Eulogy for John J Todd

Eulogy means “good words” so I can’t tell you everything I know about Dad; only the good parts. But Dad would not want us to deify him. He would want you to know that he was a sinner saved by grace. Nevertheless, it is appropriate on this occasion that we should single out some of the good characteristics that Dad demonstrated in his life and for which we can take him as a model. I have chosen these five: Determination, Independence, Reverence for God, Sense of Adventure and Sense of Humor.

Determination: When Dad set out to do something, it was wise not to get between him and his goal. I was living with him about eight years ago. He was in his mid-eighties and had recovered from knee replacements and most people in that situation would settle in a comfortable chair in front of the television and coast. Not Dad. He came to me one Sunday evening complaining of utter exhaustion. I asked him if he had done anything unusual that would explain his tiredness.

He said, “Well, you know how I do two hundred sit-ups every day?”

“No,” I replied, “I don’t know how you do it but I do know that you do it.”

“Well,” he went on, “I missed a couple of days this week so I have been trying to catch up. I did four-hundred yesterday and three-hundred fifty today but I don’t think I can do the last fifty.”

“Dad,” I said, “go to bed!”

I’m pretty sure he did the last fifty after I had gone to bed. That’s determination!

Independence: Dad dropped out of high school and trained in the printing industry. He worked in that industry for a few years and printed Yank Magazine in Manila during WWII. But like many discharged soldiers and sailors in 1945, he struggled to find work. One day his landlady, “Mom” Elliott came to him and said, “John, you need work and I need a septic tank; why don’t I hire you to make me one.”

Dad replied, “I don’t know anything about septic tanks.”
Hands on hips, Mom Elliott replied, “John Todd, I’ll have you know that this town has a public library!”

Dad didn’t have anything better to do, so he went to the library and read up on septic systems. He decided that he probably could do it. He grabbed a shovel and started digging a hole and laying brick. Before he finished hooking up her system, Mom Elliott had found two other people who needed that kind of work done. Dad was launched. He eventually built a business out of hard work, integrity and service. At one point he not only installed and repaired septic systems and pumped them, but he manufactured precast concrete septic tanks of his own design along with a number of accessories. He sold off the installation and repair business to a long-time employee, Jim Patterson, in the 70s and lost the manufacturing business (and very nearly lost everything) in the housing bust of the 1980s. But the pumping business has endured all these years and my brother Jack has recently re-launched the installation and repair business. Dad was self-employed from 1945 to November of 2010 when he asked Jack to take over the pumping business. And he lived at home until four days before he died. That’s independence.

God-fearing: Dad’s dad had become a Christian as a young man when he heard the gospel preached on the streets of St. Louis. And Dad followed in that tradition by committing his life to Christ at the age of 14 after hearing the gospel proclaimed at Bible Hall in St. Louis. When I was a small child we were attending Vine Street Assembly over near Washington Park. But Dad wanted to start some kind of outreach to the children living in our Littleton neighborhood. When he built a two-car garage behind our house, he started Friday Night Children’s Meetings in that garage. Using cinder blocks and 2x10 planks, he set up benches and started inviting families to send their children over on Friday nights. He would lead some lively singing, Ken Baird from Boulder Bible Chapel would tell a gospel story while drawing an illustration on paper with chalk. Then each child would be coached through various craft projects and memory verses.

After a few months of Friday Night Children’s Meetings, un-churched parents were coming to Dad and saying, “John, you should start a Sunday School for the kids in this neighborhood.” With little encouragement and some adamant opposition from the elders at Vine Street, Belleview Bible Chapel was born in our living room in about 1953. It soon grew to be bigger than our home could accommodate and we began renting the 4-H building at the Arapahoe County Fairgrounds. Both Littleton Bible Chapel and Parker Hills Bible Fellowship can trace their origins to that humble beginning.

Dad was very committed to bringing children under the sound of the gospel. We always canvassed the neighborhood, inviting kids to Vacation Bible School and to the family summer camp we always held about this time of year at Covenant Heights Bible Camp near Estes Park. I received condolences just this week from a woman about my age who lived across the street from us when she and I were both too young to go to kindergarten. She gives credit to my folks for taking her to Vacation Bible School where she accepted Christ.

Back then, all the Plymouth Brethren Assemblies in Colorado would go together and rent Covenant Heights for a week. Dad loved that family camp venue where whole families would be under good Bible teaching and surrounded by daily fellowship. When he bought a trampoline for us so that we would stop breaking the family beds, he always took it to camp for others to share. He was selected to the search committee that later went looking for property to buy for a camp. That search eventually led to the purchase of what is now Camp Elim.

At one point about ten years ago, Dad told me that he had read the Bible through from cover to cover every year for thirty-five years. If you put God’s word in your heart that faithfully for that long, good will come of it. Dad was a God-fearing man from first to last.

