At his passing at the venerable age of 93, it is useful to look at today's divisive politics through the lens of Rampton's years as governor, 1965-1977.

Certainly the '60s were trying times. Beginning with the John F. Kennedy assassination in 1963, and building to a crescendo in 1968 with the grinding agony of the Vietnam War, the Democratic Convention in Chicago and the assassinations of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., Utahns, like other Americans, feared that their nation might be coming apart at the seams.

Yet there was quiet, sensible Cal, guiding Utah through its own tempests, from the Sunday Closing Law (which he vetoed in 1967) to the ordeal of Gary Gilmore's execution, which took place two weeks after he left office.

He has been called a moderate Democrat. That meant he championed both better funding for public schools, a traditionally Democratic cause, and business development, a Republican platform plank. He guided a building campaign on state college campuses to accommodate the baby boomers and formed Rampton's Raiders to recruit corporations to the Beehive State. He created the Utah Travel Council to promote the state as a tourist destination.

He was far-sighted enough to envision the need for a general statewide land-use planning law and later said it was the greatest disappointment of his political career when the law went down to defeat in a referendum spearheaded by the real estate industry.

The Gov, as he was called, was not immune to political scandal. When a cache of booze was found in the governor's mansion, he owned up to it and said it wouldn't happen again. End of story.

There were poignant times, too. When his beloved Lucybeth went public with her lifelong battle with clinical depression, she helped bring the disease into the light.

Cal Rampton wasn't a liberal or a conservative. He was both and neither. Ideological labels mattered less to him than getting good things done for the people of Utah. We could use more of that today.