January 13, 1941
TO
August 9, 2026

DAVID LLOYD Hill passed away on Sunday, August 9, 2026, at the age of 85. He was born January 13, 1940, in Idaho Falls, Idaho, to Margaret and Lloyd Hill.

He graduated from Bonneville High School and, shortly afterward, left home to serve a full-time mission in New Zealand for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. After returning from his mission, he met Judy Christensen. They married in the Idaho Falls Temple and became the parents of five children: David Geoffrey Hill, Douglas Eugene Hill, Melissa Ann Hill, now known as Katya Birken, Theresa Marie Hill, and Caralee Hill-MacRobbie.

If there was one thing Dad knew how to do, it was fix things.

He loved tools, engines, cars, lawnmowers, boats and almost anything mechanical. His garages were filled with tools, parts and projects. If something was broken, Dad wanted to know why—and more often than not, he could figure out how to make it work again.

That curiosity began early. As a teenager, he once replaced the carburetor in his mother's brand-new car with one he thought would perform better, then proceeded to race the car around town with his friends. His mother was understandably less enthusiastic about the improvement than he was.

He carried that mechanical ability into his working life. After working at a gas station, Dad took a janitorial job with Sears. One day, he noticed that broken sewing machines and lawnmowers were piling up because no one was repairing them. He approached the service manager and told him that he could fix them if they would give him a place to work.

They did.

That simple conversation changed the direction of his career. Dad became the fix-it man and eventually a Sears Service Manager, managing increasingly large service operations in Utah and California. At one point, he managed a major service center in Union City, California, with dozens of service trucks, repair technicians and a department selling maintenance agreements.

For a time in Provo, Dad even shared his knowledge over the radio. Listeners would call a local program with questions about broken small engines and appliances, and Dad would explain over the air how they could repair them.

But some of Dad's best projects never had anything to do with his job.

While the family lived in Caldwell, Idaho, Dad found an old broken Story & Clark player piano and restored it for Judy. She began teaching piano lessons, and their son Geof became one of her students, beginning at only four years old. Geof would sit at that piano playing the simplest little songs—sometimes only two or three notes—and practice before going to school. Decades later, he still remembers those first little songs.

Dad himself knew exactly one piano number: boogie-woogie.

He also loved boats and the water. In Caldwell, he bought an old boat, restored it and gave it the wonderfully appropriate name “Fer Hill Sake.” The family took it waterskiing on Lake Lowell and later on Utah Lake after moving to Orem. Dad also helped Geof buy a canvas kayak, opening yet another door to adventure.

Dad enjoyed airplanes as well. He sometimes flew in the private airplane of his stake president, President Blacker, and on walks with his children he would talk about airplanes, cars, engines and how things worked.

One of those conversations eventually produced something unforgettable.

After reading Andrew Henry's Meadow, young Geof went into the garage and announced that he was going to build a helicopter. He had managed to gather some wood when Dad came out and asked what he was doing.

A few days later, Dad had gone considerably further.

He built his son an airplane.

It was fashioned using a lawnmower engine, wheels and a real working propeller. The propeller produced enough thrust to move the airplane, but Dad quickly realized that a rapidly spinning propeller surrounded by third-graders and neighborhood children was probably not his safest invention. He removed the propeller drive and reconfigured the machine so the lawnmower wheels powered it instead.

Geof would sit in the cockpit and drive his airplane around the neighborhood while Dad occasionally ran alongside, adjusting the throttle and keeping his creation running.

Eventually Dad took the airplane to Provo, where Geof drove it down the street in the Pioneer Day Parade.

It wasn't even their first parade vehicle.

The year before, Dad had constructed a cardboard Buick for his son. He called it the “Funny Buick” and decorated the rear corners with tall homemade newspaper creations that looked like palm fronds. That vehicle went down the Pioneer Day parade route too.

Dad had an ability to make childhood interesting.

When he managed the Sears service center in Provo, Judy would sometimes bring the children to visit him after work. Once the employees had gone home, Dad let the kids roller skate through the warehouse.

Later, after the family moved to California in November 1978, he bought a home with a swimming pool. Dad heated that pool even during the winter. On cold days, a column of steam could be seen rising behind the house from blocks away. The family could swim in January.

Life was not always easy financially. During particularly lean years in California, Dad supplemented his Sears income by getting up early in the morning and driving around the city dropping bundles of newspapers at locations where newspaper carriers could pick them up for their routes. He did what needed to be done.

After the death of his son Douglas in 1984 and during a period of tremendous change in the family, Dad and Geof shared a travel trailer for a time. Their mornings often began on mopeds with a ride to Winchell's Donuts for a donut and Coke before Dad had to report to work.

Those little mopeds eventually became the transportation for a much bigger adventure.

One Monday, Dad suggested that the two of them ride their mopeds to Yosemite National Park.

So they did.

