Life revolved around politics when Cook raised his own family. The yard was littered with political signs during campaign season, and the back patio was stained with paint and glue from making political signs — and this was long before Cook began running for office. When Cook got into politics himself, his children knocked on doors, passed out fliers and attended parades in every small town in the state.

Other dads talked about baseball scores with their children; Cook talked about Clinton's health plan.

"He would ask us questions at dinner about what we were doing in school," says David, Cook's son. "He was looking for a hook, and then he'd see a connection with some issue and ask us about it. You wanted to be very careful how you answered because he wanted to start discussion and you better be able to back it up."

Cook ran for his first political office in seventh grade and was elected president. He ran for president again at Roosevelt Junior High and finished second. He didn't run for office at East High — "because I didn't think I could win," he says — but the Roosevelt defeat was the start of a long losing streak that would resume decades later in middle age.

He was a straight-A student at East. A self-described "bookish kid," he says, "I wasn't the cool guy on campus, but I wasn't a total nerd." Then almost in the next sentence he says he and his friends held competitions to see who got the highest score on math tests.

He graduated from the University of Utah in 1971 with a degree in economics and later graduated near the top of his class from Harvard with an MBA. He was immediately hired by the prestigious management-consulting firm, Arthur D. Little, in Boston. In 1977, he joined his father, Melvin, in the explosives business.

Hat in the ring

Melvin Cook was one of those genius types. He was a professor of metallurgy at the University of Utah and founded a research group that did consulting work for the Department of Defense and mining companies. He created an explosive device that enabled bazooka shells to pierce the previously impenetrable armor of German tanks during World War II. Later, he developed what came to be known as the "Blue 82" or "Daisycutter," the largest non-nuclear bomb in the Army's arsenal. It could flatten up to a half-mile radius of jungle in Vietnam, which allowed helicopters to land and then some. In 2002, the bomb was used to demolish terrorist hideouts in the mountains of Afghanistan.