John Lister Ross
(Daddy)
1916-1968
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Daddy was born on December 14, 1916, in Northport, Washington, USA, the third child and only son of John ("Jack") Ross and Elsie May Lister Ross. He lived mostly in Kettle Falls as a little boy, and subsequently in Spokane through high school (his older sister Margie still lives in their mother's old home in Spokane). A couple of poems by Elsie Lister Ross are in La Lilandejo.
He graduated from Spokane's Central High in the mid-year (January) class of 1935, I think. I understand he had a well-off uncle who, despite or perhaps because of the Depression offered to pay Daddy's way through college on condition that he go to Stanford. Leland Stanford, Jr., University turned down his application (I sometimes think my name was his revenge; yet Stanford rejected my application, too) and he went briefly to WSC (now WSU, Pullman), and then Whitworth College (Spokane), before graduating in Metallurgical Engineering from the University of Washington. Where he also met Mommy.
He spent the last couple years of World War II in seminary, getting a BD from Berkeley Baptist Divinity School (now American Baptist Seminary of the West). Then he and Mommy were married (in Seattle) and they went off to Massachusetts, where he did a student pastorate under Rev. Hillyer Straton at First Baptist of Malden while studying for an STM (Master of Sacred Theology) at Andover Newton.
Returning to Washington, I think he was pastor of a couple of churches (maybe one in Tacoma — Grace? — and then a now defunct Calvary Baptist in Seattle) before becoming, in 1953, Director of the Baptist/Disciples Student Center at the University of Washington.
After 14 years in that position, he was given a year's sabbatical leave and took a position as a Visiting Fellow at Waseda University, Tokyo, Japan. He was accredited to Waseda Hoshien, the Christian Student Center there, where he taught English conversation and lectured (in English, with interpretation by Miyabe Sensei) on topics like the American Civil Rights Movement, Harvey Cox's The Secular City, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the Death of God Theology. After 11 months in Japan, we returned to Seattle via the Trans-Siberian Railroad and a drive through northern Europe.
The Japanese sabbatical and the return trip that crowned it were the experience of a lifetime, in more than one sense: a bare three weeks after our return to Seattle, on August 19, 1968, he and Mommy were both killed in a head-on collision in Seattle.