Rollover victims remembered

Instructor Evan Parker, 45, began taking machines apart as a child and never stopped being intrigued by them.

"Anything that didn't work he could make work, and anything that worked he could make work better," said his son-in-law, Geoff Hasty of Gallup, N.M.

Parker earned his master's degree at USU while also teaching in the ag tech program, driving the 100 miles round trip from his home in Hooper, where he also ran a farm, a repair shop and a ground-leveling firm.

He married his high school sweetheart, Tammy, after returning from an LDS mission. They have six children and four grandchildren.

He's remembered as a man who was never too busy to help a neighbor plant crops or students repair a tractor.

USU named him the Department of Agriculture's Teacher of the Year in 1995; this week he was to receive the Adviser of the Year Award.

"He always had 10,000 projects going at once," Hasty said. "It was almost as if he knew he had to squeeze in 90 years in a short amount of time."

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Steven D. Bair, 24, was called the Quiet Giant by his family.

Tall, lanky and mellow, his sister Jennifer says, Bair loved horses and had wanted to be a cowboy since he was a little boy. His goal was to become a farm machine mechanic "and to have cows and horses on the side," his sister said.

Bair grew up on his family's farm in Moses Lake, Wash., and hoped to return there after getting his degree. His only other big venture away from home was an LDS mission to Fort Worth, Texas.

"He'd just keep to himself and work on his project and get 'er done," classmate Tyler Speth remembered.

The orange tractor that is now a makeshift memorial on the USU campus is outfitted with a transmission built by Bair, an agricultural machinery technology major.

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Dusty Dean Fuhriman, 22, was a generous man who loved learning, electronics, auto mechanics, and especially digging in the dirt, his mother, Kathy Fuhriman, says.

"He loved the dirt from the time he was just really small," she said, recalling the times they would till the garden together. "He was my buddy from the time he was just really little."

As a youth, the older of two children enjoyed helping his father, Scott Fuhriman, at his ranch in Pocatello Valley, Box Elder County, and was able to handle big equipment, even a backhoe, with ease by the time he was a teenager.