John Henry Bassarear

John Henry Bassarear slipped away quietly on February 11^th to be with our mom in time for Valentine’s Day after being separated for 16 long years. He was born August 2, 1924 in Waterloo, IA to Clarence Ralph Victor Bassarear and Nina Cora Stewart. His dad was a traveling salesman for Standard Oil and the family lived all over Iowa!

Dad enlisted in the army in 1943 and was a forward observer with the 285th Field Artillery Battalion in WWII. He is a survivor of “The Massacre at Malmedy”, which occurred on the 2nd day of the “Battle of the Bulge”. His battery (roughly 120 men) ran into a German tank column who had been instructed to proceed quickly towards the fuel depot on the coast, which they hoped to capture, and to not slow down to take prisoners.  The soldiers expected to be taken as POWs after the Nazis relieved them of their winter coats and everything else they could. The GIs were all gathered in a field when the Germans sprayed the entire battery with machine-gun fire. Afterwards, they walked among the Americans and killed any survivors with a shot to the back of the head.  Dad only survived because other GIs bigger and bloodier fell on top of him. Fewer than 30 men escaped. They continued to lay there for several hours playing dead while the rest of the tank column passed by, shooting into the GIs for sport. He is our hero for his service but also for being the outstanding man he was while shouldering that PTSD for the rest of his life. He refused to share his story until he went on Utah’s first “Honor Flight” when he was 90 years old.

After the war, he married our mom, Rogena Mae Chadwick, on June 19, 1948 in Des Moines, IA. They were married for 56 years. Dad was world-renowned in the mining industry as a metallurgist, helping design/improve the way to process copper ore around the world.  Dad worked for National Lead, Foote Mineral, Cyprus Pima Mines, and retired as a vice president from Fluor Mining and Metals. After graduating from the Colorado School of Mines in Golden, CO, like his father before him, moved all over the country with his young family and lived in Great Falls, MT; Tahawus, NY; Knoxville, TN; Tucson, AZ; Tonopah, NV; Bishop, CA; and whew! back to Tucson, AZ for nine years. Once the kids left the nest, he and Mom lived in Half Moon Bay, CA; Manteca, CA; Park Rapids, MN; Sun City, AZ and finally in 2000, moved to St George, UT.  Dad moved up to Bountiful, UT in 2013, and said St George was the longest he’d ever lived in one house in his life!

He was named the Distinguished Alumni from the Colorado School of Mines in 1985, and received numerous other awards from The American Institute of Mining Engineers (AIME). He happened to be the keynote speaker at a mining conference in Vina Del Mar, Chile while Jennifer was serving as a missionary there. (In the obscure little town of Rancagua, Chile, someone looked at Jennifer’s name on her missionary tag and asked if she happened to be related to John Bassarear. When she replied, well, yes, as a matter of fact he’s my dad, she found out what a rock star Dad really was!)

When we lived right next to the mines about 20 miles south of Tucson (in one of only four houses for miles around), we had an idyllic childhood. Dad taught us all how to shoot .22s, we picnicked in the desert washes, flew kites and model airplanes, raced around the 4-house neighborhood in a go-cart, and if we were lucky, we got to cross some of the flooded washes in one of the 120-ton mining trucks, with tires 10 feet high! During our four years there, we saw scorpions, tarantulas, Gila monsters, black widow spiders, rattlesnakes, a coral snake, and poor Mom was the only one ever bitten by a scorpion- twice!!

He was passionate about Barbershop music.  He joined a chapter everywhere we lived, and sang in two different choruses that finished in the top 10 in the international competition (The Smokyland Chorus in Knoxville TN and The Peninsulaires in San Francisco). Since he was a baritone (who just fill in the notes that the other three in the quartet aren’t singing), we thought he was a little tone deaf as he sang around the house… If you were talking to Dad and happened to say the word “sweetheart”, he would sing out “Let Me Call You Sweetheart”, having a line to sing from just about any song he knew in barbershop music. He sang and whistled our whole childhood, and we traveled to more than a few competitions around the country as our family vacation. (“The Music Man” was his favorite movie, and with modern technology he was able to watch it over and over again.)

