How a ‘good man’ found Christ at 80-years-old

How a ‘good man’ found Christ at 80-years-old - A Tribute to my Father
By Mark Ellis, Special to ASSIST News Service
SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA (ANS -- April 3, 2015) -- Recently, my father passed away and is now in heaven.  So during the memorial service for him, I gave the following tribute:
Many of you came to this service because Don Ellis was one of the finest men you knew. I saw the public side of dad and I saw him in private – and there was no difference. He was completely genuine, one of the finest men of his generation – or any generation.
One of the greatest gifts God gave me was to have a father who was a man of integrity.
Dad was born in humble circumstances. His father left his mother for another woman when dad was only seven years old. From that point on, he had very little contact with his father, a big wound for a small boy.
So dad was raised by a single mom, Reta, a schoolteacher in Costa Mesa, California. Her parents lived a few blocks away, so her dad, Howard Cooper, became a father-figure to dad.
This was in the days when Costa Mesa had dirt streets and farm animals might be wandering about. You never knew when a horse might stick its head in your kitchen or bathroom window – and that happened.
Schoolteachers made next to nothing in those days and dad went to work at an early age by necessity. He was a soda jerk at Pink’s drugstore in Costa Mesa. He set pins at the bowling alley in the fun zone on Newport peninsula when that was still done by hand.
One prankster rolled on dad while he was still setting up pins and the ball smashed into dad’s knee, resulting in a weakness in that knee he carried the rest of his life.
MORE (Where you can see my video tribute to him).
Photo captions: 1) Dating at UCLA. 2) My father working at Fallbrook Farm in California.
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