2 words sum up a good man's legacy

He was CEO of Evans Advertising, the most powerful agency of its time. He was chairman of the board of this newspaper. Before that he was city editor. At age 25. He served in World War II. He counted among his friends and associates many of Utah's most influential and well-known people. He had a lot to do with you having plenty of water to keep your lawn green (he was a primary lobbyist for the Upper Colorado River project), not to mention the fact that you can read your newspaper in the morning. He had a marriage that lasted 67 years. In his prime he was known to shoot in the 70s at the country club. From the back tees.

But when Glen Snarr's time was up Monday, all of the above somehow magically morphed into a two-word legacy:

Nice Guy.

I know. It's among the most overused phrases in the English language. Right up there with "It's not rocket science" and "slam dunk." Drug dealers are called nice guys. So are kidnappers.

But in Glen Snarr's case, those two words will have to suffice.

Ask anybody who knew him.

Where it came from — what his grandson Josh Loftin calls "ridiculous niceness" — who knows? But I used to watch it in action daily at the newspaper, because for some reason they put the cynical columnist in the office next door to the chairman of the board, aka Glen.

For six-plus years, we coexisted peacefully. Glen could coexist peacefully with a cobra.

We talked every day — well, every day when we were both in the office — and until I read his obituary I knew almost nothing about anything that's in the first paragraph of this column.

And yet he knew everything about me.

I didn't consciously realize how lopsided our relationship was. He was that good. Always solicitous. Always inquiring about what was going on with me. Never talking about where he'd been and what he'd done. There was no I in Glen.

It was just never about him.

I called some of his family to see where that came from.

His sister Elaine Bullock said, "You know, I think growing up in the Depression was probably a good thing. It was a time when you were nice to everybody, and everybody was nice to you."