NewsNet Services
Michael Perkins, chairman of the Brigham Young University Communications Department, drowned Thursday Aug. 14, in a kayaking accident on the Salmon River in Idaho while on a family outing.
Perkins, of Provo, was on vacation in a remote area of central Idaho when the accident occurred. His wife Donnette reported the family was on a guided river trip including rafts and kayaks with Perkins riding last in a kayak. She said that at the time of the accident she looked upriver and saw him hanging onto a rock before the current pulled him under.
Funeral services will be Wednesday at 11 a.m. at the Grandview South Stake Center, 1122 Grand Ave., Provo. Friends may call 6 to 8 p.m. Tuesday evening from at Berg Mortuary, 185 E. Center Street, and at the church from 10 to 11 a.m. Wednesday. An obituary is included in today’s edition of The Daily Universe.
Rugged terrain in the area caused a delay of retrieval efforts until Friday morning, authorities said. One helicopter assigned to fires in the Red River area helped deputies gain access to the remote location. The body was located Saturday.
Perkins became chairman of the BYU Communications Department in fall 2001. He graduated from BYU in 1982 and worked for the Deseret News as a night police reporter during the 1980s. He earned a law degree from the University of Utah in 1986. After teaching at the University of New Mexico and working at the Albuquerque Journal, he taught at Drake University in Iowa before he was hired as an associate professor of communications at BYU in August 1999.
Prior to being named department chair at BYU he spent a year creating the journalism program at BYU-Hawaii. He was recently named head of the media law division of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communications.
“Mike Perkins was as close to the ideal as anyone I have ever known. He loved people. He loved knowledge, and he loved action,” said BYU assistant academic vice president K. Newell Dayley.
Dayley, former dean of the College of Fine Arts and Communications, said, “Mike saw himself as a servant, not a master. Consequently, he thought about himself and his own position and his own needs second, third, fourth or fifth in line. He was all consumed with what he could do for others.”
“I don?t think he ever held anything against anyone. He was one of those rare people that forgive people immediately. Those who worked with Mike followed him because they trusted him.”
Associate Communications Department chair Ed Adams came to BYU at the same time as Perkins and shared a friendship that spanned more than a decade.
“I was at a university in Texas and he was at Drake and we used to get on the phone and commiserate with each other,” Adams said. “He and I were serving as Church bishops at the time. We had a lot in common.
“We applied for positions at BYU at the same time, and he convinced me to come. We had offices near each other in HFAC and over the past few years we developed a habit of walking daily around campus and eating lunch together.
“I loved to talk to Mike. He loved problems. For some of us problems are an annoyance or cause us mental stress. For him solving problems was mental gymnastics, it was like a big puzzle for him to work out problems, analyze a situation and come up with solutions.
Adams said an attribute that Perkins possessed was an ability to be guileless adding, “You never had a sense that Mike was the boss or the one in charge. He had an analytical mind and mastery of words, but people could always say what was on their mind. Somehow the best ideas and thoughts would come to the surface, and Mike would allow the discussions to take place.
NewsNet general manager Jim Kelly said, “Mike Perkins had a rock-solid testimony of the Savior and the truthfulness of the Church.
“He was very centered in his professional and his doctrinal footings. He knew BYU and the communications program was exactly where he wanted to be, and where the Lord would have him serve.
“Mike was a very approachable and affable man whose faith and service were at the same time simple and profound.”
