James Alvin Butler

Our father was creative, intelligent, intense, often fun, eternally curious and always compassionate. He could see a piece of furniture in a department store or a magazine, study it, then reproduce it in his tiny basement workshop. From the radiator covers that matched the colors of the walls to the stained-glass door in the kitchen, our father’s creativity touched every room of our house in Philadelphia.

Even today, our houses have tangible reminders of our father’s handiwork. His stained-glass illuminates Rita’s foyer. His breakfast table, crafted when we were in high school, is now in Beverly’s kitchen.

Our father was perhaps the most intelligent man we ever met: he taught us how to “read between the lines” in the local newspaper. And, when faced with what seemed like an insurmountable problem, he would ask targeted questions that lead him – and us -- to viable, pragmatic solutions.

He was intense and serious. And, this intensity, this seriousness, lead him to become a baker. He was sweeping the floors of The Melrose Diner in Philadelphia when the owner noticed that he came in on time and that he did his job carefully and meticulously. The owner decided to send our father to baker’s school. He baked pies and cakes for fifty-seven years, his favorite being apple pie. When Rita and Bill got married forty-five years ago, our father baked a “bride’s cake” and a “groom’s cake” for them.

Our father was also fun and he could be silly. Once when Beverly went on a cruise with our parents, she remarked that it was “strange” that all his socks were brown. He pulled a sock from his suitcase, sniffed it, then fell over!

He was eternally curious. When our parents were seventy-one, they took a cruise to the Panama Canal because my father wanted to see how the canal “locked” in ships. He had learned about the locking system when he was in high school and had always dreamed about seeing it for himself.

Most importantly, our father was compassionate. He raked leaves and shoveled snow for a neighbor who lived alone and was going blind. Mrs. Nell did not ask him to do this: he did it because she needed the help. Part of his compassion was his passion for doing “right,” for respecting others. When he learned that the white doctor in our neighborhood called all his white patients by their titles, but called our grandmother by her first name, he put on his suit and hat and went to the doctor’s office. He politely told the doctor that, as long as white patients were addressed by their titles, then his mother-in-law’s name was “Mrs. Martin,” not “Carrie.”

It is not surprising, then, that our parents’ marriage lasted sixty years. Our father never came home without first greeting our mother with a kiss. And, after she was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s, he took care of her. When walking became difficult for her, he moved them from the three-story home they had lived in for almost forty years in Philadelphia to a single-story home in a retirement community in New Jersey. This kind of love extended to us and to our families. Our father was “Dad” to Rita’s husband and “Pop-Pop” to their children, William, Jacqueline and Ashlyn. They knew “his word was his bond.” When Beverly was about to marry her husband, who is Italian-Irish, our father said she was marrying “the best person for her.” Our father was born over a hundred years ago in segregated Greenwood County, South Carolina, and, given all that he saw of racial cruelty, for him to make such a statement showed the full depth of his loving heart.

We are thrilled that our father was our father -- this creative, intelligent, intense, often fun, eternally curious and always compassionate man. We are both professional women, who, as young children, learned from him that being women did not mean we weren’t strong. Our parents showed us how to be independent, how to work hard and how to do what we know is right. And, so, when our father fell suddenly ill, we did what we knew to be right and rallied behind him, grateful that, when he took his last breath, we were all close by in Florida.

We will miss our father, but we will carry him with us in every act we undertake. The best of him lives deep in us and in his grandchildren.

Rita Butler Holliday

Beverly Butler Faragasso

A celebration of life service for James will be held Sunday, March 10, 2024 at 2:00 PM.