Extracted and extrapolated from the biography his wife, Margaret Baker McKinnon provided for the book Randolph - A Look Back, compiled by Steven L. Thomson, Jane D. Digerness, and Mar Jean S. Thomson:

Benjamin Richard McKinnon was born on 11 November 1897, as the 21st child of Archibald McKinnon, Sr., and the 10th child of Archibald's second-wife, Jane Brough.

His mother, Jane Brough, was polio-crippled as a child in England. When she and her family made the trek to Utah, she was the only one allowed to ride the entire way. Despite having to use a crutch to walk, she always did her work, and there was a lot of it. She taught Benjamin and all his siblings the value of hard-work. One chore he remembers was Jane asked him and his older sister, Phoebe to plaster the chinks between the logs of the two chicken coops, using fresh cow dung. (The manure would dry to form excellent insulation.) Ben and his sister, Phoebe, were in a big hurry, so they gathered the "plaster" into buckets and slung it and smoothed it with their bare hands.

Ben's sisters were all very influential on his life: Sarah was his third-grade teacher; Ada tought him to type and do shorthand in High School; Jane, then acting as secretary to the school board, helped to influence the hiring of her little brothers (Ben - 15-yrs, Ray 12-yrs) to be janitors of the elementary schoolhouse. Ben had the task of maintaining the boilers that provided heat for the school, as well as the pot-bellied stove in the building across the street that housed the first and second grades.

His sister Katherine's influence was perhaps the greatest, in that she made it possible for Ben to study dentistry. An Army nurse during World War I, she married Dr. John Paul McComb, whom she met in France, and they lived near the greatest dental school in the country. She invited Ben to share their home for the four long years.

For his wife's biography of him, Ben recalled, "It cost too much to come home, besides I had to work every day of vacation time. Summers I carried mail, usually two routes a day and six days a week. Christmas time I worked in the Post Office -- often eighteen hours a day. We worked all night and until noon Christmas day, until every piece of mail was dispatched."

Ben graduated from dental school in 1926. He said, "I always prayed that my mother would be all right until I got home."

Upon returning to Randolph, he practiced dentistry in his mother's parlor with a foot-tread dental drill, 1926-27. He had made plans to move to Morgan with his mother when she died suddenly, in September (1927).

By December 1927, Ben was established in his new office in Morgan. Margaret Baker came to Morgan in January, to teach school. It was love at first sight. They were married two years later (4 September 1929), when Ben was thirty-one.

In the spring of 1963, Ben closed his dental office and devoted full time to a mink farm. The 1970's brought retirement from the mink business and farming. Ben spent the 1980's in restful contemplation of his youth and times in Randolph, until his death on 8 February, 1986.