H. Aldridge Gillespie

H. Aldridge Gillespie is a former member of the Second Quorum of the Seventy and General Authority of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He served in the Church as a bishop, stake president, Regional Representative, and patriarch. He was presiding over the Mexico Tampico Mission at the time of his call to the Seventy in 2000. He was released in 2005 and then served as president of the Oklahoma City Oklahoma Temple until 2009.

He was born on May 22, 1935, in Riverside, California, and reared in Utah. He earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees in civil engineering from Utah State University and his PhD in civil engineering, fracture mechanics, and failure analysis from the University of Arizona. For several years he was a professor at the University of Oklahoma and then director of the Transportation Safety Institute for the US Department of Transportation in Oklahoma City for seventeen years.

He and his wife, Virginia, are the parents of five children.