Obituaries: A champion for LGBTQ rights, a Western historian, a pioneering lawyer, a fire captain, a money manager, a tiger and a bear

I’ve mentioned here before the challenge of writing an obituary: Crystallizing a person’s life, detailing their major accomplishments and the reasons they’re newsworthy, in a single article. Here are some people whose obituaries I had the honor of writing in the last few months:

• Brett Mathews, who took the U.S. military to court to get his honorable discharge after being drummed out of the U.S. Air Force because he was gay, was also a subject of “Family Fundamentals,” a documentary that screened at the 2002 Sundance Film Festival. Mathews died Aug. 24, at age 49, in an accident at his home in Tooele.

• Will Bagley was one of the pre-eminent historians of the American West — and his masterwork was his 2002 book “Blood of the Prophets: Brigham Young and the Massacre at Mountain Meadows,” which updated the available body of knowledge about the murder of 120 California-bound Arkansas settlers crossing southern Utah in 1857. Bagley died Sept. 28, at age 71, in Salt Lake City, of complications from a stroke.

• Henry Lee Adams was the first Black person to graduate from the University of Utah’s law school, and the first to serve as an assistant attorney general in the state. Adams died Oct. 15, at age 86.

• Merrill Bone was a 35-year veteran of the Salt Lake City Fire Department and Salt Lake County’s Unified Fire Department — where he was a captain when he died from complications of COVID-19. His death is considered in the line of duty, because he was a paramedic and could have contracted the virus from someone he treated on the job. Bone died Oct. 31, at age 61, at Intermountain Medical Center in Murray.

• Sam Stewart was an investment manager who founded Wasatch Advisors (now Wasatch Global Investors), building the firm up to $17 billion in assets, specializing in small-cap companies ripe for growth. Stewart, whose wife Diane is an arts maven and operates the gallery Modern West Fine Art, also was an avid arts patron whose Stewart Family Foundation supported a vast array of nonprofits. Stewart died Nov. 23, at age 79, at his home desk in Salt Lake City.

I also ended up writing obituaries for two nonhumans this fall: Cila, an Amur tiger at Utah’s Hogle Zoo; and Bart the Bear II, the movie-star bear who lived in Heber City.