Thor's Day: Gone to meet Jesus

Self-portrait

In Memoriam Vernon DeWayne Voss

By Morris Dean

Two weeks ago today – that is, on Thor’s Day – my cousin Vernon DeWayne Voss passed away, in Tucson, Arizona. It was June 18, the week after he and his doctor decided to discontinue chemotherapy, and the day after he entered hospice. Some of you will remember him from June 18 last year’s Wednesday Voice interview (“Vernon DeWayne Voss on killing cancer naturally”), or from his own July 22 Tuesday Voice column, “In editorial cartoons: Drawing right conclusions,” featuring a few of his political and religious cartoons.
    He had learned in November 2013 that he had cancer. Declining radiation and chemotherapy all through 2014, he went on as usual, including doing his cartooning (as the dates on many of the cartoons shown at the bottom of today’s column attest).
    But in August he emailed me: “I’ve been too worn out to do any drawings this week…No matter what my outcome, God is good all the time.”
     September: “I still have to use a cane to get around. I have my good days and my bad days. Due to all the different medicine I’m taking, sometimes I’m just kind of zoned out for an hour or two during the day. But, God is still good.”
     October: “I’ve been too worn out to do any drawings this week.” And later that month, from his wife, Carolyn: “We are not afraid, shaken, or hopeless. Our trust in Jesus remains strong. He is Vern’s Source and Healer. He and only He brings healing, with or without meds.”
     November: “I haven’t felt like drawing, as this cancer has been giving me fits. I’m not complaining, God is still good!”
    After that, I heard from him directly no more. Carolyn fills us in on Vern's final months:

By the end of 2014, his quality of life had greatly diminished and he had lots of pain, including in his bones. He had a CT scan in January 2015, an MRI in February. His doc talked to him and said he thought that going on chemo would help his pain and give him better quality of life. Vern submitted to it and his first chemo treatment was on February 20. His bone pain gradually seemed to go away, and his PSA count came down a little.

    The week following his chemo treatment on May 22, Vern was very sick, and when he went in the following Friday (May 29), his doc said his body was too weak to take chemo that day. He was to have started back up on June 12, but when the day arrived Vern and his doc agreed that that was it, he would take no more treatments. Everything was bad and wasn’t improving.
    Toward the end, Vern prayed that Jesus would take him to Heaven. I find great comfort in knowing he is with Jesus.

Vern and I  were childhood playmates first, in the country a few miles east of Tulare, California. After the war, my father worked for a rancher named Porter Sanders, to whom Dad had been introduced by Vern’s father, my mother's brother Vernon, and I believe that Uncle Vernon still worked for Mr. Sanders also. Dad moved us to Petaluma in 1948, but when we returned to Tulare, in 1955 – to share live with my Uncle Leo Voss – Vern and I were able to fraternize again.
    At about the time Vern re-entered my life, he also entered the life of his future wife, Carolyn Scroggins. As she recounts:

Vern and I knew each other as kids. My sister [Lois Ladeen] and her husband [Paul Smith] pastored the [Assembly of God] church that Vern and his family attended in Exeter. I would spend a couple of weeks in the summer with my sister and of course go to church. We went to Vern’s house one of those times, and he drew cartoons to entertain me.

    Vern— Vern went by his middle name in those days, so…DeWayne was in the 7th grade at Central Junior High School in 1955-56, I was in the 8th. My mother and I (and sometimes my father) would go to that church in Exeter, usually riding with Uncle Leo. (Exeter was northeast of Porter Sanders’s ranch; DeWayne had been born in Exeter.)
    DeWayne and I made posters for Sunday School. Already was a talented cartoonist, and religion figured in his art from the start. He would invite a few children from the neighborhood over to his place and we would play “tent revival” – DeWayne taking the role of the preacher, of course. He was as gifted an orator as he was a cartoonist. Even then, DeWayne seemed to be larger than life – larger, anyway, than the size to which life has a way of confining a person.
    Our fraternity was to last for only a year. Let Carolyn resume:

The next time I saw Vern was in Arkansas, in 1961, the year he graduated [from high school]. I was with my family and we were visiting my brother. Vern and I went on our first date. He was 18, I was 14. From then we began to write. We were engaged in November 1966 and married on August 12, 1967.

