John Kingsley - music man

When John Kingsley first sang with a group of inmates, he was rather nonchalant about how it would be. “I went in there thinking we’re going to sing,” he said, “no more complicated than that.”

John Kingsley

That was 17 years ago, after a woman named Elvera Voth was looking for volunteers to sing with her new men’s chorus of inmates from Lansing Correctional Facility in Lansing, Kansas; a group she had founded in 1995 and named the East Hill Singers. At the time, Elvera was the choral director for the Lyric Opera of Kansas City. One of her Lyric performers was Michael Lanman, the son of Holy Cross mission partners Bob and Dorothy Lanman, who were good friends of John. Michael convinced his dad to join the group, who then convinced John to become a part. John said, “Initially I didn’t think of it as a ministry so much as just a chance to sing in an all-male chorus.”

Yet, John gave it his heart and a huge chunk of time in the early years, going to Lansing most Tuesday evenings and an occasional Saturday for rehearsals. The chorus is comprised of inmates housed in the East Unit, the minimum-security unit situated on East Hill, which is part of the Lansing Correctional Facility. “The East Unit is removed from the ‘big house,’ which accommodates the medium and maximum security inmates and is not a foreboding place at all,” John said.

As John sang with the inmates each week, his attitude about them began forming. “I started seeing these fellows as just people who had made some bad choices,” he said. “They’re about as typical as a group of guys could be and they are hugely appreciative of the volunteers and their current director Kirk Carson.” John added that the relationships he has formed are warm and genuine.

John describes his singing voice as bass/baritone. Singing with the inmates has been an interesting challenge at times. He explained that there are no audition requirements for the inmates, and many have never sung seriously before, or had musical training or choral experience. “As a result,” John said, “it’s not unusual to find yourself trying to stay on key while surrounded by guys with their own idea of what key we should be searching for. It’s good training, but I’ve learned to block it out, sing away and hopefully provide some leadership to the others. It should also be said that we’ve discovered some marvelously talented musicians among the inmates—both as vocalists and instrumentalists.”

John had music in his background before discovering East Hill Singers. His mother played piano and led a tiny Methodist choir in the upstate New York village where he grew up. “The choir met in our living room from the time I first remember until I left for college,” John said. “Sometimes there would be four, sometimes eight or ten but I guess that was my initiation to choral singing.” He recalls singing a solo with the choir as a young child, and some singing in high school, but didn’t do much with it until college where he finally got some instruction. He never thought of singing as a calling---simply an outlet.

 “My early goal was to design firearms,” John said. “I was very much into guns (and cars) so I spent a couple of years studying gunsmithing and arms design.” The draft and military service led to a stint in the Air Force and then marriage to his wife Mary and a job with General Electric, where he started out designing Sidewinder missiles. “That was a far cry from the kind of firearms I had in mind earlier in life,” he said.

John stayed with GE until changes in ownership and management would have forced him to move to El Paso, Texas. That was a deal breaker so he started looking for alternatives. He settled on starting Express Signs in 1988 with, what was then, new computer technology. “It seemed like an easy thing to do but I was wrong,” he said. “But my A-plan was to start a family business, and that’s what I did.”

John continues to use his voice in ways that bring him and others joy. He sings with the Holy Cross church choir, and was once the voice of the whale in a children’s musical of “Jonah” staged at a former church. He has sung with a number of quartets, including one with Holy Cross mission partners Bob Lanman, Larry Colburn and Tom Cook that was formed in the early 1990s.

About eight or nine years ago he joined the Johnson County Chorus. “That was kind of a chance thing too,” he said. His granddaughter’s elementary school music teacher, Anita Cyrier, was also the director of the Johnson County Chorus. When John attended a performance, he met the director and the next thing he knew he was a member of the chorus.

John describes the music as a bit ‘meatier’ than that sung by the East Hill group but said that in no way takes anything away from the pleasure he gets singing with the Lansing men. “The term ‘ministry’ sounds a bit too preachy,” he said. “I’ve come to view my time with East Hill Singers as simply a good thing to do—for me and, hopefully for the men.”  

Jim and Linda Fargus - a heart-stopping moment

Jim and Linda Fargus have been married 44 years. Their lives were fairly ordinary most of that time. They have a son and daughter, two grandchildren, worked long careers before retiring, took part-time jobs after retirement. They traveled occasionally and kept physically active. Then came the night Linda’s heart stopped.

