Imogene Thorn

On March 20, 2017, at the age of 93, Imogene Johnson Thorn, of Provo, Utah, passed from this life surrounded by the love of her family. She died while visiting family in Gilbert, Arizona, following a brief battle with pneumonia.

There will be two viewings at the Grandview East Stake Center at 1081 W 1060 N, Provo, UT:

Thursday, March 30, 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. and Friday, March 31, 9:00 a.m. to 10:30 a.m.

Funeral services will be held Friday, March 31 at 11 a.m., also at 1081 W 1060 N, Provo, UT.

Imogene will then be interred next to her husband, Scott Lee Thorn, in the Evergreen Cemetery at 1997 South, 400 East in Springville, Utah.

In the years before her death, Imogene wrote her autobiography, Song of the Meadowlark. You are invited to read or download it by going to https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BywFTdPOhVgKUHFtbmRSOWpRVEk/view?usp=sharing.

Imogene was born July 3rd, 1923 to Ralph McClellan Johnson and Ruby Jensen Johnson in Barnwell, Alberta, Canada, the third of eight children: Rula Hope, Mills McClellan, Imogene, Stewart Kent, Gladys Winona, Glen J., Raymond Drew, and Sylvia Ann. Despite the Great Depression, she spent a happy childhood working on their family farm on the Canadian prairie, listening to meadow larks and watching the clouds and sunsets. She met Scott Lee Thorn while attending Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. They were married in the Cardston, Alberta LDS Temple on July 10, 1946.

Over the years, she and her husband resided in Provo, Springville, Salt Lake, Kearns, Sandy, and Orem, Utah. They have five loved daughters: Carol Jeanne [Lawrence] Walters, Merrilee [Jon] Wells, Pamela [Barry] Smith, Adele [Glen Var] Rosenbaum, and Teresa [Rodney] Johnston.

Imogene Thorn was a being filled with love.

She loved her family. She loved spending time with them and playing with her great-grandchildren. She loved her friends.  She loved visiting people and making new friends. She would talk to people on the bus, on the phone, at her church, in the park, or at the salon. Whatever your problems, she would want to help. Her whole life was dedicated to serving others.

She loved music and spent her life singing. She went from singing three-part harmony while sitting on the school radiator with her friends, to singing in the Mormon Tabernacle Choir with her husband, to singing lullabies to her grandchildren. She loved a wide variety of music but especially opera, orchestral music, and musical theatre. Being a choir director was her favorite church calling, but her greatest musical joy was when her family performed for her.

She loved learning. It didn’t matter the subject: she wanted to learn it all. She lived life with vigor to the end. She learned to swim in her fifties, ski in her sixties, and began learning Spanish in her seventies. She found great joy in attending college classes with her grandchildren and, later, attending Elder Quest classes sponsored by Utah Valley University.

She particularly loved language and grammar. She had attended secretarial school in Calgary and studied English at BYU, becoming an excellent writer and editor. She would read the dictionary for sheer pleasure. She could have long debates about the correct structure of a sentence or about whether-or-not “anyways” was a word. She valued great art and literature, and was reading new books to the last week of her life.

She also loved to help others love learning. She was honored with a community award for her volunteer work at Windsor Elementary School in Orem, where she tutored the children in reading. When she moved to the home of her daughter, Carol, in Provo, children from the neighborhood would come and read with Sister Thorn every week.

She loved laughter and had a tremendous capacity for enjoyment. She did comic tap dances to entertain children, which became even funnier when she did them holding on to her walker. She loved jokes and puns. The jokes told by her sons-in-law and grandchildren would occasionally make her laugh so hard she cried. She would joke back, laughing and smiling the whole time. She told stories about her own foibles more than she teased others. She laughed when she showed her granddaughter the tree stump her poor eyesight had converted into a flower.

Imogene loved the gospel. She was a valiant member of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and served as a missionary with her husband in Peoria, Illinois. Her week was never complete without a trip to the Temple. Her day was never complete without reading the scriptures. A few months before her passing, she re-read the Book of Mormon and the Doctrine and Covenants. By that time, she could barely see, but she spent hours each day deciphering the words of the scriptures.

Imogene Johnson Thorn was a woman who loved life. She showed all of us the joy that can be found in family and other people, service, music, learning, laughter, and the gospel. Her favorite scripture was Romans 8:28 “And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God.”

She is survived by her brothers, Glen and Raymond Johnson, and her sister, Sylvia Heaps, her five daughters, 36 grandchildren, and 53 great-grandchildren. With spouses, her family numbers 122+ people.

She is sorely missed. But we know that she is laughing and singing in heaven.