President Henry B. Eyring once asked his father a simple question: "Why do you ask gas station attendants questions?"
His father's response was profound: "I never met a man I couldn't learn something from," he told his son.
Years later, President Eyring would describe his childhood home as a laboratory where he learned to cherish science and religion and to respect others.
Set apart Feb. 3, 2008, as first counselor to President Thomas S. Monson, President Eyring credits his accomplishments as a scholar, educator and religious leader to his parents.
Born in Princeton, N.J., May 31, 1933, to Henry and Mildred Bennion Eyring, he was raised in a home filled with deep discussion. His father was a renowned research scientist at Princeton, whose knowledge of intricate chemistry was widely applied to a variety of scientific fields. His mother was head of the women's Physical Education Department at the University of Utah and was pursuing a doctorate at the time she met his father.
The family moved to Salt Lake City in the 1940s so their children could grow up in an LDS environment, and Henry Eyring helped build the University of Utah into a renowned research institution.
With characteristic concern that children feel, Elder Eyring told an audience at Brigham Young University several years ago how he remembers the move to Utah. "I can remember how my cousins helped me," telling him "the kids would stone me with my New Jersey accent. I got rid of it quickly, out of fear. I remember terror as I walked up to the junior high school on the first day.
"A few years later — I don't know how it happened — but after basketball season I left high school and went without my high school classmates to the University of Utah. I can remember those first days — the Physics Department and the Mathematics Department didn't seem very friendly to me. I remember my fear.
"I went from there to the United States Air Force and somehow decided that physics would not be my life's work. I thought I needed something else for education, so I tried a place I had heard of called the Harvard Graduate School of Business. I was so naive I didn't know it might be hard to be admitted. I know now that it was a miracle that I was accepted.
"I can remember parting from my father on a street corner in New York City. For some reason he was there for scientific meetings. I was on my way to the Harvard Business School in my Ivy League suit, or so I thought. That suit was later borrowed by my roommate, who had been a Harvard undergraduate. He wore it to a costume party as a gangster suit, which offended me some. He wore a black shirt and a white tie with it.
"When I parted from dad in my new suit, it was one of those great moments in life when I was going off to school. I looked back at him. Later he said to me that I looked forlorn, but I remember feeling sorry for him. To him I was a frightened student. I didn't know what a balance sheet was. I didn't know what a pro-forma cash flow looked like. I was a physics student about to be lost in the Harvard Business School."
After earning a bachelor's degree in physics, serving two years in the Air Force, and entering the Harvard Graduate School of Business Administration, President Eyring met the woman who would share his love of learning. He married Kathleen Johnson, a daughter of Sid and LaPrele Johnson, in the Logan Utah Temple July 27, 1962; they have six children.
They moved to Palo Alto, Calif., where President Eyring worked for 10 years as a Stanford professor. He recalled that "her first adventures in cooking for us were to find some morning menu that I could keep down on my nervous stomach as I went off to meet those apparently confident Stanford students. I wondered how I could teach them, until I found out that they were scared, too."
While at Stanford, he held teaching and administrative assignments in production management, operations and systems analysis, organizational behavior and management of the total enterprise. He also served as a visiting fellow for a year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and was founder, director or officer of at least two companies in Sunnyvale, Calif.
A consultant to a wide range of private and public enterprises, President Eyring was called by the First Presidency to serve as president of Ricks College (now BYU-Idaho) in 1971, where he served for six years before becoming deputy commissioner of Church Education. He was later named commissioner, where he served until being sustained as first counselor in the Presiding Bishopric in 1985, then a member of the First Quorum of the Seventy in 1992, and then as an apostle on April 1, 1995, at age 61.
Recent messages from President Eyring have focused on the need to live the gospel in the present, rather than procrastinating one's activity for the future.
Those who wait for "some day" to improve their spiritual lives flirt with significant danger, he said during the April 2007 General Conference. "We may discover that we have run out of time. The God who gives us each day as a treasure will require an accounting. This day is a precious gift of God. The thought that 'some day I will' can be a thief of the opportunities of time and blessings of eternity."Living the gospel and avoiding the evils of today's society have been recurrent themes for President Eyring. In a talk several years ago, he warned of the flood of evil that "soon will be a torrent. It will become a torrent of sounds, sights and sensations that invite temptation and offend the spirit of God. ... Swimming back upstream to purity against tides of the world was never easy. It is getting harder and may soon be frighteningly difficult. We must raise our sights."
As an apostle, President Eyring represented the church in interfaces on highly public issues that involved some controversy. In Cedar City, he was the church spokesman in issuing an apology to descendants of those murdered 150 years ago in the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Some 120 non-Mormon immigrants traveling toward California were killed on the order of local church leaders who commanded an LDS militia.
During a memorial service at the gravesite of some of the victims, President Eyring read a prepared statement by the First Presidency acknowledging that local leaders led and carried out the murder of unarmed civilians. The statement expressed "profound regret" for the massacre, which has long been a source of historical dispute and embarrassment to the church.
Then-Elder Eyring, along with Elder Russell M. Nelson, his fellow on the Quorum of Twelve, also were assigned to visit with The Rev. Al Sharpton, who made a public political comment aimed at presidential candidate Mitt Romney, suggesting Latter-day Saints do not believe in God.
In a telephone conversation with the two apostles, Sharpton apologized. The two church leaders accepted the apology and said the matter was closed.
After he was sustained as President Gordon B. Hinckley's second counselor on Oct. 6, 2007, he was asked at a press conference whether he had a message for the world:
"We are believers in the Lord Jesus Christ, as the Son of the living God, who is generous in every way," he said.
At general conference last October, President Eyring said church members can help avoid the conflicts that beset the world by unifying, even though the worldwide church incorporates different cultures, backgrounds and languages.
"There is always more that the children of God have in common than differences," President Eyring said. "And even the differences can be seen as an opportunity. God will help you see their differences not as a source of irritation but as a contribution. In a moment, the Lord can help you see and value what the other person contributes which you lack."
Compiled from Deseret News and LDS Church News reports