Jim and Linda Fargus

Jim and Linda met in college, a small university in Bloomsburg, Pennsylvania, where they both landed in part because of cost and geography. They got to know each other as they waited tables in the campus dining hall. They moved to Overland Park in 1999 for Jim’s job. Both retired in 2006, Jim as a project manager with Sprint, Linda as a teacher. Shortly after retirement, Jim took a job as a math instructional paraprofessional, Linda as an adjunct reading instructor at Johnson County Community College. Nothing in their ordinary lives prepared them for what was to come.

Shortly after midnight , the beginning of the Monday that would mark their 41^st wedding anniversary, Jim was awakened by a noise.

“Linda has always been an active sleeper,” Jim said. “She would sit up in bed, have conversations, and I was pretty attuned to all of that.” So when Jim heard a noise, he did the usual, which was to pat her on the arm and let her know everything was okay and she could go back to sleep. But this night, she wasn’t sitting up in bed, and he got no response when he asked her if she was all right.

Within moments, Jim realized she wasn’t breathing. Though he had CPR training, it was sheer instinct that took over. Instinct coupled with fear and adrenaline. He moved Linda to the floor, started doing chest compressions and called 911. “I had the phone laying on the floor, it wasn’t a speaker phone, and I was yelling into it,” Jim said. All he knew was that his wife had no pulse and wasn’t breathing and he was desperately trying to save her. The 911 dispatcher told Jim to stop the compressions and give her a couple of breaths. He did so and saw her chest rise, but she wasn’t breathing on her own.

He began compressions again, until the dispatcher told him the ambulance was two minutes out, and he needed to go downstairs, open the front door and turn on the porch light. He did those things, then returned to Linda. Finally he heard the siren and knew help was near.

Soon there was a lot of commotion. Jim said there were three or four paramedics, and a couple of police officers. One of the officers escorted Jim to the hallway, and kept him company as the paramedics worked on his wife. “I heard them shock her,” Jim said. “The defibrillator talks, and I heard it three times.” Jim estimates they were in with his wife for 30 to 45 minutes, before they carried her out wrapped in a bed sheet for the ride to the hospital. Jim had called his son, who lived in town, and the two of them headed to the hospital as well.

“We sat for two hours, and didn’t know anything,” Jim said. Finally the on-call cardiologist met with Jim and his son, and explained that Linda didn’t have a heart attack. Instead, she had an episode of ventricular tachycardia, where the heart beats too fast and the ventricles can’t pump enough blood to the body. It can be severe and life-threatening. And because Linda had gone a period of time without breathing, there was a very real possibility of brain damage. Linda had been placed in a cooling suit that would lower her body temperature so that her brain wouldn’t swell, and was put into a coma.

Twenty-four hours had elapsed since Linda’s heart had stopped before Jim finally went home to rest. Though Linda went into cardiac arrest again overnight, the medical team was able to keep her alive.

When something dramatic or life-threatening happens, we oftentimes look for a sign that all will be well. For Jim, that moment came Wednesday afternoon. Linda was still in a coma, and had a breathing tube down her throat, so conversation wasn’t an option. But when Jim took hold of her hand, she knew to squeeze it, a recollection that still causes him to swell with emotion as he recounts it.

Linda remained in the hospital for eight days. Her brain activity had continually been good, a positive indicator that she would once again have a good quality of life. She has no memory of the week preceding the night her heart stopped, and very little memory of the events during her hospital stay. It’s almost as though this happened to someone else, yet she knows it’s real because of the emotion she’s seen in her husband and adult children. She finds it interesting that Jim proved to be so stalwart. “This is the one,” she said of Jim, “who when the kids fell and needed stitches, he couldn’t drive them to the hospital.”

Jim was able to step up in another way too, a way that illustrated a strong faith. He saw God’s hand throughout this experience. “I’m hard of hearing, and for me to hear something like that…” Jim said, referring to the elusive sound that woke him when Linda’s heart stopped. He also trusted that the outcome would be okay. “I always knew she could die,” he said, “but I never thought she would.” Linda enjoyed hearing this from Jim, because, as she noted, “He’s the half-empty kind of guy.”

The two of them have adopted the saying, “It’s all small stuff,” meaning they have changed their perspective on what matters and what doesn’t. “Every day, every bit of time we have together is precious,” Jim said.

Jim & Linda with grandchildren

Linda has what she calls a lump under her chest as a reminder of what happened. That lump is a pacemaker and defibrillator, tools to help keep her heart beating at a normal rate. She is once again physically active, is involved in the Holy Cross music ministry, and life continues much as it used to. Like Jim, Linda too had a moment when she knew she would be okay. That time came in November, a few months after she had returned home from the hospital, when she got to hold her first grandchild. “I just thought I might not get to see her, hold her,” Linda said.