My brother Will was a force of nature

Had my brother been an asteroid, his impact would have ended the dinosaurs. We called him “Bill” until that interloper Bilbo Baggins entered popular culture. Then it was Will.

Will Bagley set a California state record for chin-ups, was the statewide impromptu speech champion complete with a certificate of achievement signed by Gov. Ronald Reagan, got elected Oceanside High School student body president, led a protest against the poor lunch choices at said high school (I remember his “Give the cafeteria back to the rats” picket sign), built a raft and floated down the Mississippi, road the rails, lived in a cabin on a mountaintop near Santa Cruz to write the Great American Novel, hitch-hiked across America then did it again going the other way, got run over by a river barge on his second float down the Mississippi and barely lived to tell about it (his dog, Thor, wasn’t as lucky), learned guitar and wrote songs, finagled an audition with Bob Dylan (Dylan: Keep your day job), brought his stripper girlfriend home to Oceanside to meet the family, lived in another cabin on a mountaintop in North Carolina to take another stab at the Great American Novel, taught the local farmers to grow marijuana in exchange for learning how to make moonshine, and got arrested by the sheriff in a “law and order” election year for the quarter acre of weed he was tending. (The evidence later “disappeared.”)

All before being diagnosed with juvenile onset diabetes (type 1) at age 30.

Needless to say, my parents were happy with almost none of this. We grew up in a Mormon, Republican household, and while the religion and politics didn’t stick, curiosity and the love of learning did. Our house had a good-sized library, Time, Newsweek, two daily newspapers and TVs tuned to the news. The enduring image I have of my father is him with his nose in a book.

My parents lived to see Will finally set up house in Salt Lake with a family and hold down conventional jobs making cabinets and, later, writing technical manuals for Evans and Sutherland. He may or may not