    Yes, Uncle Vernon and Aunt Lorene moved themselves and DeWayne to Arkansas, where our families had their roots (more than one set of relatives had moved back, not feeling quite comfortable in California). In an email last August, DeWayne reminded me of their migration:

If you remember, when you went into high school, I was elected student body president to follow you. I don’t know if that had ever happened before (two cousins). Of course my parents moved to Arkansas, and I was unable to serve my term.

In that one year when we were both in Tulare, DeWayne and I also played chess and even boxed a bit. That little bit of pugilism may have been the last boxing I ever did (I had done some with the Mogel brothers, Ted and Richard, in Petaluma), but it wasn’t DeWayne’s last go in the ring. He joined the Marines in 1962. Last August he sent me the pictures below, taken when his troop went over by ship to Vietnam in August 1965. “This boxing match,” he wrote, “took place on the troop-carrying ship USS Bexar.” [Click a photo to enlarge it.]

“I’m in the front to the right.”

“Pounding my opponent’s chin”

“Breaking his nose”

“I won by TKO in the second round."

    DeWayne told me that his company operated in the jungles east of Phu Bai and Hue, Vietnam, and he was in 15 different combat engagements with the Vietcong while serving as a Marine Corps sergeant.

    I had seen him at the Yale football game at Princeton in 1961, when he was in an FBI training program in Washington. Somehow we didn’t connect prior to the game, and I found him waiting outside the gate after the game. I was struck by his apparent lack of concern about the mix-up, but I felt terrible about it. We went to a bar and visited with each other for about half an hour before I had to leave to get my ride. The time was too short.

DeWayne may have been a warrior, but our cousin Billy Duvall (whose mother was also a Voss) remembers DeWayne’s “kind heart for all and wonderful sense of humor.”

On a visit sometime around 1960 to his home in Oppelo, Arkansas, while the adults slept, DeWayne whispered, “Billy Charles, we need to make a safety check of the house.” After we got out of bed and onto the floor, he told me to hold on to his big toe. Then we proceeded in the dark to crawl around the house to make sure no one had left on any burners or anything. This was my first encounter with the absurd, many years before I ever heard of Camus.

    Billy’s reference to “the absurd” may be pertinent to the fact that DeWayne loved corny jokes. Billy’s son André, who of course didn’t meet DeWayne until many years later, on one of DeWayne’s visits to Arkansas in the nineties, has “several memories of DeWayne’s cheerful disposition. I was a sucker for corny jokes, and he was full of them. Here’s one joke I vividly remember him telling:”

A man received a parrot for his birthday. The parrot was fully grown, with a bad attitude and worse vocabulary. Every other word was an expletive. Those that weren’t expletives were, to say the least, rude. The man tried hard to change the bird’s attitude and was constantly saying polite words, playing soft music, anything he could think of to try and set a good example. Nothing worked. He yelled at the bird and the bird yelled back. He shook the bird and the bird just got more angry and more rude.
    Finally, in a moment of desperation, the man put the parrot in the freezer. For a few moments he heard the bird squawk and kick and scream. Then suddenly there was quiet. Not a sound for half a minute. The man was frightened that he might have hurt the bird and quickly opened the freezer door.
    The parrot calmly stepped out onto the man’s extended arm and said, “I believe I may have offended you with my rude language and actions. I will endeavor at once to correct my behavior. I really am truly sorry and beg your forgiveness.”
    The man was astonished at the bird’s change in attitude and was about to ask what had made such a dramatic change when the parrot continued, “May I ask what the chicken did?”

    André comments: “I’m sure that this version has small deviations from the way DeWayne told it, but it’s quite accurate in content as best I can remember (and I do remember DeWayne’s voice and demeanor).”

