Edwin Brown Firmage Obituary (1935

SUMMARIZING A BEAUTIFUL LIFE Father, partner, friend, teacher, advocate, Edwin Brown Firmage passed away October 3, 2020, at age 85, having lived a life of inner richness and action for good. Ed was born in Provo, Utah, in 1935, the year of Black Sunday and Top Hat. That same year, Ed’s dad’s dad, Edwin D. Firmage, an early partner of J. C. Penney, started his own department store, Firmage’s, in Provo. Ed worked there, with grandfather and dad, till he left home to marry and then to serve a two-year mission for the LDS Church in Great Britain. Ed was unusually close to his grandparents on both sides. EDF was a visionary business leader, schooled and refined by hard times and hard work. EDF’s wife, Miriam Susan Raddon, daughter of Park City newspaper editor, Samuel Raddon, was the young Ed’s model of saintliness. Ed’s mother’s dad, Hugh B. Brown, was a Mormon apostle. Also self-made, having taught himself the common law of England on the plains of Alberta, HBB chose the path of learning and service to faith. In HBB’s wife, Zina Brown (née Card), Ed found the only person who could rival his other grandmother in the qualities of kindness. In these remarkable lives EBF found his roots. Ed’s connection to his roots was life-long and life-giving, for grandparents and grandchild. In 1965, Ed became one of the first White House Fellows, a cadre of promising young professionals chosen to work for a year as special assistants to senior officials such as the president, vice president, and members of the Cabinet. Among the other Fellows of that year were journalist Bill Moyers and Tom Johnson, future president of CNN. For his year as Fellow, Ed served on the staff of Vice President Hubert Humphrey, with responsibility for civil rights issues. On leaving the White House in 1966, Ed was offered high-level positions in several Washington agencies. Instead, he chose to return to Utah, so that his children could know their grandparents. Ed had a brilliant mind. The first of his family to finish college, Ed graduated with bachelors and masters degrees in history from BYU, then attended the University of Chicago Law School, where he was National Honors Scholar and member of the editorial board of the Law Review. He received his J.D. and S.J.D. degrees from Chicago in 1963. From Chicago, Ed went to the University of Missouri, where he taught for a year, and then to the White House. On returning to Utah in 1966, Ed took a position at the University of Utah Law School, where he remained for the rest of his distinguished career. In 1990, Ed became the Samuel D. Thurman Professor of Law, in recognition of his contributions to scholarship and the school. In 1991 Ed received the Rosenblatt Prize for Excellence, the highest academic award given by the University of Utah. Ed’s many other honors include the University of Utah Distinguished Teaching Award (1977); the Brigham Young University Alumni Distinguished Achievement Award (1978); the Utah Academy of Science, Arts and Letters Charles Redd Prize (1988) for outstanding contributions in the humanities and social sciences; and the Turner-Fairbourn Award for significant contributions to peace and justice (1991). Ed was also Fellow in Law and Humanities at Harvard Law School in 1974. Ed’s particular areas of professional interest and expertise were the First Amendment, civil rights, constitutional law, and international law. Ed was the editor or author of several widely used textbooks on constitutional and international law as well as a highly regarded monograph, with Francis Wormuth, on the war power (To Chain the Dog of War). Ed’s interests in history and the law came together in his book Zion in the Courts: A Legal History of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, which he wrote with his former student and friend, Collin Mangrum. Ed’s interests in international law and human rights took him around the world. In 1970, he served as United Nations Visiting Scholar, and attended sessions of the General Assembly in New York and Geneva, Switzerland. In 1990, Ed visited Russia as a participant in the Fulbright Seminar, in the course of which he held meetings with senior government officials, scholars, and leaders of emerging political parties. Later that year Ed undertook a commission to Vietnam and Hong Kong on behalf of Vietnamese refugees. He was one of the first Americans to visit Vietnam after the thawing of relations. In 1999, Ed served as a delegate to the United Nations Sub-Commission on Human Rights, in Geneva. His speech at the Sub-Commission began debate on the topic “Toward the Creation of a Culture of Peace and Non-Violence Toward Children.” Ed’s work with the U.N. was part of a lifelong commitment to conflict resolution and the rule of law, at home and among nations. In 2001 Ed returned to the U.N. to deliver an address entitled “Beginnings,” which focused on the rights of indigenous peoples, Native Americans and Tibetans in particular. As a result of his work with the U.N. and his expertise in constitutional law, Ed attracted the attention of Tibetan observers, who arranged for him to meet His Holiness, the Fourteenth Dalai Lama, in Dharamsala, India. The meeting was the beginning of a deep friendship that saw many returns to Dharamsala to talk with His Holiness and to consult with his government-in-exile on the formation of a Tibetan constitution, as well as questions of human rights and international relations. In 2000, Ed visited Tibet itself. In recognition of his many, different contributions to human rights, Ed received the United Nation’s Médaille d’Excellence, in Geneva, in 2001. Ed’s involvement in issues of civil and human rights was a