Alton J ("Jay") Hoyle - A not so common man...
Jay never claimed to be anything too special. Just a hard working
fellow who loved his family and served his God
as well as he could. He paid his bills, mowed his lawn, kept his car running, and whenever he could
- he'd catch a game on TV. But to his family and friends, Jay was a very
special man in ways that even he could never have imagined - actually a very "uncommon
man" indeed.
A typical newspaper obituary wraps up a man's life in just a few sentences, offering just a simple outline of the dates of his birth and passing, where he lived, where he died, and
maybe what he did for a living. The obit might include a
truncated list of his survivors. All of that is important
to genealogists, census takers, and agencies paying his government benefits -
but of only passing interest to those of us who knew him.
For
the rest of us none of Jay's statistics begin to describe the man who owned them - although some of those facts might
indicate what helped to shape him into the man he would
later become. The "real man" went well beyond being just the poor farm kid
from Oklahoma, the painfully shy ladies' man, or the shade tree mechanic who worked
mostly on
Chevys. Jay not only raised a beautiful family, but he also touched the lives of
hundreds of his spiritual "brothers and sisters" that shared his faith in
Jehovah.
At 4:30 on Sunday, April 30, 2006, his friends and family gathered at the Kingdom Hall of Jehovah's Witnesses in Morrilton, Arkansas to celebrate a life well lived and the man who lived that life. On behalf of the family and friends of Alton J Hoyle, I offer up this unworthy biography of a man that we all loved very much. Maybe some of the younger members of his family, most who never got to meet him, will be able to get know "Pops" a little better and form their own opinions about our reluctant patriarch.