Letter: Goodbye to a wonderful friend and great man

Dear Editor:

On Sunday, July 14, 2024, I lost a wonderful friend who was also a loving and caring father, a loving, faithful husband, a person you could count on and a great man who cared deeply about his church and community.

This great American was a humble man who would not brag about his greatness; he just showed it by the example of his life, his family and his accomplishments.

Eugene T. Speller was born in a sharecropper shack on the edge of a cotton field near Pinhook, Missouri. He was a child during the Great Depression. His father had a sixth-grade education. His mother taught grade school with just a 10th-grade education.

Eugene was just a child working in the cotton fields when he would tell others “I’m going to college.” Remember, he was a poor black child working in a cotton field during the depression, yet he is planning on going to college. The men in the field challenged him about that statement. His answer was: “Daddy said I am.”

Eugene didn’t just rise up out of that cotton field and go to college; he eventually became the president of Olive-Harvey College in Chicago, but getting there was not easy.

He attended Lincoln High School in Charleston, Missouri, where he was the only male in his class. And getting there wasn’t easy either. He had to walk to East Prairie, Missouri, take the Shoe Factory bus to Charleston, and walk to the high school. No yellow bus picked him up on the corner.

After high school, he went to Michigan State University while working three jobs and studying hard. Later John Deere hired their first black engineer without ever meeting him. They did so on the strength of his letter, resumeand phone call. He was very successful at John Deere. Later, he was told they were very glad they did not know he was black when they hired him or they would not have done so.

All because “Daddy said I am.” The power of a father on a child’s future!

Eugene’s wife, Thelma, was a member of a founding family of Smith Chapel Methodist Church in Sunset. I met Eugene and Thelma when I was the pastor of that church in the late 1990s. We became fast, close and enduring friends.

I walk in his shadow, and I will miss him.

God bless.

Harry Sharp

Sikeston, Missouri