When President Dallin H. Oaks was only 7 years old, his father—Dr. Lloyd E. Oaks—died of tuberculosis.
The loss profoundly impacted his family. Yet President Oaks says of his childhood with his siblings:
“We were raised in a happy home in which our deceased father was always a reality. [Our mother] taught us that we had a father and she had a husband and we would always be a family because of their temple marriage. Our father was just away temporarily because the Lord had called him to a different work.”
President Oaks carried on his father’s legacy through a special tradition: giving his sons and grandsons pocketknives when they were young. The tradition honors a poignant memory of his father’s Christlike generosity.
The Gift of a Pocketknife
One day, Dr. Oaks took young Dallin on a walk downtown, and they passed a shabbily dressed boy standing outside a sporting goods store. Dr. Oaks spoke to the boy, led him inside the store, and allowed him to pick out a pocketknife as a gift.
“I didn’t get a pocketknife that day, but I did get a lesson,” President Oaks later recalled. “At the time, I felt let down, as a little boy would feel when the gift he thinks is his goes to someone else. But as my father and I walked away from the store, he said, ‘You have me. He doesn’t have anybody.’ Later I realized how generous and how sensitive to the needs of others my father was.”
Honoring a Father’s Christlike Love
In an interview with the Church News, Tiffany Bratt, President Oaks’s granddaughter, shared that the prophet’s father died before he could give young Dallin a pocketknife. But President Oaks gave pocketknives to all of his sons and grandsons to commemorate his father’s loving act.
“The love and attention he’s given us and the priority that he’s made each of us as his family members has just inspired me and helped me throughout my life to feel the love of the Savior,” Tiffany said.
In a social media post in 2014, President Oaks honored his father and testified of eternal families, writing:
“I was not yet 8 years old when he died, but his influence lives on for me and his descendants, now totaling 140. … Thanks to the gospel of Jesus Christ, I know I will see my father again. Families are forever.”
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