Former BYU professor Kay Sherman Mortensen remembered, honored

PAYSON — Missionaries at Cove Fort don't say goodbye. They only say, "We'll see you later."

"To my dear friend Elder Mortensen I say, 'We'll see you later,' " Elder Parley Baldwin said Saturday. Baldwin is director of the Cove Fort Visitors Center where Kay Sherman Mortensen and his wife, Darla, had been serving just weeks before Mortensen was found dead in his Payson home Monday.

Police say a homicide investigation is ongoing, but as of Saturday they had not made any arrests.

Hundreds gathered in Payson Saturday to honor Mortensen and praise his dedication to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, his love of the land and animals, and his strong personality.

"Kay knew something about everything, and he knew everything about most things," Baldwin said with a smile, as a ripple of quiet, knowing laughter went through the audience. "He never had an opinion he didn't express."

Mortensen was born in Ephraim and developed a love of the land as he farmed, raised sheep and hunted, said Bishop Dan Humphery.

He believed in being prepared, both physically and spiritually, and loved to discuss issues, especially global warming and politics, Humphery said.

He attended Snow College, then Utah State University, and earned a Ph.D. in metallurgy from the University of Utah.

After a few years in industry, Mortensen got a job teaching mechanical engineering at BYU, where he taught for more than three decades before he retired in mid-2005.

Humphery read comments from several students who wrote to the Mortensen family to express condolences and share memories of a cherished teacher.

"What I learned in his classes, I remember the most," wrote one man who was a student in the 1970s.

Another student called Mortensen a "farmer with a Ph.D." and said he appreciated the applicable life experiences and stories Mortensen would share in class.

"He embodied what was good about the Western states," the same student wrote, adding that Mortensen was "infectiously giddy" about guns and would have made a great engineer for the Manti Temple had he been born a few decades earlier.

A fellow BYU engineering professor, Len Pugh, described how he and Mortensen would eat lunch together in their offices and discuss everything, but especially the doctrines of the LDS Church.

"Kay was a scriptorian," he said. "I knew that he studied them daily, but I couldn't figure out how he knew so much about the plan of salvation."

Pugh later realized that it was Mortensen's numerous years of service in LDS temples that allowed him such insight.

The two men also spent time together on the farm working with Mortensen's cows.

"Kay loved his cows," Pugh said. "He had them all named, and he'd talk to them by name."

As the men worked, they would often talk about missions.