In 1987, when we moved from Denver to San Diego, one of the first men I met was John McColl who was referred to me as a man who had with his brother Bill, always supported every F.C.A. function that had been held in San Diego. I learned at that time that there was not much of an F.C.A effort being accomplished here because there was not a full time person who could coordinate the willing volunteers to help with the  programs at the junior and senior high schools and colleges in the county.

     John and I decided that we would have a fundraising banquet to raise enough money to have a full time director for San Diego. John said that if I would be the chairman he would help me get some table sponsors, and said his nephew John, Bill’s son, would help. I suggested we needed a person to honor, and because Bill was a former all-American at Stanford, and an all-pro tight end with the Chicago Bears and a tremendous supporter of F.C.A. financially, that we should honor him. As John the nephew, and I talked about it, I found that all six of Bill’s children had been involved with F.C.A. at Stanford.

     We thought it would be a much better idea to honor both Bill and his wife Barbra as the F.C.A. couple of the year. I then asked my friend Mike Ditka to come in from Chicago to be the keynote speaker. Donn Moomaw a national F.C.A. trustee was our Master of Ceremonies and we had a tremendously successful banquet. As we showed a movie of Bill’s athletic accomplishments and his and Barbra’s contributions to the community as humanitarians, it was abundantly clear that we had chosen the correct couple, and we raised enough money to hire a full time area director.

     Over the past 13 years, Bill and I have seen each other almost every month at breakfast and I’ve seen him at many functions throughout the years in the community. This gentle giant of a man has been so interested in the people  he is around and the places where he  can help. He worked his way through medical school playing football for the Chicago Bears (I’m told that he was the first one to ever do that). He graduated with his specialty in orthopedic surgery, and upon graduating took his family of six small children ages 1-6, with a pair of twins in the middle, his college sweetheart/wife Barbra and went to Korea for two years as a medical missionary. His area of interest, in spite of his degree in orthopedic surgery, was leprosy, and so he not only helped there for two years but went on eventually to be the national President of the Leprosy Association of America.

     When we lived in Denver I was in the electrical contracting business. In 1963, one of our customers, who owned the largest mortuary in the area, hired our company to build a lighted cross on the side of a mountain southwest of Denver, where he was going to build a number of mausoleums on the flat top part of the mountain. He wanted to have a lighted cross to properly identify his mausoleum like all the other cemetery’s. I designed this cross, and it ended up being the largest lighted cross in the World at 393 vertical feet tall. I gave a slide presentation of the actual design and construction  of this cross, and Bill responded so positively to me after the presentation, that I had a slide enlarged to a photograph and framed it for him in his home.