I was grieved to hear of Will Bagley's death on September 28, 2021 in Salt Lake City. I had heard that he had suffered a stroke in late 2020 and was in an assisted care home. Today I learned of his death when I accessed his wikipedia site. The Salt Lake Tribune covered his passing on September 29, 2021. He was 71 years old with a lot of living for those 71 years.
Bill, as I knew him, was a phenomenal person who followed his heart and lived an "intentional" life. He was my classmate at Oceanside High School and my boyfriend during my last years in high school before he headed off to BYU in 1967 and then transferred to UC Santa Cruz.
We kept in touch for a short while and then he went on to bigger things. His independent learning project to study the life of Mark Twain resulted in an incredible trip on a home-made raft down the Mississippi River. He later published a book of his adventures which I read when it was published in May, 2019: River Fever: Adventures on the Mississippi, 1969-1972
Bill was an iconoclast, a romantic and a great humanitarian. He did not suffer fools lightly nor did he hold back in the face of wrong-headed thinking or powerful politicians and Mormon theologians. I will miss you my friend, may you always be "forever young."
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