by Mark Tabb
“OK, Ed,” Jon said. He let out a quick sigh. “That’s what we will do. We’re going to build the school from the ground up in one year’s time, and we’re going to play our first home football game here in 104 days. Wow, I think that settles it. We have officially lost our minds.”
“No, Jon, we’ve just set ourselves a good set of goals. If you’re going to set a goal, you might as well set one worth fighting for,” Ed said.
Ed didn’t come out and say it, but his bold pronouncement on the hill grew out of his trust in the power and goodness of God, a trust formed while growing up between two very different worlds. Lots of tears were yet to be shed over all that the storm had taken away, and the shock of losing everything had not yet fully subsided. But Ed never wavered in his conviction that God presented him and the entire community with a choice as to how they would respond. For Ed, like everything connected with his work at the school, this was not about football. This was about choosing to trust in God’s wisdom and plan, even though he did not fully understand how or why God would allow such a devastating storm. Many of those who lost everything wondered how a good God could allow such a tragedy to hit their little town. Ed never did, just as he never heard his mother question why God would allow her to be duped into marrying a man who was not what he made himself out to be. Instead, she trusted God and put her husband in his hands. That’s what Ed chose to do after the initial shock of the tornado devastation wore off.
One week after the tornado, Ed and Jan attended worship at First Congregational Church of Parkersburg, just as they did every Sunday. During the worship service, their pastor asked if anyone would like to share a testimony. Ed stepped up to the microphone. “First Timothy 6:7 tells us that we come into this world with nothing, and we leave the same way,” he began. “Thank God, I did not leave this world last Sunday, but Jan and I, like a lot of you, lost everything we had. I’m here to tell you that losing everything is not such a horrible thing. I’m not saying this has been any easier for me than it has for any of you, and I will grieve for a very long time over my neighbors and friends who lost their lives Sunday. But I have to tell you, over these past six days, I’ve seen the mercy and goodness of God through people he has sent our way like nothing I’ve ever seen.
“I’ve also rediscovered over this past week how our faith in God is the only thing that is going to carry us through these times. You know, Job also lost everything he had in a tornado, only he also lost his children, something that I hope I never have to experience. After he lost everything, he told his wife, ‘Naked I came into this world, and naked I will depart. The Lord gives. The Lord takes away. Blessed be the name of the Lord.'* Job praised God in the storm, and that’s what I want to be able to do as well.
“God was with Jan and me down in our basement while our house blew away. I’ve heard stories from a lot of you of how you felt like the wind was about to suck you right out of your shelter when something reached out and pulled you back down to safety. Well, that something was the hand of God. He was with us through the storm, and he will be with us as we get up and go forward and rebuild this community. Thank you.”
Ed walked off the platform and took his seat next to Jan. Thirty-three years earlier, God brought Ed to Parkersburg and gave him a job to do. Nothing had changed that fact—not even an EF5 tornado. In fact, his work had just begun.
*Job 1:21.
CHAPTER 5
STARTING OVER
The only way we win is to look out for one another.
ED THOMAS
EARLY IN THEIR FIRST YEAR OF MARRIAGE, ED STAYED UP late to watch a ball game one night while Jan went to bed without him. Ed didn’t know that Jan had spent most of the afternoon rearranging the furniture in their small duplex, nor did he notice that the bed and dresser had swapped places when he came home that afternoon and changed his clothes. Once the game finally ended, Ed clicked off the television and headed off to the bedroom. As he walked down the hall, a devious little idea hatched in his mind. Quietly, he opened the bedroom door. He crept over across the room in the darkness, and then he suddenly dove toward the bed, or at least where he thought the bed was supposed to be.
Jan sat straight up in bed when she heard a loud thump, which was followed by a moan. She switched on a lamp only to find Ed curled up and rolling on the ground, the wind knocked out of him. “What are you doing?”
When Ed finally got his breath back, he said, “I was going to play a little trick on you, but it didn’t exactly turn out the way I planned. What happened to the bed?”
Jan could not help but laugh. “I moved it when I cleaned the bedroom today. Remember, you sat on it this afternoon when you came home from work.”
“I did? I don’t remember that. Why do you have to move things all the time, anyway?”
“I like variety.”
“I don’t,” Ed said, still on the floor.
“Then you better pay closer attention around here,” Jan countered with a playful tone.
Ed stumbled to his feet, his pride damaged but his sense of humor intact. “At least warn me next time,” he said with a chuckle.
In the week that followed the tornado, Ed never found his bed or most of his other possessions. He and Jan, along with Aaron, Todd, and several other family volunteers, spent hours upon hours digging through the scattered debris that now represented everything they had in the world. Any hopes that they might actually find things intact fell apart when they uncovered one of the dressers from their bedroom. Even though the drawers were closed tight, dirt and insulation were deeply embedded in socks and sweaters and every other piece of clothing. Jan soon discovered that even a thousand trips through the washer and dryer would never get it all out.
