Chapter 2. Gone Missing

The recliner had swallowed me whole, and my vigil didn’t end up lasting long at all; my reminiscing soon gave way to a world of dreams in which I imagined Grandma being ushered past the sentinels standing guard on her voyage home. In her honor, of course, they were singing her favorite parodies and were dressed in crazy outfits – the kind she loved to wear to costume parties!

I awoke a few hours later with a kink in my neck; the telephone was ringing, the sun was rising, and sure enough, the phone call confirmed that she was gone. By the time she passed away early that autumn morning in 2006, she had already been a widow for almost twenty-five years; our sadness at her passing was thus tempered to some degree by the thought of a joyful reunion in the heavens with her eternal sidekick, Charles Hampton Price.

“Hamp,” as my grandfather was known to his friends, had been a meticulous record keeper, almost to the point of what today might be considered a diagnosable case of Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder. When we made another trip to Utah to attend Grandma’s funeral the next week, we sorted through her possessions and found among them Hamp’s detailed timelines, maps, journals, photographs, and other records that he had kept. I thumbed through the materials, and they quickly drew me in. As the hours passed, I attacked the annals with a late-night fervor, perhaps aided by a bit of inherited OCD of my own.

I didn’t have the chance to know my grandfather well while he was still living, but I found a renewed interest in researching his life as I dove headlong into over 5,000 pages of journal entries. I was particularly enthralled by his mission journals; we had served LDS missions in the same area of Germany sixty years apart, and his journals described people in their youth whom I had known as elderly pensioners – people who had endured the rise of Nazism, a world war, and forty years of Orwellian rule in the interim.

In my few memories of Hamp, I can still picture the Patriarch. A retired lieutenant colonel with a distinguished career in the U.S. Air Force, he was a soft-spoken giant – bigger and taller than anyone else I knew. His eyes revealed that he had stories to tell, but his voice, though gruff, was calm and soothing enough to put me to sleep whenever he would start into his narratives.

He would get caught up in the minutest details of his stories – details that, though uninteresting to me as a young child at the time, continued to intrigue me long after a 21-gun salute punctuated his passing in 1982. To this day, for example, he is the only LDS Stake Patriarch I have ever met who had a tattoo (the culmination, I had been told, of an unfortunate night of bad decisions after his high school graduation.)

As I dug through his memorabilia after Grandma’s funeral, I felt compelled to discover more about his roots – and his youth in particular. I had taken a bit of a haphazard approach to my research, so I decided to start from the beginning and scan all of the records into electronic files. My attempt to put his journals in order, though, left me with an unfortunate gap; his high school years were conspicuously missing from the pile of journals. As it turned out, he had misplaced that particular volume many years before his death, and it had never turned up again.

As I read the detailed descriptions of personal and historical events in his other journals, I found myself with a growing list of unanswered questions about his youth. For that time period, sadly, I was forced to conjecture his thoughts and experiences based on the sparse documents I could gather: a yearbook, a commencement program, and a few scraps of notepaper.

I found that he had attended a high school known as L.D.S. High. I opened the embossed cover of the yearbook and thumbed through its pages, wondering why I had never heard of the school. I found Hamp’s portrait and stared at some of the others on the page. Who were these people? They must have known him; maybe I could ask them some questions myself! I got excited about the idea and optimistically Googled one name after another to see if there might be any hint of classmates who were still alive and kicking. Each time, however, the search ended with a death record. I saw no promising leads among the first few dozen names I tried, and I soon admitted to myself that the idea of locating living contemporaries was a fruitless path.

What was I thinking anyhow? The entire class would have been approaching centenarian status; the ranks of those who might have provided a first-hand account had long since thinned, if not completely disappeared. Looking at the death dates on my computer screen, I realized that I had only missed my chance by a couple of years.

I wished I had begun the project earlier, but I can’t say I hadn’t been warned:

“Don’t wait until it’s too late,” a college family history teacher had admonished over a decade before – back when many of Hamp’s fellow graduates in the Class of 1928 could still have granted me an interview.

We had all nodded our heads in affirmation, but without any actual intent of doing anything about it until we ourselves had become old and boring. The warning had fallen on deaf ears; along with the rest of the BYU Class of 1995, I had been much more interested in rock climbing and skiing than in sitting around some smelly nursing home or spending my precious free time glued to a microfiche screen in the dark dungeons of the library.

As a tell-tale sign that I myself had aged in the meantime, I recognized that I would now happily give up a day on the slopes for the chance to sit down with someone who could provide a personal account of the time period missing from Hamp’s journals; unfortunately, though, the chance had evaporated. Why are old teachers always right in retrospect?

“Guess I should have listened to Sister Fischer,” I said to myself, closing the yearbook and acknowledging my failure to heed her warning. I shook my head with an air of disappointment, accepted the consequences of my procrastination, and moved on to other projects.

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