Last night, my father passed away at about a quarter to midnight. This coming Friday, he would have turned 92. He died on his 63rd wedding anniversary.
Richard Farris "Fritz" Cravens was one of 14 children, 9 of the 11 boys being ministers (and one of the other two a lay preacher). He picked up "Fritz" when fighting with a brother, and an older brother nicknamed them Fritz and Hans (which became Hank) after the Katzenjammer Kids, an early comic strip http://en.wikipedia .org/wiki/ Katzenjammer_ Kids.
My father was converted and baptized in a Free Will Baptist Church, and was at least briefly a licensed minister with them, before being ordained first a Cumberland Presbyterian and then a Southern Baptist minister. For a few years in my childhood, he was a minister in the Assemblies of God before returning to the Southern Baptists. He loved to sing, and was in a gospel quartet in his younger days. His degree from seminary is actually in church music rather than theology. When I was a child, his two standard solos were "How Great Thou Art" and "Great is Thy Faithfulness" , both of which we will sing at the funeral.
May he rest in peace.
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