L. Hal Edison - 1919 to 2023

Hal Edison, Cache Valley boy and WWII veteran, graduated with a degree in Business Administration from Utah State Agricultural College in June of 1947. While working as the manager of Low Cost Drug in downtown Logan, he met Alice Nelson from Tooele, Utah and hired her for a summer job. Alice was about to begin her senior year, working towards a degree in Elementary Education. She received that degree in June of 1950, but not before marrying Hal on Christmas Day, 1949.

L. Hal Edison was born at the Budge Memorial Clinic in Logan on August 24, 1919 during the Spanish flu pandemic and less than a year after the end of World War I. The middle of three brothers, he grew up in Hyrum around the corner from his paternal grandparents - immigrants from Norway. His mother was of Welsh heritage and she loved to read. She named her son “Louis” after his father but found his middle name “Hal” in Jack London’s Call of the Wild. And that is the name he preferred throughout his life.

At an early age Hal knew he didn’t want to be a farmer. He hated picking green beans and raspberries and saw how hard his grandparents worked milking cows. His dad worked in the grocery business and his mom had attended business college and worked as an accountant. So, at age 13, in the height of the Depression, Hal began contributing to the family income by working at the American Food Store in Hyrum. A few years later when the family moved to Logan so his older brother could attend the Utah State Agricultural College, Hal would take the train back to Hyrum every Friday after school, work in the store until it closed, sleep in an apartment above the store, work all day Saturday, finish the day by oiling the store’s wooden floors, then take the Greyhound bus back to Logan.

Hal graduated from Logan High in 1937 and then took a year off to work full-time at Stone’s Food Store. He started college in the fall of 1938 and continued going to school and working at Stones through March of 1942 when he was drafted for service in WWII.

Two of Hal’s friends urged him to join them in paratrooper training because that meant he’d be able to send an extra $50 home every month. Ironically, neither friend followed through, but Hal did, becoming a paratrooper with the storied All-American 82nd Airborne. After more than a dozen training jumps in the states, he jumped into three combat zones in Sicily, Italy and Holland. And because of his previous education and typing skills, Hal became the clerk for the 82nd Airborne 505th Regimental Headquarters Company. The 82nd was at the forefront of the war - the first troops into Naples, Italy, and Holland, and one of the first units into Bastogne during the Battle of the Bulge. When the war ended, they were in Ludwigslust, Germany where they liberated a concentration camp and met up with Russian forces coming from the east. Luckily for Hal’s family, his future wife and two daughters, he missed joining D-Day - the Normandy Invasion, because of a serious auto-bicycle accident resulting in punctured lungs and broken ribs that kept him in the hospital in England for a month!

Hal was honorably discharged from the Army in September of 1945 and upon returning to Logan went back to school at USAC where he joined the Sigma Phi Epsilon Fraternity. He also went back to work for his old boss, Earl Stone, but this time he worked at Stone’s new drugstore, Low Cost Drugs, where he soon became the manager.

In the fall of 1951, after marrying and starting a family, Hal was hired by wholesaler McKesson and Robbins Drug Company. His job was to call on drugstores, check out their inventory and sell them whatever they needed to keep their store well-stocked. The family soon moved to Salt Lake City and over the years his territory also included southwestern Wyoming and Davis County.

After their daughters were in Jr. High, Alice put her education to work teaching Kindergarten through Second Grade in Granite School District. She retired after 21 years of molding the lives of hundreds of small children and introducing them to life beyond their families.

In the late 1960s Hal transferred to another division of the company, McKesson Laboratories, and his territory became Utah and Idaho and ultimately expanded to twelve western states. When the sales force for the Labs Division was reduced, Hal and Alice moved to Sparks, Nevada where Hal took a job selling there and in northern California. They spent nearly three years in Nevada but when a territory became available in Salt Lake City returned to Utah. Hal worked for another decade, retiring from McKesson in 1984 after 33 1/2 years with the same company.

To remember and honor Hal, donations may be made to the L. Hal & Alice Nelson Edison Aggie Family Scholarship. The scholarship benefits students who are pursuing a degree in the Jon M. Huntsman College of Business.