Stella Oaks was with her husband at a Colorado hospital when he died, so the role of delivering the heartbreaking news to their 7-year-old son, Dallin, back in Utah fell to they boy’s grandmother.

His mother had maintained optimism and faith that his father would recover from tuberculosis, and she and her three children had prayed fervently for his recovery.

So his father’s death shocked the boy.

“I ran into the bedroom at their old farm home and knelt down and began to pray that it wasn’t true,” he wrote later. “When I had been there just a few moments, Grandpa came in weeping. He knelt down beside me and promised that he would be a father to me.”

The devastation President Dallin H. Oaks felt that summer day in 1940 multiplied the following year with his mother’s nervous breakdown and

See Full Page