Sense of adventure: Dad wasn’t a wild-man who leaped off of cliffs without thinking about how he would land, but he wasn’t a timid milk-toast, either. He was always interested to see how the developing technology could lead to new sporting adventures. At one stage of his life, it was fishing and how new lures, new rods and new materials for leaders gave him new opportunities to catch mountain trout. Then it was motorcycles and how they could get you to otherwise inaccessible fishing spots. Before there were any light-weight Japanese off-road motorcycles, he was using a heavy Triumph 650 Thunderbird with street tires to get to remote fishing. I caught my first fish after he put me on the little chrome rack on the gas tank and had my brother, John, climb on behind him. With three up, we bounced over logs and splashed through streams in what would later be designated The Lost Park Wilderness Area.

One summer Dad chaperoned the teenagers from camp when they went down to Lake Estes to water-ski. Not all of the teenagers were willing to risk it in such cold water. But Dad plunged in and learned to water-ski. And after that he kept borrowing Roscoe Turner’s aluminum fishing boat to go water-skiing out at the newly finished Cherry Creek Reservoir. Later he bought a boat more suited to the purpose and then we converted a small school bus into a camper to pull it. We started skiing farther from home, out at Jackson Lake near Wiggins and Glendo Reservoir in Wyoming.

When Camp Elim went in the direction of different camp weeks for different age groups, Dad started looking for a family camp with water-skiing. We ended up making an annual pilgrimage to Minnesota where Plymouth Brethren from the midwest gathered on Lake Koronis every year. There we would have good Bible teaching, good fellowship and a “summer Olympics” involving a water-ski tournament. After they saw how we could ski, they always made up the teams as follows: Colorado vs. the rest of the World. We were Colorado and Colorado always won, hands down. I would do slalom, Jack would ski on little shoe-skis that I had made in Junior High shop class and Dad would ski backwards, starting with his head under water.

Water-ski season in Colorado is pretty short and we eventually started snow skiing to make the off season go by quicker. One summer, Dad added parasailing behind the boat to the summer adventures. And eventually riding the trails of Rampart Range on light-weight dirt bikes became a passion.

Dad was born when milk was still delivered by horse-drawn wagons in St. Louis, but he lived well into the twenty-first century and he never tired of the adventure.

Sense of humor: One of my earliest memories was that Dad couldn’t drive past a barnyard animal without rolling down the window and barking, mooing or crowing just to see the animals’ reactions. And he always got a kick out of surprising people. When his grandchildren were little, his main way of interacting with them was to hide where they would not expect him to be and then to jump out with a big roar and make their hair stand on end. When he was 84 and had new artificial knees, he took delight in running up the stairs of this building just to see people with their eyes as big as saucers and their jaws agape. And he loved to tell stories that would catch people out. Though he was a man who stood up for the truth, he didn’t have any qualms about telling an outrageous lie if it might lead to a moment of good-natured laughter. If you were around him very much, he probably caught you out. But he was very hard to catch, himself. But I caught him a couple of times and he had the grace to laugh at himself when I did.

My favorite time occurred when my nephew Ryan got married. When Dad was only eight years old, he had tasted coffee at a friend’s birthday party. He decided he hated coffee. That’s fine; coffee isn’t for everyone.

But over the decades of his life he began to get a little bit arrogant about how virtuous it was of him to avoid coffee. If someone offered him a cup of coffee, he might reply, “Sure, I need to wash my feet,” or some remark about maintaining the purity of his lips.

Well, at Ryan’s reception up in Salida, I was going through the line and found, to my delight, a big bowl of chocolate-covered espresso beans. I put a whole handful of them on my plate and continued through the line gathering other special treats. When I was looking for a table, I happened to pass my dad, who was already seated and eating. Then I knew I had him.

You see, my dad also had a sweet-tooth that would not be denied. So, pointing to the chocolate-covered espresso beans on my plate, I asked, “Hey Dad, did you see these?”

“No,” he replied, “what are they?”

“They’re chocolate-covered cockroaches.”

“Oooh, I’ll try one,” he said. He was, as you will remember, adventurous. So he popped one into his mouth and began to munch. But then he got that look on his face that he so loved to produce on others’ and he spit the treat out into his hand and exclaimed, “COFFEE!!!” Then he laughed with me at the poetic justice of it all.

When Jack and Barry were moving Dad from his home of 46 years just days before he died, they drove him across the Platte River on Mineral Avenue. Dad looked out at the water and said, “Well, fishies, rest easy. You no longer have to worry about me; I won’t be bothering you anymore.”

That, my friends, is a sense of humor, kept to the end.

Summary:

So if you are determined, if you strive for independence, if you fear God and serve him diligently, if you nurture a sense of adventure and keep your sense of humor, you will be following in the footsteps of my dad, John Joseph Todd.