PROVO — George Stewart, a thin, 76-year-old man, has probably earned the right to relax, if he only knew how. He’s served four missions for the LDS Church, one term as Provo’s mayor, part of two terms as a city councilman, one “term” as an LDS bishop and another as an LDS branch president, owned and/or worked for several businesses, and raised 11 children with his wife, Jo Anna.
He should be bouncing one of his 47 grandchildren on his knee from deep in an armchair, but Stewart’s idea of slowing down is to work part time for a software company and to serve another term on the Provo City Council. He stays busy enough that he still has to consult his calendar before making an appointment.
Stewart has told his children he’s got to live at least four more years to finish his term. “I’ll be 80 when I get done!” he says, and then laughs, as if he has just realized the oddity of a man that age holding political office.
Anyway, he could be doing a lot of other things. When he left the mayor’s office, he was given a lifetime pass to a local golf course, but he’s never used the thing. His hobby is work. He’s held a job since he was 10 years old, although he has officially retired from time to time. He’s like the cigarette smoker who has quit the habit — many times.
“I feel like I was called to serve,” he says, sounding like a favorite Mormon song.
He and Jo Anna have lived in the same house for 37 years, tucked away on the Provo bench. The first thing you notice when you approach the house are the signs on the exterior walls: “A crowded nest is still best.” “God bless this house and all who enter in.” “The miracle of God is seen in every sunrise.” “Just believe.”
The first thing you notice when you enter the house is that there are more of the same on the interior walls, along with dozens of family photos: “It’s a wonderful life!” “Ask. Seek. Knock.” “Thy will be done.” “No empty chairs — come dine at our table.” “Come what may and love it.”
And on and on it goes. It’s as if Norman Vincent Peale and Brigham Young moved into the place. You pretty much know the Stewarts before you meet them; all the signs are there.
After chatting up his guest, Stewart disappears into a back room and reappears with a couple of large scrapbooks that chronicle a full life of church service, politics, business and family, not necessarily in that order.
“It’s been a great life,” he says, thumbing through the pages and stopping occasionally to study a photo or an article.
Raised in Arizona, he went to work when he was in the fifth grade to help support his family following the death of his father. He delivered papers, worked at a dry cleaner, carried groceries, stocked shelves. He was the oldest of six children, living in an 1,100-square-foot home.
After serving a two-year mission in Peru for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, he earned a political science degree from Arizona State — where he was elected vice president of the student body — and enrolled in law school at the University of Utah, selling cookware door to door to pay tuition. He dropped out of school when he got a better offer from Advanced Data Processing in Portland and worked there for 10 years.
When ADP tried to transfer him to New Jersey, Stewart left the company in 1978. He packed up the family and headed to Arizona to buy a car dealership, but he never got there. Along the way he stopped in Provo to visit his sister and ended up staying for 37 years. “I’ve never been able to give a good reason,” he says. “I felt like it was the place to be.” He founded Hamburger World restaurant and sold insurance. He sold the restaurant in 1986 and became president and CEO of EFI Electronics Corp and then retired five years later at the age of 50.
“My father had died at 53,” he says. “I thought I had three years to live, and I wanted to do other things and spend more time with family.”
During the next 18 months he did volunteer work, serving as executive director of Deseret International, which trains doctors to work in developing nations, and as chairman of the Provo School Foundation. “It sounds funny now, but in my last few years I wanted to do something other than work in the business world,” he says.
He returned to the business world briefly in 1991, when he accepted an invitation to be vice president of sales and training at Franklin Quest (now Covey). He retired again two years later.
Several community leaders urged him to run for mayor. He was serving as an LDS bishop at BYU at the time and knew nothing of local politics, he said. For what it was worth, he and Jo Anna have mayors in their ancestry — his great-grandfather was the second mayor of Mesa, Arizona, and her father was mayor of Calgary, Canada. Stewart filed as a candidate the night before the filing deadline and went on to win in November 1993, serving from 1994 to 1998.
The hallmarks of his term were the completion of several large developments — the Riverwoods mall, the Provo Towne Centre Mall and the renovation of the blighted Academy Square property, which was torn down and replaced with a city library. The latter two projects were problematic and controversial and were years in the making, which was why, in addition to mayoral duties, Stewart became director of economic development for three years. “I felt that was the only way I could get those things done,” he says.
What most will remember about Mayor Stewart is his decision to close Provo’s public pools on Sunday, which grew into a national controversy and found its way into USA Today. To his detractors, he argued, among other things, that even the federal government recognized Sunday as a day of rest, which is why mail isn’t delivered on that day.
“It was a day of rest for the majority of our citizens,” he says. “I felt I was doing what the community wanted me to do. We were the only city in Utah County that opened our pools on Sunday.”
He was nicknamed King George by radio personality Tom Barberi for his autocratic style and the pool closure, and he was lampooned by newspaper cartoonists. One cartoon showed the mayor coming down from the mount. Nobody laughed harder at the cartoons than Stewart. He still has them filed in scrapbooks and shows them to a guest.
“I didn’t mind,” he says. “I loved it. When I ran for office I decided I was not going to take personal affront for anything that was said.”
Barberi was also a good sport about it. When King George left office, Barberi called Stewart and playfully urged him to run again, claiming, “You are my favorite whipping boy.”
But Stewart had never planned to run for another term, fearing that he might be tempted to make decisions based on ensuring his re-election rather than doing the right thing. He and Jo Anna also wanted to be free to serve another mission, and they got their wish. They were sent to the Navajo Indian Reservation in southeastern Utah, living in a tiny trailer in Bluff, San Juan County, and then in Mexican Hat. Eight months into the mission, Stewart was called to serve as a mission president in Argentina.
He returned to Provo in 2004, and a year later he was convinced by a handful of supporters to run for City Council, a move that seemed odd, if not backward, for a former mayor. He won handily, but halfway through his term he bailed out. After reading a story in the Deseret News about the LDS Church wanting more senior couples to serve missions, he felt compelled to answer the call (he learned later that Jo Anna had read the same story and felt the same way). He resigned from the council in December 2008 and left on another mission, this time to Mexico City.
“We felt like we needed to serve while we still had our health,” he says.
He returned to Provo in 2010 and a few months later he was called by his church to serve as branch president in the Missionary Training Center, a calling he performed for four years.
He had no plans to return to politics, but couldn’t resist when people in the community approached him about running for City Council again. Last fall he won a second term, seven years after he had resigned.
“I was surprised no one brought it (his previous resignation) up,” he says. “I guess it’s pretty hard to criticize someone for resigning early to serve a mission — at least in Provo.”
So here he is, back on the City Council, Part II, working 25-30 hours a week for $12,000 a year, as well as working part time for a software company.
“It keeps you alive,” he says. “People die when they don’t stay busy.”
Email: drob@deseretnews.com