Re “Silenced, Frozen into Place by ALS, He Never Gave up”
[img]2799|right|Renard Ricks||no_popup[/img]I only met the extraordinary gentle man Renard Ricks one time.
Last month, on his 61st and final birthday.
Less than two weeks later, on Oct. 3, he was gone, consumed by the ravages of a 3½-year fight against ALS, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis, which cages victims in a room without doors or windows.
Mr. Ricks’s kindness and gentility shined through with the golden glow of the sun on that brief but memorable evening in the South Bay.
Unable to move — except for his eyes and face bones that permitted an inviting smile – Mr. Ricks stamped an enduring imprint on an evening where his stillness was moving and heroic.
You wanted to know more about this man of God whose gentility was a model for his family, including his five children.
He was a black man growing up in the Deep South during the final gasps of hardcore racism. Small towns of his Alabama childhood permitted whites to openly, loudly, scarily confront and threaten their fellow black citizens on the street without fear of retribution.
Mr. Ricks’s morally straight character was tested and solidified, certified for life.
Born Sept. 20, 1953, in Sheffield, AL, Mr. Ricks was baptized shortly before his 12th birthday. He attended Mars Hill Bible School in Florence and graduated Deshler High in Tuscumbia in 1972.
Mr. Ricks enrolled at the University of North Alabama, volunteered for the U.S. Army in the hyper Vietnam era, returned to the university three years later, undertook a double major in radio and television broadcasting with a minor in journalism.
A colleague.
One of the tragedies of Mr. Ricks’s closing months was that his family and friends were denied his lifelong mellifluous tones.
Presaging a career in broadcasting, he starred in speech as a collegian. He started the University of North Alabama’s first speech forensics team.
He was a man of considerable accomplishment. Early and later. In 1978 and 1979, Mr. Ricks was nationally ranked, as the 24th best and then as the 18th most impressive poetry/prose reader. He acted in university productions with the actors Broderick Crawford and Michael Douglas.
While his wife Wanamarie and his children, Sonjai, Rickedra, Desmond, Renard and Korye mourn his death 13 evenings ago, fortunate is the man who can eloquently declare himself to the world without uttering a word or stirring a limb.
His shimmering record may be impossible for those he left behind to duplicate.
His was a life exemplarily lived.
