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BOB MINICK 1925-2009

Bob Minick was born in Oak Grove, Arkansas, in 1925, and died in Rialto, California in 2009. He was one of nine children who spent his childhood alternating between the hard-scrabble Ozarks of Arkansas and the dusty, dry plains of eastern Oklahoma. Raised in a strict Pentecostal family, he began singing in a gospel quartet when he was in his early teens. It was while singing at a Pentecostal camp meeting in eastern Oklahoma that he met Dorothy Abshier from Morrow, Arkansas, who soon became his wife and mother to their four children. During World War II, Minick served as a Conscientious Objector in the Army, becoming a medic at Fort Dix, New Jersey. At the conclusion of the war, he and his wife and their first-born child, Roger, returned to Morrow, Arkansas, where they tried farming for a time, raising chickens, dairy cows and growing alfalfa. A couple of years later, however, he took advantage of the GI Bill and was soon enrolled at John Brown University, a religious school in Siloam Springs, Arkansas, thinking he would become a Pentecostal preacher. During this time he supported his education and growing family––he now had two more children, daughters Mary and Alecia––by building houses and selling them, his family living in each house briefly until the next house was ready to sell. He also had a second job delivering mail for the local post office, assigned to a rural route that took him over washboard gravel roads. In 1953, Minick graduated from John Brown University and, after deciding he might become a teacher rather than a preacher, began commuting to the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville where he majored in education. Before completing his degree, he started teaching high school history in Bentonville, Arkansas (while also pastoring a five-sided cinderblock church he built), and two years later, having stopped preaching, became the principal for a year of a small 12-grade school in Sulphur Springs, Arkansas. It was in the summer of 1956 that Minick and his wife made what they both believed was the most decisive decision of their lives––they moved their young family to Southern California, settling in San Bernardino, where within a week he was carrying mail and was soon teaching history and driver’s training at San Bernardino High School. A year later he and his wife gave birth to their fourth child, Storm, the same year Minick completed his MA in education from the University of Arkansas. Minick taught high school for nearly twenty years, the last five at San Gorgonio High School. Then as the ideas and fervor of the Sixties began to impact on him, he became more and more involved in politics. He was an active member of the Downtown San Bernardino Democratic Club and volunteered much of his spare time to work on various political campaigns in the area, even running for State Assembly himself in 1968, a campaign he lost. In 1971 he met George Brown Jr., who hired him to run his campaign for US Congress in 1972, and when Brown won that race he made Minick his District Administrator, a position he held for most of the seventies and early eighties. It will always be said that Minick was one who never shied away from taking on new projects, and never failed to bring insight, humor and humanity to whatever those endeavors might be. During the mid-seventies he and his wife built a house back in Arkansas with the help of all his children. He became interested in bees and helped his son Storm start a beekeeping business. In 1975, he wrote a compilation of stories based on his youth for the book HILLS OF HOME, a collection of photographs his son Roger made in the Ozarks. It was while working on this book, following a trip back to the Ozarks in 1973, that Minick renewed his love for old-time music and began singing again, accompanying himself on the guitar and banjo. In 1976, Minick and his wife moved to Rialto, CA, and became restaurateurs with their daughter Mary (and briefly Alecia), owning and operating the well-known family-style restaurant, Minick’s Barn. For the last two decades of his life Minick became something of a troubadour, making dozens of appearances in the area as a raconteur, singer and musician. Starting in 2001, he regularly appeared before the San Bernardino County Board of Supervisors dressed in his familiar Bing Crosby hat, seersucker jacket, red and white striped suspenders, Mardi Gras beads, red socks, giving an impassioned speech against some injustice, on one occasion making his point to the Board by playing his banjo and singing a relevant song. Minick was also well-known for his often provocative op-eds that frequently appeared in newspapers throughout Southern California, but perhaps nowhere did he display his passion for story-telling, singing and expressing progressive ideas than at the Monte Vista Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Montclair, CA, where he and his wife were long-time members. His favorite writer over the years and a source of inspiration for much of his philosophy on life was the 19th century free-thinker Robert Ingersoll. Minick was a founding member of the Inland Empire Atheists. In 2004, Minick lost his wife Dorothy of sixty-one years, and then in 2007 his daughter Mary passed away. Bob Minick passed away on July 16, 2009. He is survived by his children Roger, Alecia, and Storm.