While living in Tucson, our parents took us as children to nearly every national park in the west. Our favorite memories are camping in Yellowstone, and especially in Yosemite in the Sierra Nevadas.  Dad was so relaxed and happy when we were camping, and he saved us from more than a few bear encounters! (Side note: our mom always said “I try to be a good Christian woman because my version of hell is camping forever…” Can you imagine these days putting four kids (and probably a dog), a few coolers, food for a week, and a tent the size of a small apartment in a station wagon?!

Dad always loved baseball. When he was in New York, he played shortstop on the community team. His one claim to fame was batting against future Hall of Fame pitcher Johnny Padres who was “barnstorming” in the area in pick-up games.  Dad said he was so scared of Padres’ fastball that he just stuck his bat out, and hit a home run! He was also proud that while waiting to return to the states from Europe, he pushed the Commanding Officer to have the engineers level out a ball diamond for them.  He rounded up the equipment and then, just days before their first game, he learned he was shipping out to come home.

(He also got a shooting range put together for all the guys who worked under him in New York. He was always the one to take the bull by the horns when there was a project he thought would benefit someone else.) The last eight years he and Jennifer attended many a ballgame watching the Salt Lake Bees play.  He was nearly blind but he always told people that Jennifer was his “Vin Scully” and he could enjoy the game with her narrating it. He had the honor of throwing out the first pitch during a military weekend game, and leading the crowd in singing “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” from his seat during the 7^th inning stretch. (When he continued to climb the 30-40 steps up to his seat when he was 94, and people continually telling him there was an elevator, he gave them a mischievous smile and said, “elevators are for 95 year olds”…)

He was a top-notch golfer and played at every opportunity. After he retired, he had TEN holes-in-one, the first two coming on the same hole, one week apart! He also volunteered with Junior Golf through the Elks and made many clubs at his home for family and friends.

He took up sailing when we were younger and named his first little sail boat “Baby Doll”, because that’s what he always called our mom. A friend loaned him a 28’ sailboat while the friend was on assignment out of the country.  He sailed often in Arizona at Parker Canyon Dam, Apache Lake, Lake Pleasant, and once nearly got swept away in the strong currents in the Pacific Ocean! (Steve and Dad were camping overnight in the bigger sail boat once, and listened to the radio when “Secretariat” won the triple crown in horseracing.)

He also loved fishing and asked us to put in his obituary that he once caught a 28” pike!  He was always relaxed once we got on the water. Steve was his fishing buddy when they both lived in Minnesota. He and Steve enjoyed many trips to the Boundary Waters in Minnesota when he was in his 70s. They carried their canoe over their heads (42 lbs), from portage to portage, with full backpacks on, looking for another “hot” fishing hole. This required several trips to move all their gear to the new spot. The rest of us were a little worried about it being too much exertion for Dad. We magnanimously told Steve that if Dad were to die on a Boundary Waters trip, we would be okay with it. Steve responded by saying HE wouldn’t be okay if Dad died on one of their trips because HE would have to be the one to string Dad up in a tree to save him from bears while HE hiked to get help! Tom went with them on two of their trips and enjoyed it very much.  On another fishing trip years ago in Patagonia, AZ, Steve was in the front of the boat. He threw his pole behind him to cast his line out and hooked Dad’s hat which went flying over the front of the boat! When he looked back, he said Dad’s eyes were as big as saucers! Now, our dad did not “suffer fools” lightly, and we were always especially grateful when he found the humor in one of our more “stupid” moments. Sometimes he found the humor when he may have been the fool- such as stepping out of the canoe and tipping over like a scuba diver onto his back end.

Mom was a special woman, and had such a calming influence on him.  It was hard for her to move to a new town every few years or so while we were growing up, especially when they moved to San Francisco after the kids had flown the coop. It’s tough to meet other moms where you’re no longer involved in carpool, scouts, PTA, or sports’ teams. Dad had just been promoted to vice president and sometimes was gone weeks, and once in awhile months in China, Peru, Japan, Australia, etc. But she endured it bravely and made the best of it- just like many other supportive spouses from that generation.  She had a wicked sense of humor and was incredibly wise; but she still didn’t see why 2 + 2 couldn’t be five…