Billy tells of another adventure with DeWayne, this one out of doors:

On a visit to Grandma Voss’s home in Hector, Arkansas [also sometime around 1960], Dewayne suggested we go fishing in a very small creek in her back pasture. I didn’t know there could be any fish in such a small creek. He took some small straight pins and made them into tiny hooks to which he attached some thread. He then attached the thread to some small twigs, about 10ʺ long. We then proceeded to the creek.
    After a while we found a few minnows swimming in a small pool. We then attached a small piece of an earthworm to the hooks, dropped them into the water, and soon had our catch. We took them back to the house and fried them on the stove and had a delicious small meal.

Our cousin Lisa Duvall Carter (Billy’s younger sister) is another who remembers “my always entertaining cousin DeWayne”:

Just days before he passed on, I had been thinking of the time he was pantomiming to an Elvis Presley record, “I want to be free like a bird in a tree,” and he was smiling and pointing out the window. (I believe it was 1962 because we had been discussing Marilyn Monroe dying.) Then Billy showed me Carolyn’s e-mail that said: “…Vern is free, free, free....” I will think of his spirit and energy soaring and free....

The following obituary was read at his Celebration of Life event on June 24:

Vernon DeWayne Voss was born in Exeter, California, on May 23, 1943. His parents took him to a small Assembly of God church from birth. He lived in Tulare, California, through 7th grade before moving to Arkansas in 1956. Upon graduating high school in 1961, he went to work for the FBI in Washington, DC, for one year.

    In 1962, he joined the US Marine Corps. He spent the first two years in the Mediterranean Sea aboard the USS Canberra, a heavy cruiser, guided-missile flagship. His third year was spent at Camp Pendleton, California, with the 1st Recon Battalion. His fourth and final year was spent in Vietnam with the 3rd Recon Battalion, during which time he was awarded the Bronze Star with Combat ‘V’ for bravery under fire on multiple occasions. He was honorably discharged in 1966.
    While attending Southern California Bible College (now called Vanguard University), he married Carolyn on August 12, 1967. He then went to work for his dad’s hay trucking business. From there, he started working for the Madera City Fire Department in 1971. In 1975, he moved to Greeley, Colorado, to work in the on-site fire department for the Eastman Kodak Company. There, he attended the First Assembly of God, where he taught classes and served on the board.
    After leaving Kodak, he started up his own business, a cinnamon roll shop in the Greeley Mall. When this store, as well as a few other employment ventures did not prove successful, he was miraculously re-hired by Kodak in 1991 (when they were not hiring externally). He worked for Kodak an additional 11 years before retiring in 2002.

    Vern and Carolyn then moved to Tucson, Arizona. The first church they attended was the Victory Assembly of God. They were hooked and, even though they were away from their kids, they knew this was where God had placed them. His time here was truly blessed because of his growth in love of God, faith, and ministry, as well as gaining eternal friendships.
    Vern was thankful for loving Christian parents who raised him to love the Lord. He was saved at a revival when he was 11.
    Vern was proud to serve as a Marine and fight for his country in Vietnam.
    Vern was blessed by God:

• to have married the girl that captured his heart from childhood,
• with two sons who have grown into wonderful men of God, husbands, and fathers,
• with two great daughters-in-law and five special grandchildren,
• with good friends throughout his life.

    Vern was preceded in death by his sister [who died in infancy], mother, father, and a grandson.
    Vern is survived by:

• his wife, Carolyn, of Tucson, Arizona,
• his son Darin and his wife, Carla, and their daughter, Brooklyn, of Greeley, Colorado,
• his son Matt and his wife, Christie, and their sons, Cameron, Maddox, and Carson, of Olathe, Kansas, and
• many other extended family and friends.

Vern had such passion for life, such natural grace. He was always courteous. He was faithful, kind, of good cheer. He was valiant. I will remember this beloved cousin until I can remember no longer.
    Carolyn says that their sons – especially Matt, who is on his church’s technical staff – put together this slideshow to honor their dad [5:56; full-screen is allowed]:

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Selected cartoons. I didn't use any of these as Friday Fish, nor did any of them appear in Vern's Tuesday Voice column. [Click an image to enlarge it.]

Religious cartoons (some with a political slant):

Political cartoons:

Copyright © 2015 by Morris Dean