Even so, in those first few days, the Thomases loaded as many of their possessions as they could find into the horse trailer Jan’s dad brought over for them to use. When Jan uncovered her washer and dryer, she yelled out like she had just won the lottery. “Ha, look what I found!” Aaron and Todd came over and carried the washer and dryer to the trailer. Neither had the heart to tell their mother that both machines were too far gone to ever work again.
For Ed and Jan, like every other storm victim, finding something as simple as a washing machine felt like getting a small part of their lives back. Their biggest celebration came when they uncovered some old photographs of Aaron and Todd, and especially when they found photographs of the grandchildren. Somewhere in the debris, Jan managed to dig out their insurance papers. That first day they also saved a dining room table with large bubbles sticking up in its veneer top, a desk that was missing two drawers, and a wooden dresser that looked like it had been left outside in a thunderstorm. Aside from a few pairs of jeans and a handful of shirts, most of their clothes were either gone forever or ruined. Everything else they needed —from such simple things as socks, toothbrushes, makeup, and razors to big-ticket items like their cars, appliances, and furniture —they had to buy new. Every material item they always took for granted was now scattered between Parkersburg and New Hartford, nine miles away. After thirty-two years of marriage, Ed and Jan had to start over from scratch.
Two days after the tornado hit, Ed walked up after a brief trip to the high school. Jan was just finishing a conversation on her cell phone. “You’re not going to believe this,” she said to Ed, “but I just got off the phone with a contractor.”
She caught Ed off guard. He almost said, “Why do we need a contractor?” but he caught himself. Twenty-four hours earlier, hiring a builder was the last thing he could imagine doing.
“I gave Mom the name, Dad,” Todd said. “He’s actually one of my buddies from college. He does great work, and you can trust him to do what he says. He’s going to build my house out by the golf course later this year.”
“OK,” Ed said, still trying to come to grips with the fact that he needed to rebuild a house.
“He told me that they just finished a house over in Cedar Falls, and they have a window of time before they
start on their next one. He and his crew can get started on our house right away,” Jan said.
“What do you mean right away?” Ed asked.
“As in tomorrow, if we want him to. I told him I had to talk to our insurance company first.”
“But any thinking person can see the house is a total loss, so that shouldn’t be a problem,” Todd added.
“No, it shouldn’t be a problem,” Jan said, “but …”
Ed jumped in. “So let’s hire Todd’s buddy and get him out here, the quicker the better.”
“I don’t know, Ed. I’m not so sure it’s a good idea to hire someone so fast without getting bids from several different places first. I mean, come on, we’re talking about rebuilding our entire house. I think we need to do our homework before we jump into anything.”
“Todd’s already checked him out, right? For me, the quicker we rebuild the better. I think it’s important for us to send a message to the rest of the community. When I was over at the school …”
“Which time?” Jan interrupted.
Ed smiled. “I just needed to get a few things out of my classroom. Anyways, when I was over at the school, some parents came over with their kids, and a lot of them wondered what was going to happen to the town and if the school would even be rebuilt or if the state might consolidate us with another district. I think it’s important to make a statement that we will rebuild our town and our school and that we will be better and stronger than before.”
“That’s fine, Ed, but I’m not so sure it’s a good idea to give someone the go-ahead to build a house without so much as a formal bid.”
“Todd trusts him. That’s good enough for me,” Ed said. “We’ll see,” Jan said.
That the school and community came into the discussion was not a surprise to Jan. The two had played a major role in Ed and Jan’s relationship since the day he first asked her out on a date a few months after she graduated from Northeast Hamilton High School. Back then, Ed was Mr. Thomas, the boys’ football coach and her former world history teacher and assistant basketball coach. He came to Northeast Hamilton when she was a junior. Back then, neither ever thought of the other as anything other than a teacher and student. That never would have changed if not for a mutual friend who planted a bug in Ed’s ear about Jan after she graduated from high school. He kept telling Ed to give her a call, and he continually built up Ed to Jan. Even so, she felt more than a little strange when she answered her phone and heard her former teacher say, “Hi, this is Ed Thomas.”
“OK, hi,” Jan said. She did not know what to call him. “Ed” felt far too informal, and “Mr. Thomas” was out of the question. She decided to call him nothing at all.
“I was wondering if you would be interested in going out with me Friday night after the football game?”
If their mutual friend had not warned her in advance that Ed was going to ask her out, Jan would have turned him down flat. After all, who goes out on a date with one of her teachers, even a former teacher after you graduated? Instead she decided to give it a whirl and said, “Sure, that sounds like fun.”
“Great,” Ed said. “If you don’t mind, would you meet me at the school? I have to get there pretty early with the team and all. I’ll meet you as soon as the game is over.”
“That will be fine. I’ll see you then.”
“OK, great. Bye, Jan.”
“Bye, uh … er … bye.”
After the initial shock of the phone call wore off, Jan started to warm up to the idea of going out with Ed. After all, he was only a few years older, and, now that she started thinking of him as a man rather than a teacher, she found him attractive. Even so, going out with the girls’ basketball assistant coach felt a little odd, so much so that she didn’t give much thought to the fact that their first date was wrapped around a Friday night football game, a game her date spent on the sidelines coaching the losing team.
