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Biography
of John David Snavley I was born in LaPorte, Indiana, in October of 1957. My parents, Virginia Nice Snavley and Jim Snavley, named me John David, after two bible characters who were great friends. As a little boy, they told me that my name meant “friendship.” The space age was also born in October of 1957, when the Soviet Union launched the first Earth-orbiting satellite. Sputnik weighed 184 pounds. I weighed eight and one half pounds. Later that year, Senator Joseph McCarthy died, killer bees escaped from Brazil and headed north for the U.S., John Lennon was introduced to Paul McCartney at a church picnic, and an obscure physician nicknamed “Papa Doc” began his reign of terror over the tiny island of Haiti. On my fifth birthday, President John Kennedy announced that Soviet atomic missile-sites had been photographed in Cuba. As the cold war heated up in the Caribbean, my family packed their belongings and took up residence about 50 miles from Cuba, in Port-au-Prince, Haiti — home of Papa Doc and his bloodthirsty band of Ton Ton Macoutes. To me, it seemed wiser to stay in LaPorte and take our chances with the killer bees. Once established in Haiti, my parents opened a hospital for indigent children with tuberculosis. The days brutally hot, the nights were balmy, and always the noise of of people and donkeys and car horns, the smells of Creole cooking over charcoal fires, and at night, the sounds of voodoo bands doing WHO-KNEW-WHAT up in the hills. Unable to light the entire city of Port-au-Prince at once, the Haitian power company kept a blackout rotating through the neighborhoods each evening. Forced to abandon our electrical devices, the Snavley family would gather around a table and play Monopoly by the light of candles and smoldering mosquito coils. When I was about 11 years old, my parents sent me to live with Damon Nice and May Evernham. It was during that year that I learned something of the Nice family history. Like my mother before me, I rose before dawn and shivered in front of the old stove. At the kitchen table, Grandpa and Aunt May passed around eggs gathered from Nice chickens in the barn. Many of those same noble animals made the ultimate sacrifice to preserve the American tradition of a chicken in every pot. To get to school, I walked down the same lane that my mother, and my mother’s mother, had walked as children. Grandpa gave me a calf to raise, and taught me how to drive the tractor. After school, I played in the lane or in the workshop. Like all of Grandpa’s haunts, the workshop smelled permanently of cigar smoke. Light a cigar today, and I’m back in my grandfather’s living room, me on the floor in front of the television, he with a copy of “Prairie Farmer” and a John Ruskin.
It seems likely to me that my greatest single influence, oddly enough, was someone I never really met. Grace Nice died a year after I was born, and I cannot remember her face or her voice. My mother painted verbal pictures for me, of a woman kneeling alone next to the stove by a kerosene lamp, praying for her children, and for her children’s children. I’m not sure how old I was when I came to know Jesus in a meaningful way, but I plan to thank Grace Nice, at least in part, for the privilege. I went to college to be a journalist, and put my degree to good use in 1979 by joining a rock and roll band. My musical career was short-lived, and I have mostly been an advertising writer and graphic designer since then. Today, I'm the marketing director for a real estate firm in Indianapolis. I have also served on staff at my church, and have been a church music director for the better part of the last 15 years. And, I thank God that Nice blood flows in my veins. |
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