Editor’s Note: The following is a reflection from Stan Copeland on the life of John Nash. It is adapted from a funeral eulogy he gave, as well as from a story in Copeland’s cookbook, The Picklin’ Parson’s Cookbook. John Nash was the uncle of Craig Nash, Good Faith Media’s Senior Editor.

He was our little league coach in the late 1960s, and I learned about much more than baseball from him. Johnny Nash was a good ancestor, and nobody had to instruct him how to be one.

Some men study it. Some preach it. Some post about it. Mr. Nash simply lived it.

He slipped away on February 6, and when I heard, I had the strange sense he had outpaced the rest of us one more time and outrun us to heaven.

Labor Leader

When I was a boy, Mr. Nash was the union boss at the Kelly-Springfield tire plant. In those days, unions were not abstract political talking points; they were the fence around a working family’s livelihood. They served a purpose, and working folks knew it.

He stood between labor and whatever threatened fairness from corporate decision-makers, with profit mostly in mind. He knew contracts, but more than that, he knew people and cared deeply about them.

He had played football at Henderson County Junior College and served in the Marine Corps. The crew cut never left him. It suited him—plain, disciplined, no foolishness.

Long before I ever put words to it, he was living my rendition of John Wesley’s simple rules: do no harm but take no bull, do good and call out bad, and stay in love with God and who and what God loves. John Nash didn’t quote those rules. He embodied them.

Diamond Lessons

Back then, my transportation was a bicycle and my calendar was measured in innings. Summer meant sweat-stung eyes, dust rising from cleats, and the long shadow of the WPA-built Chandler Elementary stretching toward the outfield fence. That school building, born of Depression grit, was made of the same stubborn stone that lined the wall around our ballfield—a wall that seemed to say, “Boys will grow here.”

We grew all right, thanks in large part to Coach Nash.

Our Chandler Tigers wore red and white. But we were black and white too—Marvin, Jake, and Poochie Montgomery, Dexter Simpson, Buck Hendrix, Weldon Thompson, and the rest of us—shoulder to shoulder. We were just boys who loved baseball and were friends with each other. And not everyone in rural East Texas loved that.

Some teams refused to play us. We did not always understand why. Coach Nash did. And in looking back, he did not want to load the ugliness onto our young backs. He treated us the same, every one of us, and in those days, that sameness was its own quiet revolution.

He drove a 1956 light-green Ford pickup—rounded and sturdy like the man himself. For away games, two boys rode in the cab. The rest of us piled into the bed, bats clanking together, wind in our faces. It was open-air conditioning before seatbelts were law and buckling up was a commandment. One rule for each of us was that our butt had to be on the bed of the truck.

One evening, he got into a scuffle—not over a bad call, but over words spoken by the coach on the other team about one of our Tigers. For Coach Nash, some things were not negotiable. Fairness was not theory; it was personal. He stood for us the way he stood for the tire workers—firm, unflinching, unwilling to let injustice pass as “just the way things are.”

He went to bat for us. All of us. He saw a better, fairer world coming, and he wanted to do all he could to usher it in.

We did not fully understand it then. We only knew he expected us to hustle, to play hard, to shake hands, and to look an opponent in the eye. What we did not see was that he was teaching us how to belong to one another and be better people.

Living Justice

By the 1980s, when I was off in seminary trying to find words for faith and justice, Johnny Nash was still taking no bull and calling out bad. In 1986, he became the plaintiff in Nash v. State of Texas, alleging that union members’ civil rights had been violated during mass picketing.

He was involved in battles over discrimination at the Kelly-Springfield plant and even within the union itself. He understood that fairness has to be tended like soil; it will not stay fertile on its own. You have to work at it.

Some called him tough. He was. But with the Tigers, he was kind. His blue eyes could flash steel when needed, yet they carried warmth for boys who needed believing in.

He knew we were children. He also knew we were worthy and all needed the same fair chance in life.

When I heard of his death, I pictured those eyes finally closed, the race finished, the work well done. Heaven will not have to teach him much about justice. He practiced it here.

Johnny Nash was a good ancestor. He did not wait for applause or permission. He simply stood where he was planted and refused to let wrong have the last word. And because he did, a field of boys in Chandler, Texas, grew up knowing—deep down—that they mattered, and that being friends no matter what was our higher calling.