M. Jensen Ogden 1940-2024

“When an old man dies, a library burns down.”

M. Jensen Ogden, age 84, was born to teenaged parents on March 22, 1940.

He was largely raised by loving maternal grandparents on the family farm in Riverside. One of his tasks growing up there was to muck the manure out of the barn after milkings. So strange that years later the sight of a little poop in a baby’s diaper would make him retch.

A class president in high school, he set a never broken basketball record, playing three years of varsity ball without ever scoring a point. In a supreme irony, he later played on a team formed from Mormon missionaries that won the New Zealand national championship.

Young and impressionable, he served an LDS mission where he became the personal assistant to the mission president in Auckland. He loved the lush, green country and the Māori people, but did not love trying to sell religion door-to-door. Older and wiser many years later, he reluctantly concluded that God had been the single worst idea that human beings ever had.

He graduated from Utah State where he affiliated with Sigma Chi. He began teaching at Ben Lomond High and was voted “Most influential Teacher” by his students and elected president of the Ogden Education Association by his peers. He had enjoyed summer study grants outside the Utah bubble at Louisiana State, the University of Iowa, and Stanford. Later, he had been recruited to teach in the Economics Dept. at Weber State.

He was a regular at the coffee shop where politics and religion were discussed at great lengths. He also enjoyed frequent luncheons with his “Low Priest” brethren. He was a Voracious reader that enjoyed paddlin’ his kayak on peaceful flatwater and peddlin’ his bike on local river trails. Highly valued was kickback time with family and friends at Walden West, the modest cabin he built by himself on the north slope of the Uinta’s. A place he joked was the real Ogden Temple. It was there, like Thoreau, he “was rich, if not in money, in sunny hours and summer days and spent them lavishly.”

He had hit a couple of marital speed bumps on an earlier highway, so Colleen, though considerably younger, finally brought some stability to his life. She succeeds him, as does their schoolteacher daughter Alixe, computer guru son-in-law Aaron, and their precious young grandson Archer. As well as older stepchildren Jason, Aaron, Gabriel and Ashley and their children. Also, a brother Scott (Karen) and sister Carol Ann (Mike Tuckett) both of Salt Lake City.

Portions of his ashes will be spread in four locations: over his grandparents and mother’s graves in Riverside near the family farm; in beautiful Moraine Lake where he had paddled his kayak in Banff National Park, Canada, and at Walden West his much-loved cabin; and on the sand at low tide inside Cathedral Cove outside Hahei, New Zealand.

Kia kaha, that’s Māori for “be strong.”

Colleen has arranged a Celebration of Life to be held on May 4, 2024, 4:00 pm at Myers Mortuary located at 845 Washington Blvd., Ogden, UT 84404.

Condolences may be sent to the family at www.myers-mortuary.com.