Neil Rasband (1925-1977) *51

Neil Clifford Rasband was my father. He was born 27 August 1925 in Heber City, Wasatch, Utah to Erwin (Ern) Giles Rasband and Della Elizabeth Moulton. When he was 6 weeks old his mother was taken to the Utah State Mental Hospital in Provo, Utah, suffering from what we now believe was postpartum depression. It was called, at the time, a mental or nervous breakdown. He was sent to live with his father's sister, Elizabeth Ann Rasband Baird.

When his father remarried Violet Ann Edwards, in October 1927, he was sent back to live with his father and new stepmother. He once asked his "Mama Lizzie" why she "gave him away and not Alta," her daughter 5 years older than he. "Mama Lizzie" was the only mother he had known. His birth mother remarried and moved away to Colorado. When she came back to Heber to visit family, she would sometimes come to see him and his brother, Earl, and give them each a "shiny new nickel." She NEVER told them she was their birth mother. (She didn't want to ruin their relationship with their stepmother.)

After Neil graduated from Wasatch High School, in 1943, he joined the U. S. Navy and served as a mechanic in the engine room of a destroyer in the Pacific. While home on leave, as they attended church in one of his friend's ward, Derial introduced him to Sarah VaLois Smith, his future wife. Once the war was over, he looked her up their first official date was on Valentine's Day 1947. He bought her a diamond for her birthday May 4 and they were married on June 25 in the Salt Lake LDS Temple. They were blessed with five children during their marriage, Eugene Clifford, Kenneth Neil, Rhonda, Paul Brent and Lonette. He was killed in a mining accident on 10 June 1977, just two weeks shy of their thirtieth wedding anniversary.