Feb. 20’s regular Heber City Council meeting ended on a somber note when Mayor Heidi Franco made an unexpected announcement.
“Chief Sever sent me a text and he says that Ron Crittenden has passed away,” Franco said just after the council voted to adjourn. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
Ronald Crittenden was 74 years old and, according to his obituary, faced several health issues.
While many who were in attendance at the meeting and many others throughout the valley likely remember him as a local businessman and a prior Heber City Councilor and Wasatch County Treasurer, his brother Kendall Crittenden — who currently sits on Wasatch County Council — remembers a lot more.
“We were born and raised in Hoytsville there in Summit County, and we had great family. We did a lot of family activities, did a lot of things together,” Kendall remembered. “Hunting, fishing and hiking and just working together, working on the farm, hauling hay for my grandparents, and all of that. So we had a great childhood growing up.”
Ron, he said, took an interest in politics from an early age. He became an accomplished debater in high school and won all-state honors. During his senior year, he became the president of his chapter for Future Farmers of America, and he carried out his duties and projects with a flair Kendall said could be described as “very entrepreneurial.”
“They have to have a project animal and usually it’s sheep or cows or something like that,” Kendall explained. “He did beagles. We had some coonhounds that we chased bobcats and mountain lions in the winter, and then we’d do rabbit hunting and whatnot. So he had beagles.”
At first, Kendall explained, the FFA advisor wasn’t sure about the decision. Ron, however, came to them with sound logic.
“The teacher or whatever said, ‘You can’t do a project for beagles,'” Kendall remembered. “And he said, ‘Sure I can. I’d make money on them.’ And he did. He raised beagle pups and sold them.”
After his graduation, Ron served a mission in Southeast Mexico, proselytizing for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the Yucatán Peninsula.
“He especially liked the area. His mission was a lot of Book of Mormon ruins,” Kendall said, referring to the LDS Church’s book of scripture said to be set on the ancient American continent.
While Ron left Mexico at the end of his mission, it never entirely left him.
Throughout his life, he would return to guide people on tours of the area.
“Because he had personal connections with the people,” Kendall said, “he was able to take some of his tours into places that other tour guides couldn’t get into. … He took a lot of people, a lot of different trips.”
According to his wife, Sandra Homer, he never lost his love of Mexico or its culture. He made his last visit about five years before he died and throughout their life together consistently asked her to hire a Mariachi band for his funeral.
“I thought maybe he teased me,” Homer said about the request. “But I think he was serious.”
Later, he would serve in the LDS Church’s Spanish Branch in Heber City.
Upon returning to Utah after his mission, Ron went on to graduate from Brigham Young University with a bachelor’s degree in Business Management and, according to Kendall, an unhindered fire to continue in endeavors of civic engagement.
There, he met Homer, who said they were placed in the same “BYU family,” an assigned group of students who engage in different sets of activities with one another.
The couple took the term family seriously — at least seriously enough to marry one another — and celebrated their 50th anniversary in May last year.
Shortly after they married and graduated from BYU, the two found themselves in Heber City, away from the bustle of Provo but near enough more populated areas.
“Ron always kind of wanted to move back to Hoytsville, and I had come from Southern California,” Homer said. “I said, ‘No, I think Heber’s small enough, small enough for me.'”
Ron kept busy with a career that spanned from filing taxes for people and selling insurance to conducting tours to the Yucatán Peninsula to working as state director for two Utah congressmen — Howard Nielson and Bill Orton.
The latter, Homer said, was mainly a position he filled in a transitionary period after Orton was elected. When he worked for Nielson, she said he often drove the congressman around to different meetings and looked up to him.
Later on, Ron became a local elected official in the Heber Valley, first as `Wasatch County Treasurer and more recently as a Heber City Councilor from 2016 to 2020.
As treasurer, Kendall said Ron prided himself in handling the people’s money in a way that allowed the county to make more off interest than what he was paid.
As a city councilor, Kendall remembered his brother as a stick-to-your-guns conservative who believed in property rights, fair treatment and limited government.
“He strongly believed in property rights. He hated zoning. He said if you’re going to do zoning, you ought to do it all the way,” Kendall said. “If you come in as a developer, you’ve got property rights to do what the zoning in your district allows you to do. You don’t come in and ask to change a zone so you can get greater density.”
Homer remembered Ron not only through his busy career and several public positions but also by his actions as a husband and father. Even with his busy career, Ron made time for his family.
Every July 24, she said the family would go camping at a property they owned east of Heber City. While others in the area had cabins, they would stick to a tent on their plot of ground.
“That’s a tradition we plan to carry on,” Homer said. “Even the last few years, with Ron’s health it got hard for him to go up there.”
That, however, didn’t stop him. He’d make the trip to the campsite to spend time with his family, go home to sleep, then return the next day.
“That was really important for him for us to keep that tradition,” Homer said. “He didn’t want us to miss it.”
At Ron’s funeral, Homer said Heber City police officers retired the United States and Utah flags, something that would’ve meant a great deal to him.
“He was proud to represent the community and the positions he held. He took it as a real trust, the public’s trust, to represent them,” Kendall said about his brother. “He did his best to represent them in the way he felt they would want to be represented.”
One of Ron’s friends from his mission also attended the service. He brought several musicians with him, and they gave Ron the Mariachi send-off he always asked for.