After the final gun sounded and the game ended, Jan went down to an area near the school office where high school kids wait to be picked up by their parents. There she waited. And waited. And waited. “Wow, this is not funny,” she said to herself, sure she had been stood up. About the time she decided to go home and chalk it up to bad luck, Ed walked over. “I’m sorry I’m late,” he said. “My family came over from What Cheer to watch the game and then they came into the locker room. I couldn’t get away. Thanks for waiting for me.”
“That’s fine,” she said. Try as hard as she might, she still could not bring herself to call him Ed.
“There’s a faculty party going on right now that I really have to go to. Do you mind if we go there instead of going out to eat?”
“No, not at all,” Jan said. This date had just shot over the top on the awkward meter. Here she was, a college freshman who had graduated from this very high school less than six months earlier, attending a faculty party as the date of one of the teachers. After the faculty party, she surprised herself by saying yes when Ed asked if she would like to go out to eat and to see a movie the next night. The second date turned into a third, and the third into a fourth, and before long, the two of them were officially an item. It helped that she learned to call him Ed instead of calling him nothing at all.
Jan wasn’t the only member of her family who found this dating arrangement amazingly awkward. Her younger sister, Kim, was still a student at Northeast Hamilton when her big sister started dating her geography teacher. At school, Kim called him Mr. Thomas, and then she came home in the evenings to find him sitting on the couch in her living room, watching television, holding her sister’s hand. Kim tried not to think about what was happening and rushed upstairs as quickly as she could. The following summer she had “Mr. Thomas” for driver’s ed. Her life had just gone from bad to worse. Kim had no idea what to call him most of the time. Ed never felt awkward. When he saw Kim at Jan’s house, he teased her, saying things like, “You’re going to fail driver’s ed. You’re the worst driver in our car.” Then he would laugh and let her know it was all a joke. Kim knew he was joking because she wasn’t the worst driver in the car; he was. Ed’s poor driving was legendary in northeastern Iowa.
Early on, many of Jan and Ed’s dates consisted of her helping him make big motivational posters that he hung in his team’s locker room. He picked up a pizza, and they spread the paper and paint across his living room and went to work. In the spring, they went to his softball games and then went out to eat with other couples. Ed may not have been a romantic as far as planning their nights out, but Jan found him to be very thoughtful and kind. He made her laugh, and she enjoyed their time together. On Sundays, they went to church together and then spent the afternoon hanging out with her family. Some Sundays, they drove over to What Cheer to spend time with his family. His mother was anxious to meet this girl about whom Ed’s first words were, “Mom, she can palm a basketball!”
When they had been dating less than a year, Ed told Jan he had taken a job at a new school an hour away. “I’ll be back every weekend,” he promised, “and I will call every night.” After he received his first phone bill, he had to scale back to calling two or three nights a week. The long-distance bill took a toll on his teacher’s paycheck. However, neither one of them could endure the long-distance relationship for long. That Christmas he proposed, and she accepted. They were married prior to the start of the following football season.
Ed might not have been able to get the Parkersburg job without Jan’s help. She didn’t come along on any of the interviews, and he didn’t seek her opinion on the place, since they were just dating and not engaged. However, something odd happened the fall they started dating. His teams began to win, and win big. Jan never suggested plays to Ed, but a few days before every game, he asked her, “How do you feel about this one?” She gave him her honest answer, and he took her advice to heart. He kept right on asking before every game for the next thirty-four years. Eventually he even had Jan watch game film with him on Saturdays after a Friday night game. She told him w
hat she thought of certain plays and players, and he listened. Something about that combination worked because in all their years together, he only had one losing season.
As the years went by, Ed’s friends told him time and time again, “Thomas, you found the only woman in the world who would put up with you.” Ed was many things, but he was not the least bit handy. He once had to call and ask a friend how to get a bottle of Windex to work. He could dissect a 4-3 defense, but he had no idea how to fix the lawn mower or the garbage disposal or do any of the normal “honey do” projects that husbands take care of around the house. Nor did he have the patience to manage the household finances. On top of that, he worked a lot of hours, especially during football season. After he became athletic director, his sports season never ended.
So from the beginning of their marriage Jan took care of almost everything at home. She balanced the checkbook, changed the light-bulbs, painted the walls, cleaned the gutters, and kept the house and the household in order. And she was OK with that. From the time they first dated, Ed told her how he believed God had called him to be a teacher and coach. The school was his mission field. Jan shared that calling, and by taking on more and more of the household responsibilities, she made it possible for Ed to spend more time with his players and students. If his focus had been purely on football and winning games, she never would have gone for this arrangement. However, she knew Ed’s calling went far beyond the football field. She, too, wanted to make an eternal difference in the lives of his players, and the best way she could do that was to be the source of refuge and the encouragement Ed needed to keep going. With every bad loss, he came home depressed, ready to quit. She listened and tried to encourage him. Yet more than once she said, “You’ve lived with this loss long enough. It’s time to get up and get going.” He listened and did exactly what she said.
