Remembrances of Jammin’ Ammon

Ammon Eric Gustafson
November 5, 1967 – September 17, 2011

When Ammon’s family moved into our ward, we were both deacons. I still remember the Sunday he came into our classroom because, for a typically quiet person like me, I was uncommonly outgoing in welcoming him. We hit it off immediately. I remember how my mom used to visit with people after church, and we kids would grumble impatiently in the car for what seemed like hours until she was ready to take us home. But it wasn’t long until the family was waiting for me because Ammon and I were so engaged talking about Dungeons & Dragons, Atari, and whatever else interested young teenagers back in 1980.

As we sat together on the front pew at church to pass the sacrament, I thought it was totally cool that Ammon could sing the bass part of the hymns. That any deacon could sing bass is impressive by itself, but his ability to sing harmony sparked my own musical interest.

I also remember Ammon being an especially fluent reader of the scriptures. While the rest of us would stumble over unfamiliar language in quorum meetings, he read like someone who did so often. I don’t remember ever talking with him about that specifically, but I’m pretty sure there was some out-loud scripture reading going on at the Gustafsons’.

Singing together in church eventually led to singing together in the high school men’s glee. Glee was a pretty humble affair, meeting early before school, and although led by Mr. Anderson, the school choir teacher, it only ever achieved semi-official standing. It was, however, strongly supported by Ms. Coburn, the drama teacher. She needed somewhere to send the boys so we’d be able to carry a tune when the musical came around each spring. One of those musicals was The Pirates of Penzance in which Ammon and I both got to do dual-roles: as pirates in the first act, then switching sides to become the pirate-battling cops in the second act.

The other product of men’s glee was a quartet that Ammon and I formed along with Steve Heron and Alan Packer. While we eventually became the not-so-world-famous “Sparkling Whiners”, the group started out Christmas Caroling. As I recall, we had invited all of men’s glee to come, but only the four of us ended up going that night. Fortunately, we had all the parts covered.

The odd thing about that particular caroling excursion was that although we sang up and down the street in fantastic four-part harmony, the only house we actually stopped at was Mandy Johnson’s, a girl that at least 3/4 of the quartet had a crush on at one time or another. Because aside from praising God, certainly one of the best uses of music is wooing women.

One day at school we barged into Steve’s girlfriend’s French class to serenade her with Angels We Have Heard on High. The teacher kindly didn’t throw us right out, probably because with Alan’s tutoring, we sang it in the original French. We also invited girls to dances with modified lyrics to some of our songs, and what girl could resist something like that?

Ammon was also very smart. He was doing math as a high school sophomore that I wouldn’t see until well into my computer science coursework at BYU. Because of his academic success, I found it funny a few years later when he confessed, in a letter, to getting a ‘C’ in physics at Stanford: “I was so depressed when I saw that ‘C’; I haven’t had one of those since 5th grade, and that was in handwriting.”

While college took us in different directions, missions brought us back together again. We both happened to be called to São Paulo, Brazil, though I was in the north mission while he served in the south. We had schemes of meeting in the Praça da República to party at some point, but of course, being good missionaries, had to settle for seeing each other at combined mission conferences a couple of times.

In the years since, we had occasional letters, phone calls and meetings. As I serve my third stint as ward choir director, I still feel the life-shaping influence of Ammon’s friendship, and those days singing How Firm a Foundation together on the front row of the chapel.