In the early 2000s, Ralph Conrad Schultz Jr. spent parts of several years living in Ghana, flying to a different West African country nearly every week while overseeing a broad swath of the continent for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Members knew him as Elder R. Conrad Schultz, an emeritus General Authority Seventy who also presided over a mission in Colorado and later the Portland Oregon Temple. He died peacefully in his sleep on September 11, 2026, in Eugene, Oregon, at age 88, according to his family and Church News.

He was born March 11, 1938, in North Bend, Oregon, to Ralph Conrad Schultz and Dorothy Pearl Bushong, and a sister, Joyce, arrived a few years later. Because his father already held the name Ralph, the family called him Conrad, and growing up on the Oregon Coast and later in Eugene he fished nearly every summer weekend, by fly, lure or bait, with relatives or his Scout troop. He earned Eagle Scout rank, joined the Order of the Arrow and attended a National Scout Jamboree in Pennsylvania, according to his obituary published by Rest-Haven Memorial Park & Funeral Home.

Sports brought him to the Latter-day Saint faith. In high school he joined a friend on a Church basketball team that won its region title and advanced to an all-Church tournament in Salt Lake City, where he heard an address by Joseph Fielding Smith, then president of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. "I couldn't tell you to this day what he said, but I remember how it made me feel," he recalled decades later. He graduated from Eugene High School and was baptized in January 1956, around the time he met a young woman from the same church activities named Carolyn Lake.

After two semesters at Brigham Young University, Schultz served a full-time mission from 1958 to 1960 in the Gulf States, covering Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi. Weighing for himself whether the Book of Mormon and Joseph Smith's account were true, he fasted for two days and knelt to pray in his family's attic bedroom. "I couldn't even ask the questions; I knew the answers," he said of that night. Back in Oregon, he enrolled at the University of Oregon and resumed his courtship with Carolyn, who had since earned a nursing degree at BYU. "You have to wait for the good things," she recalled of those long-distance years. They married June 12, 1961, in the Salt Lake Temple, a marriage that lasted 65 years.

Schultz completed a bachelor's degree in political science and, in 1965, a juris doctorate from the University of Oregon School of Law, according to a Deseret News profile published when he was called as a General Authority. He practiced first at Thompson, Mumford and Woodrich, then co-founded the firm Hill & Schultz with Robert W. Hill. Stephen, Susan, Scott, Jared and Sally were born between 1963 and 1976, and the family eventually settled thirteen acres west of Eugene they called Stone Oaks, keeping a garden, cattle and a tractor. By his family's account, he made time for his children despite his law practice and church duties, tracking their sports outings on a yellow legal pad with notes on what they did well and how to improve.

In June 1999, Schultz left the law practice, by then largely in his son Scott's hands, to become president of the Colorado Denver South Mission, training young full-time missionaries. About two years in, Church leaders gave him a different assignment: he and Carolyn moved to Ghana, where he traveled almost weekly to neighboring West African countries while serving as a General Authority. He was sustained to the Second Quorum of the Seventy in 2001 and served in that calling through 2007.

His only general conference address, "Faith Obedience," delivered in April 2002, turned on a day of salmon fishing off the Oregon coast when a sneaker wave hit the boat broadside without warning, knocking his cousin Gary into the water; a life jacket and the group's quick work brought him back safely, though five people drowned in similar waves elsewhere on the Oregon and Washington coasts that same day, Schultz told the General Conference audience. He compared the life jackets to obedience to God's commandments, closing, "I witness to you that our Father in Heaven lives, that He loves us, and that by being unquestioningly obedient to His commandments, we can once again dwell with Him and His Son, Jesus Christ, our Savior and Redeemer."

In 2007, Schultz was called to preside over the Portland Oregon Temple, with Carolyn serving alongside him as temple matron, an assignment they held until 2010. He then surrendered his Oregon Bar membership and stepped fully away from law. Of a lifetime of Church assignments, he had told interviewers years earlier, "Whatever we can do to help is what we want to do." Retirement gave him more time for family history work and the fishing he had loved since boyhood.

Schultz is survived by Carolyn, his wife of 65 years; children Stephen (Pamela), Susan Foutz (Harold), Scott (Mikell), Jared (Deeann) and Sally Forsgren (Brad); seventeen grandchildren; ten great-grandchildren; and his sister, Joyce Orr. A funeral service was held September 19, 2026, at a Latter-day Saint meetinghouse on North Danebo Avenue in Eugene, with a Zoom link offered for those unable to attend.

What Schultz built runs in more than one direction. The law practice he built over more than three decades passed to his son Scott in 1999 and carried on long after Schultz gave up his own bar card. The missionaries he trained in Colorado and the members he came to know across Ghana and its neighbors carried forward instruction he gave them in person, week after week, rather than from a distance. And the thirteen acres west of Eugene that he and Carolyn cleared into Stone Oaks, planting a garden and keeping cattle, remained the place where five children and seventeen grandchildren learned to fish the way he had learned as a boy on the Oregon Coast.