David Oglesby

By John G. Taylor

Most got it wrong, the folks sizing up David Carl Oglesby, including me.

There was the youngster who eyeballed him – “Look, Mom, a plain old man.”

Thus did a skinny, snow-crowned 6 foot 5 Georgia pine find concealment behind a humble email handle – DPlainOldMan.

When I became the Fresno Bee’s religion reporter in 1989, I thought David neatly checked boxes.

A flair for writing, shown in letters to the editor. Newly retired with time to explore, and optimistically eager.  An old school, live-the-Bible California Southern Baptist conservative.

He’d be predictable and meet deadlines, both must-haves as I hunted diverse believers who’d write brief replies to weekly questions I’d conjure, like: “How do you know there is/isn’t a God?”

David was delightfully quirky.

His phone messages: “John, when you have a moment.” No topic, no name.  No better way to disarm me into calling back.

Handwritten notes: Over the years, his signoff changed from David to “Barnabas,” from the Bible, meaning encourager, mentor, someone helping you think through problems.

David stood apart, like the Alps, but somehow looked you straight in the eye. His invariably twinkled.

I imagined he was his own landmark, standing watch aboard the USS Windsor during Pacific combat including 12 general quarters during eight hours awaiting World War II kamikazes.

Time stood still when we talked baseball.

His California team was the Oakland A’s. He was disgusted when homer-masher Jason Giambi jumped to my New York Yankees.

He relished Oakland’s strikeout expert, Barry Zito, whom he emphatically pronounced as “Zee-toe.”

He employed Civil War-ish respect – his family fought for the Stars and Bars – in referring to the Yankees as “your boys.”

Brooklyn smart-aleck sparring with self-proclaimed Georgia backwoodsman.  

He’d chastise me for abusing the creator’s name when I used ‘Gawd!’ in a story. When miffed he'd threaten to give “Hail Columbia!”

He sat with my family when my reporting was honored by the Islamic Public Affairs Council. I was at his table when the California Southern Baptists recognized his service as business manager and volunteer at its Jenness Park Camp in Sonora.

In a 20-year friendship, we lived “man plans, God laughs.”

There was my divorce and then a new marriage. And there was David and his wife Jo, the starlight of his life and mother of their two children, coping with her newly discovered and progressing Alzheimer’s disease.

He prayed to embrace what he could not understand. The nursing care he eventually got Jo from Medi-Cal left him stripped of assets and dignity.

How could government and churches, institutions they had served for decades, fail them in their neediest hours?

“Old age is not for sissies,” he’d say.

This is from a column I wrote for the Clovis (CA) Independent:

“David Oglesby wears an anxious smile and a crisp white shirt, sitting on a creaky chair during a stifling Sunday morning in a Clovis house where wheelchair ramps are everywhere.

“In the silky swallow of a Georgia accent, this retired Southern Baptist minister reminds his tiny audience, including six women dozing in the swamp of Alzheimer’s disease, that he’s as weary and waiting to meet his maker as they are.

“He then unfurls a scriptural message of hope before nudging a hymn from a tape recorder. I stab at singing “This Old House,” wholly alien to my Roman Catholic upbringing. My healthy and hymnal knowledgeable Protestant wife, Judy, worships next to me. I look at her, wondering how I could grapple with the test of love that has wrapped itself around David.”

A renewed David was unfolding.

As his focus narrowed to visiting Jo and staying healthy for her, he increasingly scolded political malpractice, community indifference and institutional religion’s “my way or the highway” self-centeredness.

“We know the price of everything and the value of nothing,” he said.

“We in our churches are still selling fire insurance when we should be telling people about life insurance – the better way to live through Christ.”

His benchmarks: Everyone is worthy of respect. Disagree without being disagreeable.

David believed governments should give tax breaks to homeowners who build porches – places to hobnob and build relationships -- but only if they excluded electrical outlets for distracting gadgetry.

Whenever we talked, the radio and TV were silent.  He always wanted to know what life was like in my shoes.

His humor was delicious. Tired of being asked about his health, he created a song for his answering machine, titled, “I Feel Fine.”

He shunned any heaven where his rocking chair awaited – There’s work to do here. I want God to send me back.

He completed his uplifting book of essays, titled, “A ‘Plain Ol’ Man’ Looks at Life, Death and Immortality.”

Crisp and heartfelt, he thanked those who gave him candy when his singing voice failed, and especially a red-headed sailor whose hand suddenly appeared to rescue David when he lacked the strength to pull himself aboard after ship painting.

“Let the spirit of God shine through you today is my prayer for you and me,” he exhorted. “Preach Christ at all times. As a last resort, use words.”

I visited him in hospitals and rehab places as he reached his goal of caring for Jo until she left on eternity’s road, and awaited the arrival of his “silent ship.”

I left a plate of my wife Judy’s buffalo chip cookies, his favorites, at his bedside at the Fresno Armenian Home just before he passed in 2007 at age 87, three years after Jo.

I will treasure our epic pilgrimage, a triple-A Fresno Grizzlies game in the early 2000s.

It was a hike from the parking garage, like walking with a man on stilts. Instead of arriving as batter’s box chalk was laid -- we loved pre-game rituals -- we got there with men on base in the top of the first.

There was no easy mashing his buffet of arms and legs into a pizza-sized seat behind home plate. With a beaming smile, soft Georgia drawl and his back to the action, David apologized to the handful of early arrivers for blocking their views.

Meanwhile, baseball bestowed a blessing as rare as courtesy honks in San Francisco. As David settled, I told him he’d just missed a triple play.

He gave it a nod. Showing good manners to a smattering of strangers transcended that moment, affirming something he wrote:

“How God brought us to this place in life is His business. What we do with the ‘here and now’ should be our concern.”