Eulogy

How do you condense nearly 90 years of living into a few words?

I can only tell you what I knew of Johnie E. Baxter ... and what I learned from him.

Many of you knew him longer than I. Two of you knew him as your brother. One knew him as husband. Two of us knew him as father. Many knew him as fellow Christian. Many, many more knew him as their friend.

You would often see him with a tooth pick in his mouth. And sometimes on a job site it would just be a splinter of wood that he was chewing on.

For almost all of the first third of his life he lived and worked within approximately 12 miles of his final resting place in the Buncomb community roughly halfway between Naylor, Missouri, and Corning, Arkansas. For about a dozen of those years he went to school, got married, farmed, ran saw mills, and lived within about one mile surrounding his grave. The last half-dozen of those years were spent in Corning building houses, hauling gravel, and doing concrete work. You can still to this day see his name stamped into the sidewalk at the northeast corner of the courthouse in Corning.

During the middle third of his life he mainly lived and worked as a maintenance carpenter at a factory complex in Rockford, Illinois. While there he built four houses. For about six years in the middle of that time he moved his family back to Naylor, Missouri. He spent his time there farming cotton, soybeans, wheat, corn, cantaloupe, and watermelons, doing concrete work including floors and bridge supports, and building ten houses in the Naylor, Missouri, area.

The last third of his life was spent in retirement: first back in Naylor where he built another house and made custom cabinets for others in the area; and lastly in Granville / Mark, Illinois, just down the street from his two grandchildren, where he built three more houses - the last one when he was 83 years old.

2011-11-27 10:46:38 RBaxter

See additional information on the Individual Data Info Page for Johnie Elvin Baxter.

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