Julianna Hayes Hewlett - Home at Last

This week we said our final farewells to our adopted Mother and Grandmother, Julianna Hayes Hewlett. She departed this life at age 82, after a forty-year separation from her eternal companion, Patsy's father Lester F. Hewlett, Jr. We came to love her as our own. I am publishing her first-person life sketch here so that many of her beloved students and their families will have the funeral information. Feel free to share the link with everyone who may have interest.

Viewing: Larkin Mortuary (260 E. So. Temple St., Salt Lake), Sunday July 9th 6-8 p.m.

Funeral: Salt Lake 11th Ward (951 E. 100 So., Salt Lake), Monday, July 10th, viewing 10-11:30 a.m., followed by the funeral services at noon.

Interment: Woodland Cemetery, Woodland, Utah 84036

Life Sketch of Julianna Hayes Hewlett

I was born January 21, 1941, in Montpelier, Idaho, the only daughter of William Earl and Verona Schmid Hayes. I had three brothers, Deon (who died at eighteen months), William Dorain Hayes, and Elwyn “Chip” Hayes. Only Chip remains behind in our little family with my passing, and how I have adored him and his wife Sandy! If Chip ever missed a day calling me in the last forty years, I do not remember it.

We moved many places in Idaho and Wyoming following my father’s Union Pacific Railroad occupation. At age four, my mother found me “practicing the piano,” using the arm of the sofa as my keyboard, as we had no such instrument. At that point my parents felt I should be taking lessons as soon as there was money to rent a piano. Fortunately, the Bancroft chapel was being remodeled, and Father requested that our home be used as a place to store the ward piano. Thus began my lessons, and a continuing lifetime interest in music.

I graduated with honors from BYU and began teaching music at Hillside Junior High School in Salt Lake City. My first class in public school teaching was a Boys’ Choir of 103 voices from the 7^th, 8^th and 9^th grades. It proved to be a year of MY education learning how to deal with teenaged mentality.

In 1968, while recuperating in Idaho from a spinal fusion I received a call from President Florence Jacobsen to serve on the General Board of the MIA. Traveling and speaking in many regional conferences, writing lessons and manuals for the MIA, and beginning work of the new LDS hymn book, were highlights in that phase of my Church activity. I also conducted a regional young special interest choir in the Tabernacle for a regional conference.

In 1969, I took a Sabbatical Leave and traveled to Germany with the University of Oregon, where I lived with a German family, toured the famous music schools of Europe, and later received a master’s degree in international music and art education.

I transferred to Highland High School in 1975, teaching choirs and beginning a Humanities class, studying the arts, philosophy and history. I began taking summer tours to Europe to study the wealth of art, music and literature in the world’s greatest museums.

I was reluctantly and unexpectedly lined up on a blind date in 1977, with Lester F. Hewlett, Jr. It was an amazing spiritual recognition, and I cancelled my summer tour to Europe to be sealed in the Salt Lake Temple on July 6, 1977. My father said in April of that year I would be married before summer’s end. His prediction came true. It was truly a match made in heaven.

Les had been the mission president in the Australia South Mission and had previously served on the Young Men’s General Board and on the Church Athletic Committee. Having been one of the first missionaries to open Alaska to missionary work, Les thus began a lifelong love of missionary work. After returning from Australia, he continued volunteering on Temple Square as a tour guide, where his love of the gospel and commitment to missionary work focused his continuing service.

We moved to the Graystone Condominiums in 1978, where Les was the teacher of the high priest group, and I taught the Relief Society cultural refinement lessons. How I loved bringing the joy of music, art and literature to the sisters in the Grant 4^th Ward (later became the Forestview Ward). Traveling with Elder LeGrand Richards for the dedication of the Orson Hyde Memorial was truly one of the highlights of our six years together. At the insistence of Elder Richards, I led the group in “Master the Tempest is Raging” as we crossed the Sea of Galilee and afterward sat in a testimony meeting on the shore. I realized once again the truthfulness of the gospel, and better understood the love Les and I shared in Church service.

Les and I belonged to the Dinnerset Group, and on December 9, 1983, Les and I were the chairpersons of the annual Christmas party at the Lion House. Associating, as the Hewlett family had done for many years with many of the members of the Quorum of the Twelve, we sat with Elder and Sister Neal A. Maxwell singing Christmas carols. I conducted the music in my new red shoes that Les had just bought me.

The next morning, I awakened to find that Les had slipped to the other side of the veil while he slept. The shock was multiplied by the fact he had not been ill. As Elder Maxwell stated at his funeral, “He was blessed not to have tasted death. He was a guileless man.” He loved and gave many blessings to the widows in our ward whom he served as their home teacher.

The years since his passing have found me continuing to teach at Highland, conducting tours occasionally to Europe with students, serving as gospel doctrine teacher, ward music chairman, ward chorister, and teaching Relief Society cultural refinement lessons.

One of the highlights of my music and Church service was in October 1990, when I was invited to conduct a Young Women’s Choir for the afternoon session of General Conference in the Tabernacle. I led 400 young women from the Bountiful and Val Verde Regions, united in beautiful voice and spirit to praise the Lord. It was more memorable by having chosen the hymn, “We Ever Pray for Thee,” and then finding President Benson had been taken to the hospital that weekend. The choice of that hymn had been made by me in July, well before President Benson became acutely ill.

In 1991, a grandson, Ben Pahnke, died of leukemia. Our family was comforted in knowing Les was there to welcome eight-year-old Ben to his heavenly home. Again, in 1993, our seven-week-old grand-daughter Adrienne Goates, was taken home, and Les was seen at her funeral by members of his extended family. It is an incredible comfort knowing the veil is thin and eternal love is strong.

As the years have brought Les’ four children and their families much closer together, I have enjoyed the plethora of grandchildren and great-grandchildren. I have loved and been loved as I never could have imagined in my younger single years. All the children, Nancy Pahnke, Patsy Goates, John Hewlett and Ernie Hewlett, have homes at the Ranch above Woodland, where Les and I spent our summers and where the spirit of FAMILY is so intense and loving.

My calling to the Salt Lake Temple as an ordinance worker has been the highlight of my retirement years.

These last years have been filled with physical challenges, but I have used faith, prayers and priesthood blessings to endure to the end. “When upon life’s billows we are tempest tossed, when we are discouraged thinking, all is lost, count your many blessings, name them one by one, and it will surprise you what the Lord has done.”

That ends Julie’s obituary in her first-person narrative, but as her adopted Hewlett family we would update the record to state she won a place in all our hearts. She might easily be the most fiercely independent, tenacious and strong-willed woman any of us will ever encounter. However, as she lived her life to its conclusion in the early morning hours of June 29, 2023, we are constrained to conclude in her 82 years of living she filled the full measure of her creation, and she finally and gleefully entered the eternal embrace of her beloved Les after a forty-year absence.