Gary Lynn Campbell

Gary Lynn Campbell, 70, of Columbia passed away Sunday, August 2, 2020 at Boone Hospital. Visitation will be 5:00 p.m.-7:00 p.m. Wednesday, August 5, 2020 at Memorial Funeral Home. Funeral Services will be 10:00 a.m. Thursday, August 6, 2020 at Christian Fellowship Church will burial to follow in Memorial Park Cemetery. In keeping with the guidelines put forth by the Boone County Heath Director all guests are required to wear a mask, to keep social distancing (six feet apart), cough into your sleeve and wash and sanitize your hands often.

Gary was born August 19, 1949 in Tulsa, Oklahoma the son of Charles E. Campbell and Georgene Tedder Campbell. On January 21, 1978 in Albany, Missouri he was united in marriage to Janis Gillespie Campbell who survives.

Gary graduated from Pittsburg State College with a bachelor’s degree in in social work. He had a career with the Department of Mental Health that spanned 30 plus years prior to his retirement. He and his wife were members of Christian Fellowship Church for 25 years before joining The Crossing. He deeply enjoyed bible study through all those years. He enjoyed the outdoors, photography, gardening, animals and his pets. He loved his family and the time he spent with, and captured photos of, his grandchildren.

Gary is survived by his wife, Janis; their children, Bobby (Angel) Campbell, and Heather Campbell; grandchildren, Jack, Conor, and Mia Campbell, all of Columbia; a twin brother, Terry (Susie) Campbell of Colorado; and a host of cousins, nieces and nephews.

Memorials may be made to the Salvation Army or the Columbia Parks and Recreation Department in care of the funeral home.

Terry Campbell, Shares his Remembrance Of Gary and their Younger Years Together

Gary,

Because of the ongoing pandemic, I have decided for health safety reasons not to attend the celebration of life event for my brother, Gary. Although I will not be in attendance physically, I will be so from a distance spiritually. While others may celebrate the adult life of Gary Campbell, I believe I may be in the unique position to speak of his younger life. And if allowed, I will offer an anecdote or two of his younger years.

Gary was born in Tulsa, Oklahoma, nine minutes after I was born. Because he was born after me, one could say he was my younger brother, or little brother as it is often said. However, he was always bigger than me, having the better position in the womb for development. At any rate, the term twin brother is most appropriate.

Although we were not identical twins, our mother treated us as such. Throughout much of our elementary school years, she would dress us alike. If it were not for the wearing of identical clothing, most folks would not have even considered us to be related.

When we were nine or ten years old, Gary and I were asked to stay in the music room classroom after our fourth-grade class was dismissed for lunch. The music teacher wanted us to sing in duet the same song that the entire class had been rehearsing for an upcoming show for parents and relatives of Skyline School, our elementary school. When we had finished, we were dismissed for lunch and nothing ever came of it. It was likely the music teacher thought it would be cute to have the only twins in the school to sing a duet for the show. We failed the audition, apparently. It was also apparent that a career as a singer was not the future for either of us.

During this time, we played baseball (see photos). The idea was initiated by our dad, I believe, because he envisioned us as being professional baseball players. We started playing when we were in cub scouts and the team was sponsored by the Evangelical United Brethren church, of which we were members. Fathers of the players built and maintained the baseball field that we practiced and played on, unique in today’s standards. I was a mediocre outfielder at best, having chosen the position because it was the farthest away from a recently batted and rapidly moving ball. Gary on the other hand was a very good player and was the team’s first baseman. He received the MVP (most valuable player) award every year we played. That award was voted upon by the players and coaches. Beyond that, a career in sports was also not in the future for either of us.

If I may be allowed to throw in another anecdote, I would like to demonstrate that the younger Gary at times could be quite spontaneous. When he was around the age of ten, we were in a sporting goods store buying baseball equipment. Gary spied a hurdle displayed on the showroom floor and suddenly he decided to try out his skills in track and field. He failed to clear the hurdle resulting in the toppling of an entire rack of various sporting goods, including a variety of loose balls. The embarrassment demonstrated by our parents was deep and to the level of utter devastation. For me, it was the funniest thing I had ever witnessed.

Gary has always been one to make friends easily. I think, in part, is because he had a unique talent to make people laugh. Not in a silly clownish way, but rather he had an innate gift that made him likeable. Just thinking of him twitching his mustache still makes me laugh and I don’t know why.

Growing up together, Gary and I were best of friends. We did everything together. We shared the same room of our two-bedroom ranch style house in Roeland Park, Kansas. Most of all and perhaps most importantly in regards of its impact on our lives, was what existed just on the other side of our backyard fence, a natural forest comprised of nearly 110 acres of native trees and shrubs with streams and a rock quarry at the far north end. As kids, we lived in those woods. Our stay-at-home mother (there was not other type in those days), would set us free in the morning to hop over the fence and spend an entire day in the woods. Somehow, as if guided by an internal clock, we managed to return home at five in the afternoon for dinner when our father returned home from work.