matter of soul as much as mind. Always a champion of the underdog and the underrepresented, he spoke for those whom the majority shunned. He took up the cause of gay rights long before the LGBT movement emerged as a mainstream issue. A speech at Salt Lake City’s East High that challenged the school’s decision to ban gay rights clubs (and then to ban all clubs in order not to appear prejudiced) created a stir in the local gay community. Hundreds of parents and students and others from around the community and beyond sent letters of appreciation and stories of their suffering, which at last had found a public voice. The East High speech was but one of many actions on behalf of gays in particular over the years. During his second tenure as LDS bishop at the University of Utah in the 1970s, Ed learned that two of his student members had been involved in same-sex relationships. Ed’s ecclesiastical superiors ordered him to excommunicate the men; Ed refused. The church released him as bishop. Ed spoke prophetically: he spoke uncomfortable truth to power and privilege. In the 2000s he was invited to participate in a historic gathering of Paiute chiefs in southern Utah. From them he learned the Native side of the tragic events at Mountain Meadows, in which his own great great grandfather, Brigham Young, had played a role. Ed then began a lobbying effort with the First Presidency of the LDS Church to see justice done and an apology issued. Perhaps Ed’s greatest achievement, though, was his heroic battle against the MX missile system in the late 70s and early 80s. When Ed got involved in 1978, every one of Utah’s national leaders, as well as virtually all of the state’s leadership of both parties supported the idea of basing the missile in the Great Basin. Ed, however, saw a political, military, and environmental disaster in the making. So, in characteristic fashion, he spoke out, an almost solitary voice in the wilderness. Not least of the challenges was that one of the proponents of the system was Jimmy Carter, a man Ed admired and for whom he had stumped as a candidate. Putting his own political future on the line, Ed resigned as Carter’s Utah campaign manager, and began a high-profile speaking campaign that would take him around the country in opposition. Ed was joined in this Quixotic dog-and-pony show, as he called it, by representatives of other groups who opposed the basing system of the missile on a variety of grounds: the Shoshone tribe, whose ancestral land would be forever destroyed; the Utah Cattlemen’s Association, whose members stood to lose their livelihoods; members of the military who thought the missile a provocative waste of money; and clergy who opposed the missile in principle on moral grounds. It was with this latter group that Ed came to know the Catholic sisters, and through them, their spiritual mentors—prophetic figures such as Thomas Merton and St. Francis. It was a spiritual love affair that would take Ed to Merton’s own monastery in Kentucky and then to Rome, which he saw through the eyes of his sisters-in-spirit and loving-arms. Ed’s trump card in the MX missile battle was the close, personal relationship he had, thanks to his grandfather, with virtually all of the apostles and presidency of the LDS Church. Methodically he began educating them on precedents for publicly opposing the missile. Ed was fortunate to have had privileged access, just a few years earlier, to the personal papers of J. Reuben Clark, who, prior to himself becoming an apostle, had been an influential senior figure in the U.S. State Department. Clark had been a vocal opponent of war, and especially of nuclear weapons, the use of which in Japan he condemned in the strongest terms in LDS General Conference. Thanks to Ed’s patient coaching, the LDS Church issued a series of three official statements, each stronger than the last. The effect of the statements was dramatic: Utah’s political leadership changed positions, and the new Republican president, Ronald Reagan, anxious not to alienate the Mormons, vetoed the basing system, and, for the most part, the missile. The result was not only a huge victory for disarmament and detente but also for the environment. It’s among the great, unsung environmental victories of the century. A series of life-changing connections followed the flurry of political action. In 1989 the Catholic diocese of Utah invited Ed to deliver the Monsignor McDougall Lecture at the Cathedral of the Madeleine in Salt Lake City—the first time a non-Catholic had been invited to do so. Ed’s theme for the lecture, which filled the cathedral to overflowing, was reconciliation, with the enemy we think is “out there” but which, in reality, is within us. The lecture was a plea for tearing down the walls that separate us from each other and building connections instead. As part of his appeal, Ed called on his own church to break down the wall that kept women from holding priesthood and participating in church life as equals with men. “I long for the time when four black people, three of them women, will sit on the stand as General Authorities at General Conference,” he said. “This profound message would transcend in immediate healing power every sermon ever given in our holy house, the Mormon Tabernacle.” The response from many quarters was an outpouring of gratitude. But, as had been the case with the MX battle, it was also an occasion for death threats from some of Ed’s own people. “If you want to get something done, ask a busy person.” The saying holds true for Ed. Amidst the many other gifts to his community not least was his role as a founding member and president of the Utah Opera Company. The seemingly crazy idea of starting an opera