Characteristics of a Man

Johnie Baxter was a kind and thoughtful man. In the years just before both I and my sister left home and went off to college we had a little short legged miniature dachshund. Dad always claimed he didn't care for having a dog around the house. But after the two of us were gone from home I returned to find a special platform he had built ... and carpeted ... in the front passenger seat area of his old work car so that Katrinka was able to see out of the car windows as he drove her around town.

He was a gentle and generous man. I never knew him to raise his voice in anger. He spoke ill of no one. He once provided a job on our farm for an unemployed minister during the winter when there was really nothing for him to do other than "make work" projects. When he was peddling watermelons and had just a few left over in his truck, he would stop and give them away to poor families we had never met before in houses along side the road.

He was a sensitive man. During their first move as a married couple he had everything they owned loaded on one horse drawn wagon. That included the three chairs they owned: one for each of them and one for a visitor. Along the way, which wasn't very far - probably less than a mile, one of the chairs fell off and broke. He sat down in the middle of the road beside that broken chair and cried.

He easily came to tears ... at the telling of a touching story ... or at the sight of a lost sinner turning to God for salvation at a church alter. There would be tears in his eyes as he sang a song that was often requested he sing at special church meetings: Does Jesus Care which goes on to say "Oh, yes, He cares! I know He cares! His heart is touched with my grief. When the day is weary, the long night dreary, I know My Savior cares." And you knew that he had felt the pains of living himself ... and had known the peace of trusting in God's love for us.

He was devoted to duty. He would work the extra hour, take the extra step, to make sure the job was done right. He was a true craftsman. While building Earl Nall's house in Naylor he was finishing the final trim work. At the end of the hallway was a closet door. The moulding around that door extended right up to the wall on either side. And on each side the edge of the moulding was going to be forever hidden by the moulding of doors opening into bedrooms on either side of the hallway. The outside edges of that closet door moulding had to be ripped down slightly to make it fit up against the wall properly. That sawed edge was never going to be seen by another human eye until the house is torn down, but he didn't leave it with a rough saw cut edge. He took that trim board to the jointer he had out in the garage to plane the edge smooth, and then it took it back inside the house. But then, before he started to nail in that piece of moulding with the edge that no one else would probably ever see, he noticed a slight bump along the edge caused by a moment's hesitation as he drew the piece across the joiner blades. So to make it good enough to meet his own standard of craftsmanship, he took it back out to the jointer once again. However, this time as he ran the board across the jointer the board tipped and sent his hand into the spinning blades ... and he lost half of his middle finger on his right hand.

As a result of this accident he went back to his job as a carpenter maintenance man in Rockford, Illinois, leaving an unfinished house as just a foundation there in Naylor. That house was the only "spec" house he ever built. All of the others had either been for his own family or as built to order custom houses for other people living in the Naylor area. That is the house that Herschel and Helen Hobbs later bought, but we will get back to the story of that house in a few minutes.

2011-11-27 10:52:41 RBaxter

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

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