On October 27, 2024, a scant twelve days after reaching the remarkable age of 103, my dear father, Richard Samuel Paulson, passed to his rest in the company of his loving family in Half Moon Bay, California.

My father was born on October 15, 1921, in Dinuba, California, the son of Armenian immigrants George and Mary Paulson. His ancestors accepted the Seventh-day Adventist faith in the late 1880s, under the preaching of L.R. Conradi prior to his tragic apostasy from the church. My grandfather, originally named Garbed Boghosian, had escape from Turkey in 1913, two years before the infamous Armenian genocide of 1915, in which six of our family members died. When arriving at Ellis Island, like so many other non-Anglo-Saxon immigrants in those days, he Anglicized his name, calling himself George Paulson.

Though born in central California, much of my father’s early life was spent in west Los Angeles, where he lived in the heavily Jewish Fairfax district. When the terrors of Kristallnacht were unleashed on November 9, 1938, the neighbor and any number of my father’s friends were painfully affected.

Following the Pearl Harbor attack on December 7, 1941, my father enlisted in the United States Navy, serving his country in the islands of the South Pacific. Like the heroic Desmond Doss, whose story we learned early as children, my father was a noncombatant who cared for the wounded, including a few German soldiers who had been captured by the Allies.

When the war ended, a cousin of my father’s worked in the business office at Pacific Union College, where one of her fellow students and co-workers was one Kathleen Grace Hardin. Soon she was introduced to this handsome, dashing naval officer who had just made the world safe for democracy. She began to break dates with her then-boyfriend—a future major professor of mine in graduate school—and soon she and Richard Paulson were an item. They were married on April 7, 1946, and remained man and wife till my mother’s passing—68 years to the day—on April 7, 2014.

My sister was born the following year, on September 11, 1947. Twelve years seven months later I was born, on April 2, 1960. My younger brother joined the family the following year.

The Eloquence of His Example

Following the Biblical model, my father led out every morning and evening in family worship. As children, our worship generally consisted of my father reading to us from the ten-volume Bible Story series by Arthur S. Maxwell. (I think my brother and I had those books memorized before we reached our teen years!)

My father taught English and speech for over 40 years at two local community colleges. His love of rhetoric and history was bequeathed very early to his eldest son. (I still have a small bust of Napoleon which my father brought me from Paris when I was nine years old.) Many of the parents in our home town of Reedley, California, had children who sat in my father’s classes. One of my father’s office partners was a local California State Assemblyman, one Charles B. Garrigus, who served as Poet Laureate of the state of California from 1966 to 2000 [1] and counted among his personal friends such political luminaries as Adlai Stevenson, John F. Kennedy, and Hubert Humphrey.

My father was known in town as a trusted man of integrity. In later years I would say to him that had he chosen to run for political office in that territory, he might well have won overwhelmingly. Once, while in college, my checking account at a local bank was found to be overdrawn. But the bank president, who knew my father, called our home and assured us he would not return the checks in question, because he trusted our family. I thus learned very early the meaning of that time-honored admonition from the wisest of kings:

A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches, and loving favor rather than silver and gold (Prov. 22:1).

Throughout his long life, my father possessed both a good name and loving favor among the many with whom he came in contact.

As a parent, my father demonstrated a unique balance in the exercise of justice and mercy. One of my cherished memories from early childhood was when he first forbade me to go with the family on an outing, then relented and allowed me to go anyway when I begged him. Later that day, as we were all having fun in a friend’s swimming pool, he pulled me aside and placed his arm around my shoulder, and said to me, “Don’t forget, son, you’re here by grace.”

More than anything else, my father instructed his offspring through the eloquence of his example. As with the father in Jesus’ story of the prodigal son, and King David long before, my father’s children have developed contrasting traits of character and temperament in the course of life’s journey. But as with both of the aforementioned Bible characters, my father’s heart was big enough to embrace us all, even when we disappointed him—which was often.

“The Dead in Christ Shall Rise”

Were I to fill this memorial with all the cherished memories I share with my late father, it would likely fill many pages. But some of my most memorable moments in his company occurred during the past few years, when we sat together at the opening and close of the Sabbath hours, reading God’s Word together and praying. As followers of the God of Scripture, the present hour doesn’t find us sorrowing as those who have no hope (I Thess. 4:13). The blessed hope of our Savior’s soon coming looms ever larger as the chaos and conflict of this present world accelerates all around us (Titus 2:11-13). In the immortal words of the apostle Paul:

For the Lord Himself shall descend from heaven with a shout, with the voice of the archangel, and with the trump of God: and the death in Christ shall rise first.

Then we which are alive and remain shall be caught up together with them in the clouds, to meet the Lord in the air, and so shall we ever be with the Lord.

Wherefore comfort one another with these words (I Thess. 4:16-18).

REFERENCES

“Charles B. Garrigus” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_B._Garrigus

Pastor Kevin Paulson holds a Bachelor’s degree in theology from Pacific Union College, a Master of Arts in systematic theology from Loma Linda University, and a Master of Divinity from the SDA Theological Seminary at Andrews University. He served the Greater New York Conference of Seventh-day Adventists for ten years as a Bible instructor, evangelist, and local pastor. He writes regularly for Liberty magazine and does script writing for various evangelistic ministries within the denomination. He continues to hold evangelistic and revival meetings throughout the North American Division and beyond, and is a sought-after seminar speaker relative to current issues in the Seventh-day Adventist Church. He presently resides in Berrien Springs, Michigan