company was the brainchild of singer Glade Peterson, who, just returned from a successful career in Europe, appeared at Ed’s office door and asked if he’d be willing to be the business face of the organization. Ed knew little about opera at the time, but agreed nonetheless. His love for opera and Glade grew together. Ed was a man of faith: religious life and thought were fundamental. Raised Mormon, Ed remained a member of record throughout his life, in spite of the efforts by some in leadership to see him excommunicated for heresy, and despite his own profound doubts about any number of points of history and theology. The battle against the MX missile was a watershed in Ed’s spiritual life, for it introduced him to Christian ecumenisms and to the inexhaustible riches of Catholicism. But for the requirement of celibacy, Ed might well have found himself following Thomas Merton into the priesthood. Instead, he found a home in the episcopal community, which welcomed him and honored him in a way his own community often had not. Characteristically, Ed brought a rare degree of learning to his faith, which exceeded that of most practicing pastors. Religion therefore inevitably found its way into his teaching. Ed delighted students in the Law School, who struggled to find intellectual substance in what was for many a tedious immersion in legal minutiae, with standing-room only seminars such as Religion and the Law or Dante and the Law. As one might expect, given Ed’s own experience as a child, his life outside the public view revolved around family. He was a respectful, nurturing father who encouraged his kids to pursue their own paths in life. To his not infrequent consternation, all of them did. He played a similar role as surrogate father with his students and with the hundreds of other young people under his pastoral care as a Mormon bishop. One of his particular domestic legacies was a love of books. Despite a busy schedule, Ed took time most nights to read with his kids, and made independent “reading time” a mandatory ritual before bed. Many classic stories entered family history and legend in this way: C.S. Lewis’s Narnia books, Susan Cooper’s The Dark is Rising, and J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, among others. Stories connected with England were especial favorites. These stories informed family thinking and imagination. To travel England, which Ed did several times with various members of the family, and once with all of the family, was to reenact the sacred drama of a shared mythology, informed by a love of books. Ed was a giver of books too. Whenever he traveled, he would look for bookish mementos: Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials for his grandson Eddie Bradley, Harry Potter in Latin for his nerdy, classically trained son, Ed. A cherished Christmas ritual for all Ed’s kids and grandkids was going with him to The King’s English bookstore to pick out a Christmas book for themselves. Ed was himself a captivating storyteller with a vibrant imagination. With his kids and then with his grandkids and great grandkids he would pile on his lap as many listeners as could fit and regale them with tales of mischievous adventures from his childhood (undoubtedly, but exquisitely, embellished) or fantasies of pirate's gold (“doubloons”) and hidden treasures, “Danny the Dinosaur” (an original creation of Ed’s), and the continuing adventures of King Kong. To his grandkids, Ed was “Zoo Pop,” for it was a tradition that he would take them to Hogle Zoo. There it might also happen that a story about one of the kids and one of the animals would be told. A fierce defender of the importance of family traditions, Ed underwrote an annual family vacation on Balboa Island, CA, a tradition that went back over 70 years. There Ed and his grandparents and parents and all his kids would take evening walks together around the island, swim in the bay, play hide and seek and “No Bears are Out Tonight” at night among the piers and alleys. With his wife, Gloria, he would visit Laguna Beach and its art galleries, and would bribe reluctant kids to come along, with promises of a stop at the Shake Shack along the way. The tradition of the visits and the love of art carried over into the next generation. His family might argue that the cherished memories created during these annual pilgrimages are among his greatest legacies. For newcomers to the family one of its oddities, which owed much to Ed, was the habit of vigorous dinner-time debates. Anything was fair game; no one was immune, least of all authority figures (Ed included). Here, as much as anywhere, Ed’s kids learned to be fearless in asking questions and questioning answers. Despite differences, this remained a hallmark of life with Ed. However much he found himself challenged by what his now adult kids presented him with, he remained open to dialog and connection. Ed leaves behind a sister, Judy Moody (Merrill); thirteen grandchildren and four great grandchildren; his former wife, Gloria, and their seven living children and partners: Ed Firmage Jr. (Carrol); Miriam Tate (David); Sarah Firmage; Zina Lewis (Bruce); Joseph Firmage; Jonathan Firmage; David Firmage (Jess); and a devoted partner of many years, Virginia Menlove. Preceding Ed in death was his infant daughter Rebecca and another partner and soulmate, Dana Swenson. Ed’s indebtedness to his daughters and partners for their loving care over many years is beyond reckoning. On the eve of Ed’s passing, monks in the Nechung Monastery in Dharamsala, sang prayers and lit candles in his honor. May his memory be a blessing. Private funeral services have been held. Condolences may be expressed at www.bergmortuary.com.