James Michael Oss

James Oss emerged from a hard-scrabble beginning in McAlester, OK. was raised by a birth-father and subsequently two stepfathers before he was a teenager. Jim found purpose, enrichment and love in his nearly 83 years of life by giving out as much of those life-sustaining ingredients as he experienced himself. He passed away peacefully in a rehabilitation center in the Phoenix area Feb. 5 from complications worsened by the onset of pneumonia.

After a somewhat nomadic life with his birth-mother and her three husbands, moving around from the Plains to Washington state and onto the farmscape around Fresno, CA., Jim’s family eventually settled in the Highland Park section of Los Angeles in the mid-1950s when Jim was a 13-year-old eighth-grader at Luther Burbank Junior High School.

The teenage Jim Oss made friends easily – girls and boys – and was known as a good athlete, student, lead tenor voice in the choir, and very hip dancer to fast rock-‘n-roll records. At Franklin High School in Los Angeles, Jim was a two-year starting point guard on the basketball team and a tenor soloist in the award-winning school choir.

From his years in Highland Park, Jim acquired many life-time friends, such as Bob Kilman, Jim Bailey, Dennis Frevik, Linda Pintarell, Diane Martin, Claudia Price, Norris Pratt and Richard Nemec. Later, when he began working at Title Insurance and Trust Co. in downtown Los Angeles, which was one of the largest title companies in the nation back then, he made other lifetime friends, particularly the late Doris and Mike Mady.

Title Insurance Co. opened the world of computers, information technology, and systems analysis to a very young Jim Oss through training that the IBM Corp. offered at that time in the early to mid-1960s, far ahead of the U.S. and global computerization. As a developing IT executive in his early 20s, Jim stayed close to two step-siblings and his mother after his second stepfather, John Brown, a middle-management executive with the Salvation Army, passed away. He became a systems expert and worked at early high-tech companies in the late 1960s-70s.

In the 1960s, He also found time to serve his country as a member of the California National Guard. He was a respected squad leader during his active duty at Ft. Ord in Monterey, CA, before the massive U.S. military buildup for the Vietnam War later in the 60s. Jim’s two older brothers by his mother’s first marriage served in the military, one as a career member of the Air Force and the other, John Martin, as a four-year sailor in the U.S. Navy.

By the 1980s, Jim was a successful IT manager, sometime entrepreneur, and real estate sales professional based in San Diego County. Always a feisty competitor, Jim spent his leisure time playing racquetball, reading, attending the theater and music concerts and gambling for enjoyment, not riches. (Truth be told: Jim never found a slot machine or card game he didn’t like.)

He experienced a serious heart attack in the late 1980s in his mid-40s. Perhaps that and the process of maturing prompted him to seek out a lifetime partner. Whatever the reason, Jim and Matt Kohal, a young engineer from the central valley in California, clicked immediately, and before they were formally married years later, Matt worked for Jim as a contract employee at the Southern California Edison Co. San Onofre Nuclear Power Plant in the coastal north of San Diego County.

Jim and Matt eventually made quite a life for themselves in the San Diego County area and in the nuclear power field. After Edison decided to shut down San Onofre, the pair took their talents to the Valley of the Sun and Phoenix. They signed on with the Palo Verde plant west of the big city, a major nuclear generation plant operated by Arizona Public Service Corp. for a consortium of electricity providers.

Along with Jim and Matt’s big move to the Phoenix area, they expanded their family to include Brandon Elliott from Dallas, whom they had become dear friends with years earlier and Craig Agee, whom they had become close friends with shortly after moving to Phoenix. These two wonderful gentlemen plus the four French Bulldogs they had adopted would serve as the foundation for their forever family.

With their success professionally, Jim and Matt traveled regularly, often with their extended family members Brandon and Craig, visiting Hawaii yearly, as well as foreign and domestic cruises in recent years. It was near the end of a cruise last fall, down the West Coast of the U.S. from Vancouver, B.C. to San Francisco, that Jim experienced a severe pneumonia and heart episode that caused his long-term hospitalization in the last three months of 2025 and into early 2026.

A Hawaiian theme Celebration of Life will be held on Saturday, April 25 at 1 PM at Thompson Funeral Chapel, 926 S. Litchfield Road, Goodyear, AZ.