Tribute | How Ed Dick earned his angel wings, and why others followed his inspiration
Manatee County lost one of its finest with the passing of Ed Dick. It is no exaggeration to say that Mr. Dick exemplified Jesus Christ as he walked out the Messiah’s directive to care for “the least of these” just about every day of his life.
In doing so, he taught countless Manatee County professed Christians — including me — the true meaning of Christ’s message in the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 25, verses 35-36: “For I was hungry, and you gave Me something to eat; I was thirsty, and you gave Me drink; I was a stranger, and you invited Me in; naked, and you clothed Me; I was sick, and you visited Me; I was in prison, and you came to Me.”
Ed literally took strangers into his home, as many as 14 at a time during the height of the 1979 Refugee Inc. initiative he led to resettle victims of Cambodia’s killing fields in Manatee-Sarasota. More than 300 strangers were given temporary shelter in the Dick home during that crisis.
One day we were headed for a meeting in separate cars, him following me. On the way, I noticed a woman huddled in a bus stop shelter during a heavy downpour. I shook my head in pity as I passed by. Mr. Dick pulled over, invited her into his car, bought her a lunch and took her to her destination.
He fought systemic racism by speaking out against the Jim Crow behavior still widely practiced in Manatee County in the 1970s, by befriending ordinary Black citizens, and by recruiting the first Black athlete to the football team of his beloved alma mater, the University of Miami.
He took in foster children, and adopted eight of them as his own, and later helped found a group home for homeless foster children. He looked out for all Manatee County public school children by, as a member of the School Board, advocating for a bond issue to pay for retrofitting older schools with central air-conditioning because “how can children focus on learning if they’re sweltering?”
I seldom agree with my old letter-to-the-editor-writing friend Bob Spencer on political issues, but on his depiction in the Herald’s obituary of Mr. Dick as “one of the angels on earth if there ever was one,” I fully concur. I would go further to say that Mr. Dick was the closest thing to a saint I ever expect to meet in this world.
His selfless behavior shamed me and many other church activists around town into getting off the couch and into the trenches of the refugee crisis in 1979. It was easy enough to agree to his plea for an editorial promoting the goals of Refugee Inc. to bring hundreds of Cambodian refugees to the U.S. But they needed homes — and sponsors. “Besides just writing about it, why don’t YOU become one yourself?” he asked.
“Are you serious?” I replied. “I just acquired a family of my own last year. I can’t take on another one.”
Yet it is testimony to Mr. Dick’s persuasive skills that within weeks I — along with quite a few other pastors, elders and Mission Team officers from local congregations — found ourselves waiting at Tampa International Airport to meet our new Cambodian “family.” In my case, it was a family of 10.
“Ten people! Where am I going to put 10 people?” I asked Ed. “I only have three bedrooms.”
“Don’t worry, they can stay with us for a few days until you can find a place for them to live,” Ed calmly reassured, not even worrying whether his long-suffering wife, Joanne, would mind having 10 guests show up at her door at 10 p.m. She was as saintly as her husband.
It was that way a few years later, when a severe freeze killed the fruit and vegetable crops across Florida and left thousands of agriculture workers without jobs, food or warm clothing. “Don’t just write about it; get your own church involved,” he counseled. It was thus that the Herald lobby began filling with food, blankets and clothing and I soon found myself in a caravan of vehicles delivering the supplies to a migrant worker camp in Wimauma.
Mr. Dick had a way of making people want to do good. Not by putting on pressure, but in his calm way pointing out how easy it was for advantaged people like me to step up with actions as well as words. I am imagining him now, entering the Pearly Gates and being greeted with something like the words of Matthew 25, Verse 23: “Well done, good and faithful servant ... enter into the joy of my kingdom.”
David Klement is former Editorial Page Editor of the Herald. He included accounts of Mr. Dick’s work in his recently published book, “Conscience of the Community: Memoir of a Small-Town Editor 1977-2007.”