Early Life and Education
Tanner was born in Farmington, Utah to Joseph Marion Tanner and Annie Vilate Clark. His mother was Tanner's second wife, and they spent their wedding night apart because of the Federal government opposition to polygamy. O.C. Tanner was the youngest of Annie's 10 children, and he would later publish her memoirs as A Mormon Mother: An Autobiography by Annie Clark Tanner. It details how his father, exiled to Canada because of his practice of polygamy, was a fading presence in the life of his son.
Annie struggled to survive financially, and O.C. felt a responsibility to contribute financially from an early age, doing odd jobs that included stoking furnaces at the university to pay his tuition. One of the persons whose fires he maintained showed him how to enter the jewelry business, and he started selling seminary graduation pins and class rings from the back of his car. He founded the O.C. Tanner Co. in 1927, while he was still an undergraduate—a company that is now one of the largest manufacturers of retail and corporate awards in the U.S. He married Grace Adams in 1931.
He completed his B. A. degree in 1929 at the University of Utah, his L.L.B., also from the University of Utah in 1936, his M.A. from Stanford University in 1937, and his J.D. degree from the University of Utah in 1967. He has received numerous honorary degrees from Utah universities and colleges. The family foundation endowed the University of Utah Obert C. and Grace A. Tanner Humanities Center.
Tanner took an interest in Mormon studies and once offered Fawn Brodie, famous for her psycho-biography of Joseph Smith, $10,000 for a similar biography of Brigham Young.
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