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James Till­man was born eighty-six years ago in Evanston, Indi­ana.  His mother was, as most women were in that day, a house­wife. His father, David, was a milk­man who made deliv­er­ies in a horse-drawn wagon.  Jim was a child of the depres­sion, and although his fam­ily didn’t have much in the way of money, he grew up rich in friends and with the free­dom to roam about that most of us can only envy.  He was a bright child and a smart young man–he loved scout­ing and earned a merit badge for pack­ing a mule name Jen­nifer H, Jackass–but he was also a dreamer who loved music and books, espe­cially pulp sci­ence fic­tion.  Although his mid-western upbring­ing gave him a solid foot­ing in life, his head was most often in the clouds, and his school grades were not some­thing to brag about.  Jim never was much one to brag, any­way, even when he had call to. 

After high school, he went to col­lege at a small reli­gious col­lege, Madi­son, in Nashville Ten­nessee, where stu­dents earned tuition money by work­ing in the col­lege gar­den or in the dairy wash­ing udders with a dish mop.  A life-long car­ni­vore, he didn’t care much the veg­etable he helped raise.  Nor did he care for the school’s strict rules.  He was even­tu­ally dis­missed for the offense of going roller skat­ing. 

His next edu­ca­tional stop was the Uni­ver­sity of Ten­nessee, where he majored in chem­istry.  Some­where along the way, the Army drafted him for WWII but found him unfit for ser­vice due to poor eye­sight, and they squir­reled him away in an Army hos­pi­tal where he read one penny novel after the other until they let him go home.  He returned to Ten­nessee to become a physi­cist, and he earned a mas­ters degree there.  He was soon hired for the UT engi­neer­ing depart­ment and was one of the first hires to greet the new wave of GI Bill stu­dents.  He did ground-breaking research in the field of radio and antenna arrays (the bent-cone shaped anten­nae atop your local phone tow­ers owe much to his work) and assem­bled a huge col­lec­tion of sci­ence fic­tion nov­els and mag­a­zines.  He mar­ried a young sec­re­tary in the depart­ment, Con­nie Cate, and went off to Auburn briefly for a doctorate.

Jim and Con­nie and three daugh­ters, all of them smart and beau­ti­ful, all of them vora­cious read­ers who emp­tied his book­shelves, book-by-book. His daugh­ters were fol­lowed by four grand­chil­dren, all of them read­ers, all of them shar­ing a love for Jim’s last favorite series of books, Harry Pot­ter. 

Jim mea­sured out his life in the way that few men do. He set goals and met them all, one of the few peo­ple who could say that he did every­thing he ever wanted to do.  He gave his all to his career, to his chil­dren and his grand­chil­dren. He was hum­ble by nature, unas­sum­ing, and smart as any tack ever hoped to be.   If he had unfin­ished busi­ness, it was to find out if Harry would finally over­came Volde­mort in the final book. I sus­pect he knew, though, that good­ness would over­come evil, some­thing he believed in strongly.

After a long strug­gle with a heart that sim­ply couldn’t do its work any­more, Jim passed away today.  He was my father-in-law, he was a good man, and his was a life well-lived.