the love of the members of his quorum.

“There is a love among the members of the Twelve that surpasses understanding,” he says. “They have the love that I believe Christ talked about.” Associating with them, he explains, has taught him humility, patience, greater faith, and love of fellowman. And those qualities foster a greater desire to serve others.

During more than a quarter of a century in the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, Howard W. Hunter has helped to move the Church along its upward path. He has been associated with the Church’s genealogy programs for many years (and maintains a personal interest, his son John reports, in gathering family genealogy). Under Elder Hunter’s direction several years ago, goals and guidelines were established that still point the way for the Church’s Genealogical Department.

President Hunter has influenced the Church Educational System as a member of the Church Board of Education and the Brigham Young University Board of Trustees. He has had a strong voice in Church youth programs, particularly in Scouting. He has served as West European Mission director and has employed his business experience as a director of several large industrial or land-holding corporations and other organizations owned by the Church or related to its activities.

But it is the depth of his caring for individuals and the quiet strength of his testimony that have made him beloved to so many Latter-day Saints. His concern is always focused outward. “He has an extraordinary ability to remember people and their circumstances,” his son Richard says. Family and friends as well comment on his amazing recall of people he met years ago and the things they talked about.

He has had the privilege of working daily for many years now with some of the most spiritually attuned men on earth. “You can’t associate with men who have testimonies like theirs without it building your own,” he comments.

Through the years, Elder Hunter has become one of those whose testimony builds others. He has, for a third of a lifetime now, constantly and consistently reaffirmed the witness he bore in the closing session of general conference on 11 October 1959, the day after he was sustained as a member of the Twelve.

“I have a firm, uncompromising conviction that God lives, that Jesus is the Christ, that the gospel was restored in this latter dispensation by the instrumentality of the Prophet Joseph Smith. I have an abiding conviction of the truthfulness of this fact,” he said.

“I accept, without reservation, the call … and I am willing to devote my life and all that I have to this service.” He has kept that pledge with integrity and love.

Left: Howard W. Hunter as a thirteen-year-old Boy Scout.

Left: Elder Hunter as a young boy in Boise, Idaho.

Center: Music has played an important part in Elder Hunter’s life. He learned to play several instruments, and for a few years he was a professional musician leading his own band.

Right: Speaking in a sacrament meeting at Shepherds’ Field, near Jerusalem, in October 1978.

Above: Elder Hunter speaks to young people in Santa Rosa, California, in 1961.

Right: Elder and Sister Hunter.

Right: Photographed visiting ancient temple ruins in Mexico, Elder Hunter is standing at far right. Next to him is Elder William R. Bradford of the First Quorum of the Seventy.

Above: Elder Hunter in meditation at a general conference session.