Dad was raised as a Methodist and Mom as a Presbyterian. Shortly after they were married, Mom converted to Catholicism. Our parents wanted us all to choose our own religious paths, and willingly dropped us off if we wanted to try out one of our friends’ church services. And all four of us chose different paths! (Mom was thrilled when Tom announced he was going to marry Yvette, who was Jewish; she said “isn’t this marvelous? I NEVER thought we’d have a Jew in the family!”)  Case in point: Tom converted to Buddhism when he was in the Peace Corps in Nepal as a young man; Steve is non-denominational but strongly believes in God; Elizabeth became a Catholic, and Jennifer converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints
(commonly known as “the Mormon Church”). When Tom’s two kids had their bar mitzvahs in New Hampshire, Mom was not healthy enough to travel there. Tom asked if she would be willing to write a letter to Emily to be read during the bat mitzvah. So the rabbi said “we will now hear a letter for Emily from her Grandma Gena”. Jennifer stood up and read, “Dear Emily, here I sit, the Catholic grandmother, writing a letter at the request of my Buddhist son, to be read at his Jewish daughter’s bat mitzvah, by her Mormon aunt.” That pretty much says it all about how we were raised, and she made sure we respected each other’s beliefs, which we still do after all these years!

The folks moved to St George, UT in 2000 where they enjoyed four beautiful years living in the desert surroundings which they both loved so much. Devastated when our mom died of colon cancer in 2004, it was a few years before he could even mention her name without crying. The year before she died, she chastised him for not even knowing how to boil eggs, and made him sit through her cooking lessons on how to make all his favorite foods. And he turned into a fabulous chef! Good food was never enjoyed by any man more than our father did.

Dad was fiercely proud of all of his children’s accomplishments, and the people they had become, and wanted to list them alllll here, but we finally convinced him that those would probably be better in OUR obituaries….

Dad was losing his vision from macular degeneration a little more each year, until this last year when he was almost completely blind. For a man who read 3-4 books a week, it was tough. But “that was life”, and no use complaining about it.  He received such wonderful care at the VA Hospital in Salt Lake. They treated him like a king and reminded him that he deserved all of it.

He should have been killed two other times during the war, and once in a mining accident where the drilling had collapsed right after he got out, and yet once more when heavy machinery fell right next to him in a ball mill. So along with that and the blindness, being almost deaf, failing kidneys, liver disease, and Type 2 diabetes for over 20 years, it was finally congestive heart failure that took him. We’re so grateful that it was only 48 hours since he started to fail until the time of his passing.

He is survived by four children: Tom (Yvette) Keene, NH; Steve (Cindy) Cedar City, UT; Elizabeth, Combermere, Ontario, Canada; and Jennifer, Woods Cross, UT. Also, survived by five grandchildren: Emily (Christian); Josh (Amy), Michael (Samantha); Karmeen James, and Anita James; and one great-grandchild Olivia whom he loved. He was preceded in death by his wife, Rogena; his parents; three siblings: Gyvonne Bassarear, Guinevere Morris, and James Bassarear; and nieces and nephews.

In lieu of flowers, please consider donating to tinytimstoys.org. Dad spent the last four years, before Covid, working one day a week putting the wheels (while blind) on toy wooden cars for children in Africa. It was a great joy to him and such a wonderful and worthy cause. Their guiding philosophy is “what’s the price of a smile?” He found great satisfaction in handing out these precious little cars (painted beautifully by the inmates at the prison in Gunnison, UT) to any child he came across.

Also, so much gratitude to Legacy House of Bountiful who cared for him for seven of the last eight years. He went to a brand new facility for one year but last year, just prior to the Covid shutdown, said he wanted to go “home” to Legacy House. The entire staff was so kind to him and they are all just incredible people, every one of them. His home health care nurses and aide from Caregivers Support (Maryann, Melissa and Sawyer) also treated him like he was their own father and with such kindness.

And typical of one of the “greatest generation”, he endured f-i-v-e months without person-to-person visits with hardly a complaint. Due to that same darned Covid, we will celebrate his extraordinary life later this year with full military honors.

The memorial service will be held at 11:00 am, Saturday, October 16th, 2021 at the Woods Cross Stake Center of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 2064 South 800 West, where a visitation will be held from 9:45-10:45 am and the funeral will follow immediately after, with full military honors.