We explored every inch of those woods, turning over every rock or log to see what was underneath, or so it seemed. After a close inspection or perhaps extracting what was underneath, we always took care in returning the rock or log to its pre-disturbed state as best as we could with the understanding that this was someone’s home. The most rewarding rocks were those positioned along the stream beds. There, we would frequently collect small sleek dark brown lizards with yellowish stripes and vivid blue tails. We called them Blue-tailed skinks, the ones if mishandled would shed their tails.

Overturned rocks also yielded a variety of insects and bright reddish-orange centipedes. Once, we collected enough centipedes in jars to fill the bottom of our red Radio flyer wagon once we returned to our backyard. Like a scene from a horror movie, the leggy assemblage of arthropods spilled over the sides of the wagon like a living wave and quickly disappeared into the lawn. To us, the scene was not horrendous at all, it was fascinating; however, our neighbors may have had a different experience upon the discovery of the sudden appearance of swift moving crimson colored centipedes in their basements. At the time, we did not realize that bright colors, like those that adorned the centipedes were often Nature’s warning signals. If we had ever been bitten by one of the red centipedes, it left no lasting impression.

We collected lizards, box turtles, snakes, and a variety of insects that include preying mantis, cicadas, and June bugs to mention a few. These animals we would keep as pets for only a day or two thanks to the wisdom of a mother who told us they belonged in their home in the woods (and not in our house). So, we would learn as much as we could about these animals and set them free.

At this point, I would like to present another anecdote concerning a frog. While attending our first boy scout camp out on farmland, I came across a trap in a pond and after reeling it to shore using an attached rope, I discovered it contained a large bullfrog. I brought the frog home with idea of making a pet out of it. However, our mother had other plans for it. I had no place to release it as there were no nearby ponds. Gary offered a solution. He would buy it from me for a quarter, which in a kid’s world in those days was a lot of money. I had no idea what he was going to do with it, but now it was his problem. The next day at school, the student teacher of our sixth grade class announced just before lunch time that during lunch she would be offering a lesson in frog anatomy using a frog kindly donated by Gary Campbell and if anyone wishes to stay during lunch they are welcome to do so. It turned out only Gary, one other student, and me were the only ones in attendance. It seemed Gary had been doing some scheming without my knowledge.

We would lead expeditions with our friends into the woods to show them what goes on there. These kids, boys mostly, either were not so fortunate as to have access to a natural area or whose parents were afraid of the woods. They loved it and they considered Gary and I to be Argonauts, of sort.

We did not have pets, in the traditional sense, growing up. Our family did not own a pet dog or cat. The only pets Gary and I could have were the Green anoles (sold under the name chameleons), Red-eared sliders, guinea pigs, and hamsters sold in the pet section of the local department store, an area we would immediately seek out whenever we accompanied a parent on a shopping spree. The candy counter would be visited later.

Some of my fondest memories with Gary were sorting through our bags of candy following a nightly prowl of the neighborhood on Halloween. Some things he liked and some things I liked, so we spent a great deal of time sorting and trading. He liked Milk Duds and I liked the Almond Joy bars, so a trade would ensue. We both liked Baby Ruth and Hershey’s bars and disliked Bit-O-Honey and Zagnut bars. The peanut shaped candy in both bags went uneaten.

As we grew older, it was natural for us to grow apart as with any siblings becoming individuals. After leaving our elementary school which was around the corner from our house and easily within walking distanced, we traveled by bus to and from Old Mission Junior High School where we attended grades 7, 8, and 9. There, other than homeroom (because we had the same last name) we enrolled in different classes and therefore, started to live separate lives.

Our parents were convinced that to have a complete education, Gary and I were to have training in a music instrument. They were likely unaware of the incident in the music room during fourth grade. So, in seventh grade, we were enrolled in band. Gary chose the snare drum. I am not sure if this was a decision he made from an actual interest in drums or not, but for me the coronet was forced on me. Again, a career in music was not to be for either of us.

We grew further apart in high school, especially when we became more mobile with the aid of a driver’s license. Typical for Gary, he had numerous friends, many of whom I did not know very well. In college, we were roommates in the dorm during our freshman year at Pittsburg State College in Pittsburg, Kansas. Gary was gone much of the time, spending most of his time with his fraternity brothers at the TKE (Tau Kappa Epsilon) house. In college he studied sociology, which came natural for him. I studied biology and chemistry.

Although our interests varied and our lives took different paths as we grew older, the one thing that we always shared was an appreciation of the natural world. This likely was the result of our experiences in the woods. Throughout the years whenever we connected either in person or electronically, we would always talk about the animals that we saw or experiences we had in the woods. The last text that I received from Gary was on May 22, 2020 at 9:55 AM. It included photographs that he took of a bald eagle and a squadron of turtles sunning themselves on a log at Eagle Bluffs, a place he always took me whenever I came to visit.

Gary is going to be missed, not only by his family, but his numerous friends. It is likely that when his grandchildren, in a few years, are asked to write an essay for a college English class assignment as a writing exercise about a tragic event that has occurred in their life, they will write about the loss of their grandfather.

I miss you Gary,

Love,

Terry