A 12-year-old performer getting ready to sing the national anthem at a state Democratic convention was visiting with former Utah governor Cal Rampton when he asked about her family's political affiliation.

"I think my parents are Republicans," she said.

"I guess I shouldn't be surprised that we're so short on Democrats the party would have to hire a Republican to sing the national anthem," Rampton replied with a laugh.

That convention in 2000 reflected the political norms of what has become Republican-dominated Utah. But back in 1964, when Rampton was first elected governor, both political parties had representation in the state's top elected offices. Utahns also had elected four Democratic governors before Rampton, although it had been 16 years since a Democrat last had been governor when he took office.

Close friends in the Democratic Party convinced Rampton to run, but he credits a Republican for that win.

"The person that elected me governor in '64 was Barry Goldwater," the GOP candidate running against Lyndon B. Johnson, Rampton says. Johnson, who won in a landslide, carried Utah by about 55 percent.

"I carried by about the same percentage," Rampton says. "I think it was the ticket that carried me through."

He went on to become Utah's only three-term governor, serving a full 12 years, and each time he was elected by overwhelming majorities. A centrist, moderate Democrat, he was one of the state's most popular governors.

At 93, he's still known as "the governor" — and that's how the staff members of a Salt Lake City care facility refer to him since he arrived there recently, following a kidney problem that marked a sudden downturn in his health.

The path to his political career wasn't so evident when he was a young man growing up in Bountiful. He dropped out of school in 1931 to take over his father's car business in Davis County when his father died.

The business was sold in 1933, and Rampton headed for the University of Utah, and then to George Washington University in Washington, D.C., for law school. He came back to Utah to finish law school at the U. in 1940, and he married a Utah girl he had met in Washington two years earlier.

"I was smitten almost immediately," he says of Lucybeth Cardon. He says the happiest day of his life was when she said she would marry him.

Rampton was Davis County attorney from 1939 to 1941, and he went on to become assistant Utah attorney general in 1941 and 1942. He left to serve in the Army in Europe during World War II.