In retirement, Gov. Rampton became a partner in Jones, Waldo, Holbrook and McDonough, one of the state's largest legal firms. He kept his hand in politics, lobbying the Legislature for various clients — including the Newspaper Agency Corp., the publishing arm of the Deseret Morning News and Salt Lake Tribune — and was chairman of various political campaigns. He didn't mind speaking out as an emeritus Democratic leader, as he did in the 1991 state party chairmanship race in which he said organized labor had too great an influence in party politics, a comment that generated a mild furor.

Even in his 90s, he still worked at a law office one day a week.

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Gov. Rampton was born Nov. 6, 1913, to Llewellyn S. and Janet Campbell Rampton of Bountiful, the oldest of three children.

His father and his uncle ran a car dealership/garage in Bountiful, first selling Studebakers, then Fords, and finally Chevrolets. Bountiful had a population of about 1,500 back then, and Gov. Rampton said that as a boy he knew almost everyone in Davis County.

As a young man, Gov. Rampton remembered, he visited a neighbor's house, hearing a celebration and learning that his young friend's father, Charles Mabey, had just been elected governor. He didn't know what that meant. He asked his young friend who the "governor" was. "'He's the boss of the whole state,"' Gov. Rampton recalled his friend saying. "That was a statement I would later find was a great exaggeration," Rampton joked years later.

Gov. Rampton graduated from Davis High School in 1931. In the fall of 1931, his father died suddenly. Gov. Rampton, only 17, helped run the family business for two years, before he and his uncle sold it in 1933.

While he approved of general LDS Church religious philosophy, he decided not to go on a church mission because he didn't think he "had enough faith in some dogma to teach it."

Gov. Rampton received his first real taste of politics in 1932, when he became excited with Franklin D. Roosevelt's run for president. A family friend was Davis County Democratic chairman, and he appointed Gov. Rampton assistant party secretary. Gov. Rampton said he worked hard for Roosevelt, passing out handbills and going door-to-door. Years later, Gov. Rampton would describe himself, as many other Americans of that era did, as a "Roosevelt Democrat."