By Kenneth Long
When my parents brought me home from Sunrise Hospital almost forty years ago, they traveled north on Maryland Parkway and made a left turn on Oakey, eventually arriving at my childhood home of 1021 E. Oakey. That was a home filled with happiness, music, and love. My grandparents lived next door, and my uncle Walter lived across the street.
Yet my arrival would not have happened were it not for Jack Huntington, who lived several houses down at 1057 E. Oakey.

Jack Huntington was and is a jeweler by trade. My father was a teacher, as was my mother. Brother and Sister Huntington set my mother up on a date with my father—a date that led to their marriage, six children, three missionaries, and fourteen
grandchildren.

Jack Huntington has only half of his right thumb. The remainder was cut off by a cement mixer while it churned powdered cement, sand, water and gravel to make the bricks which would eventually be used to build the 8th and Franklin Chapel.

As a small child, I was seated in church behind Jack Huntington. I peered at him seated on the pew in front of me and noticed his amputated thumb. I yelled aloud: “Mom—Dad, he only has one thumb!” My parents quickly hushed me and I sat silently through the remainder of the meeting. After sacrament meeting I was quick to accost Jack and in my best interrogating voice I asked: “Mister, what happened to your thumb?”

Brother Huntington took no offense, and told me the story. When I learned that his thumb was entombed in one of the thousands of bricks that made up the 8th and Franklin church, the building took on a new interest. For at least two years I stared at the various bricks and wondered: “Is the thumb in that one?”

When I went to Brigham Young University I took a religion class and learned Brigham Young’s teaching that each of our elements was preserved for the resurrection. I thought back to the 8th and Franklin chapel, the tomb of Jack Huntington’s thumb, and envisioned it being released from the cement and being returned to its proper owner. I began to chuckle aloud in the otherwise somber religion class, much to the dismay of my teacher. I was asked to sit in the hallway for the remainder of his lecture.

I fell in love with the girl who later became my wife when we were both 17. I saw Jack in church and wondered if he would be so kind as to sell me a diamond on installment payments. At the time I was making $3.35 an hour cleaning cages for a veterinarian who would later become our Senator. Yet it was not the economics that frightened me from asking Brother Huntington for a ring–it was the fact that I knew he expected me to go on a mission. I could no more let him down than I could my own father.

I had seen Jack Huntington at church every Sunday of my life. Rarely did a fast Sunday pass when I did not hear him proclaim his testimony. That strong testimony, and hundreds of others, strengthened mine and I went on a mission, hoping to get married to my high school sweetheart upon my return. However, I returned home shortly after the love of my life left for her mission. Four years after I contemplated asking Brother Huntington about a diamond for the first time, we finally went to Huntington Jeweler’s on Maryland Parkway.

The Huntington’s arrangement of my mother and father had come full circle—a child of the couple they set up for a first date was now marrying in the temple. Both my parents are gone, but I assume my father bought my mother’s diamond from Huntington Jewelers. The cycle was repeating itself.

Years later my wife and I tried to build our own house. This necessitated moving back in with my parents on Oakey. Jack knew more about construction and brick-laying than I did, so I told my children that we were going to walk to Jack Huntington’s house. I informed my small children that Brother Huntington had only one thumb and asked that they please not mention it.

Much like me when I was a boy, my own son knocked on the door and when the aged
Jack Huntington answered, he blurted: “Which thumb is cut off.” Jack told the story again, some 25 years after my interrogation. I realized then that Jack Huntington has probably told that story hundreds of times to pesky children and the morbidly curious alike. If Jack were a lesser man, he could have looked upward and grumbled towards God, asking Him why as a jeweler his thumb had to be taken while building His church.
But he never did. Like Job of old, he never “charged God foolishly.”

After the 8th and Franklin church was torn down, I returned to the site in the fading light of a September evening. On that hallowed ground where my church once stood, I kicked around the few pieces of cinder block that remained, thinking of Jack Huntington’s thumb. “Just maybe” I said aloud. But it was not to be found. The 8th and Franklin Chapel took Jack’s thumb to its grave.

Although the construction of the 8th and Franklin chapel took Jack’s thumb, it also provided a place for a man that was in tune enough with the Spirit to realize my father was supposed to marry my mother. It provided the forum that gave Jack Huntington a testimony that strengthened my feeble knees as I passed from childhood to adolescence and reluctantly into adulthood. It produced a man that I see in the temple every Friday, whose reputation as a man and a husband I need to emulate.

Perhaps the loss of his thumb was a small price to pay for that building—and despite the fact the church that entombed his thumb is gone, all that happened therein lives on in me, my siblings, my four children, and hundreds if not thousands of other men and women and missionaries who learned the gospel in those hallowed walls. Those walls were paid for in part by Jack Huntington’s thumb.

Sister Huntington passed away on May 10, 2009 after 64 years of marriage to Jack.
Like my wife and I, Jack and Colleen Huntington were high school sweethearts. I can’t help but think my father said “thank you” as soon she rejoined the throngs of Las Vegas First Warders who have passed on—not only for setting him up with my mother but for being an example to his six children.

Jack still lives in his beautiful home on East Oakey Boulevard. The last time I was there Jack told me he had retired but keeps a work bench in his home where he continues to make beautiful jewelry. Frighteningly, my daughter is nearing the age that my wife and I met at a church dance. As we drove eastbound on Oakey one winter day she asked:
“Isn’t that where Jack Huntington lives?”

“Who wants to know?” I inquired. I painfully envisioned some 17 year old boy in love with my teenage daughter, contemplating asking Jack Huntington for a diamond ring, continuing the cycle that now reaches over seven decades. My only hope is that whoever this boy is, he had someone like Jack Huntington in his ward, to set an example and a high standard for him to reach.