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Jon Huntsman’s childhood offers few hints of the distance
he would travel on his way to becoming one of the
country’s most successful entrepreneurs. His early years
were, in Huntsman’s own words, “a time of difficulty
and of struggle.” His father, A. Blaine Huntsman, started
out as a rural schoolteacher in Blackfoot, Idaho. “We
lived in subpar housing with no inside plumbing for
almost four years of my life,” Huntsman says. When Jon
was six, his father became an officer in the U.S. Navy and
moved the family to a naval air station in Pensacola, Fla.
After World War II ended, Blaine Huntsman
returned to teaching school in Idaho.
The years at the naval air station, however,
had changed both his ambition and his
expectations. “He was never again satisfied
with life in rural Idaho,” Huntsman says.
At age 42, the elder Huntsman made another
move, this time to pursue a doctorate in
education at Stanford University in Palo
Alto, Calif. He would eventually become
superintendent of schools in the neighboring
community of Los Altos.
While Blaine Huntsman spent three
years getting his doctorate, the Huntsman
family — including Jon’s mother Kathleen,
his older brother Blaine, Jr., WG’68,
and his younger brother Clayton — lived
in cramped Stanford student housing
on $120 a month from the GI Bill. Jon, at
age 14, worked after school and on weekends
to pay the family’s medical bills and
car maintenance. “It was a very, very
tough battle for a family of five,” Huntsman
recalls.
Yet these hard beginnings forged something
that a life of privilege sometimes
misses, he notes. “Those early years developed
the framework for tough competitiveness.
My childhood exposed me to
the hardships and heartaches of life. It
was good for me. And I didn’t know I was
poor. I was happy and grateful for what I
had, and always appreciated what people
did for me.”
Huntsman remembers his father as a
stern disciplinarian, but also as someone
who was “trying to get himself ahead in
life.” Years after the elder Huntsman’s
death, Jon Huntsman can look back at his
childhood with “a sense of gratitude and
thanksgiving because I knew how far I had
come in my life. Except for the grace of
God and my father’s efforts to get ahead, I
might be back in a humble rural setting
struggling to make ends meet.”
In her own way, Huntsman’s mother
had as much of an influence on her middle
son’s character as his father. Before her marriage, Kathleen
Robison Huntsman had been a missionary for the
Mormon church in the backwoods of Virginia and North
Carolina. The early years of her marriage and motherhood
were “an economic struggle that made everyday life difficult,”
Huntsman says. “But she always had immense love
for her three sons. I never heard her say
an unkind word about anyone.” On her
tombstone in a cemetery in Fillmore,
Utah, are etched words that show how
clearly the Huntsman family has always
sought to take hardship and transform it
into opportunity: “Sweet Are the Uses
of Adversity.”
That phrase, Huntsman says, “epitomizes
everything I think about my life
because the tougher and more difficult
life’s journey, the more rewarding and
fulfilling it can be when you achieve
something you were not expected to
achieve.”
Huntsman has great respect for those
who, like his parents, moved across the
country in search of better lives for themselves
and their families. His ancestors
on both his mother’s and his father’s
side were part of a pioneer group that
had followed Mormon leader Brigham
Young out West in the mid 1800s, eventually
settling down and starting farming
communities in Utah. Huntsman’s great-great-grandfather
was Parley P. Pratt,
one of the first Mormon apostles under
Joseph Smith in 1835.
“These were people of great determination,
great grit, and firm belief in their God
and religion, and in the things that bring
integrity and honor to their lives,” says
Huntsman. “My heritage gives me a deep
sense of pride and gratefulness.”
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