They simply rode out of town and kept going. As the little engines began losing power in the mountains, father and son sometimes had to push the mopeds uphill. Once inside Yosemite, Dad borrowed tools from a gas station, disassembled the carburetors, cleaned them and discovered carbon buildup obstructing the exhaust. Soon the little machines had their power back.

They rode those mopeds throughout Yosemite, even climbing all the way to Glacier Point. Other visitors thought they were crazy.

They probably were.

But it was an adventure neither father nor son ever forgot.

A Father and Son

When Geof prepared to serve his own mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, Dad remained an important part of that journey. The week before Geof was to report to the Missionary Training Center on January 2, 1987, the two drove through the snow to Idaho to spend time with family. They talked for hours during that long drive—Dad about engines, Geof about electricity and electronics, and both of them imagining things that might someday be built.

During that drive, they even dreamed up the idea of using a small gasoline generator to power an electric motor that could propel a vehicle. They never built it, but dreaming about machines together was part of the fun.

While Geof served his mission in South Korea, Dad faithfully wrote him a letter every week. Those letters became an important connection to home and helped a young missionary thousands of miles away feel less alone.

Dad also played an unexpected role when Geof returned home and decided to marry Young Me Lee of South Korea. When Geof nervously told his father that Young Me would arrive in Los Angeles on November 11, 1988, Dad simply smiled and said they should drive to Los Angeles to pick her up—and perhaps do something fun when she arrived.

One hour after arriving in America, Young Me was at Disneyland with Geof and his dad.

After riding Pirates of the Caribbean, Geof finally found enough courage to put a ring on her finger.

Dad was there.

Working and Adventuring Together

Years later, father and son continued working and having adventures together. Geof worked as a DJ while Dad became his wedding videographer. Dad became quite good behind the camera, although he developed the inexplicable habit of occasionally filming the bald spots on the tops of guests' heads—something Geof repeatedly had to remind him that brides were unlikely to appreciate in their wedding videos.

They also spent hundreds of evenings aboard the Commodore dining cruise yachts. Geof worked the dance floor as the DJ while Dad spent time with the captains and helped with the work. Those became some of their happiest years together.

Dad and Judy shared a love of dancing as well. Judy became well known for her dancing talents and leadership in dance festivals in Idaho, Utah and California, and Dad was often her dancing partner.

Later in life, Dad and his wife Mary traveled throughout the western United States selling paintings for artist Jodi Jensen at art shows. They loaded their merchandise into a large Ford van that Dad had fixed up and traveled from show to show, visiting national parks and seeing much of the West along the way.

His Final Years

Dad was married during his lifetime to Judy Christensen, Cecilia, who was from Chile, Mary Fox, and Nikki, with whom he spent his final years in the Philippines. Cecilia and Mary preceded him in death.

Dad spent approximately the final five years of his life in the Philippines. Although thousands of miles separated him from his family in America, he remained in contact through telephone calls, stories, messages and what became a seemingly endless supply of Facebook memes.

Most importantly, he told his son that he loved him.

A Lasting Influence

Dad's influence can be found in places he probably never completely realized. A little tape recorder he once offered as a reward changed the direction of his son's life. When Geof was in second grade and hated reading, Dad showed him a tape recorder with a little microphone and promised that if he read through book 22, the recorder would be his.

Geof read the books.

Dad kept his promise.

With Dad's help, Geof learned how to connect a speaker to that recorder. Before long, one speaker became many—eventually sixteen little two-inch speakers connected to that poor tape recorder, which somehow survived the experiment. That childhood fascination with sound and electronics grew into a lifetime involving audio, video, filmmaking, broadcasting, music and technology.

The father loved engines.

The son loved electricity.

But underneath both was the same question:

How does this thing work, and what else can we make it do?

Dad's life was filled with machines, tools, cars, boats, airplanes, motorcycles, radios, cameras, road trips and projects. He could turn a broken piano into the instrument on which a child discovered music. He could turn a lawnmower into an airplane. He could turn two mopeds into a Yosemite vacation. And he could turn an ordinary morning into a memory that would remain with his son for the rest of his life.

Preceded in Death

He was preceded in death by his parents, Margaret and Lloyd Hill; his son, Douglas Eugene Hill; his daughter, Theresa Marie Hill; and his wives Cecilia and Mary.

Survived By

He is survived by his children David Geoffrey Hill, Melissa Ann Hill, known as Katya Birken, and Caralee Hill-MacRobbie, as well as his wife Nikki in the Philippines.

Until We Meet Again

Families are complicated, and a lifetime together contains far more than can ever be written in an obituary. But among all the years, changes and miles, there remain the things that cannot be taken away: a restored piano, an airplane built in a garage, roller skates in an empty Sears warehouse, a boat called Fer Hill Sake, two mopeds climbing toward Glacier Point, weekly missionary letters from home, hundreds of nights working together on weddings and boats, and countless conversations about how things work.

Those are the memories that remain.

And for his son Geof, there is one final thing that matters more than all the others:

I love my dad.

And with faith in the promises of the gospel of Jesus Christ, this is not goodbye forever.

It is goodbye until we meet again.