JOHN BURDETTE CHARLES Sr.

JOHN BURDETTE CHARLES SR., 95, passed away on Monday, July 28, 2014, at Woodview Healthcare nursing home, in Fort Wayne where he had lived since 1999. He was a former Fort Wayne and Bluffton public school teacher and minister in the Unitarian Universalist and Disciples of Christ denominations. With deep family roots in Steuben County, John, born in Metz, Ind. in 1918, was valedictorian and a star basketball player at Orland High School, from which he graduated in 1937. He received bachelor's and master's degrees from Butler University in 1941 and 1942, and a Bachelor of Divinity degree from Yale University in 1945. He served as a minister in Disciples of Christ churches in Youngstown, Ohio; Niagara Falls, N.Y.; and Pontiac, Ill. and a Unitarian Universalist church in Waltham, Mass. After changing careers to public school education, the career path of his father, brother and sister, he continued in active status for many decades as a Unitarian Universalist minister and as a member of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Fort Wayne. Always interested in working with youth groups in the ministry, he began his public school teaching career at Central School in Bluffton, and then spent most of it in the Fort Wayne Community Schools, where some of the schools in which he taught were Indian Village, James Smart, St. Joseph Central, and Northcrest. He also was a recreation director for many summers the Fort Wayne parks, supervising activities at Packard, Weisser and Psi Ote Parks and Bass Playground. In the latter years of his working life, he was well known to many as an award-winning greeter-guard at the Fort Wayne Coliseum Road Kmart store. He was a resident of the Indian Village neighborhood in Fort Wayne for nearly 40 years. He is survived by his son, John Burdette Charles Jr. of Reston, Va. His 21-year marriage to Dorothy Leah Gantz Charles ended in divorce. Neither remarried, and she preceded him in death in 2012. No funeral or memorial services will be held. Arrangements by D.O. McComb & Sons Foster Park Funeral Home, 6301 Fairfield Ave. Private burial is in the family plot at the South Metz Cemetery at his birthplace of Metz. In lieu of flowers, the family requests any gifts in his honor be made to his favorite charity, the Unitarian Universalist Service Committee, PO Box 808, Newark NJ 07101-0808.