Jim Troxel asked me to post this remembrance of John’s life:
“If a man does not keep pace with his companions,
perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer.”
Henry David Thoreau.
It was the early part of 1966 on the campus of Oklahoma State University located in Stillwater that I, as a naive sophomore, first encountered John Giancola, a senior philosophy major. John was active in the Methodist Wesley Foundation, led by our campus ministers Carl Caskey and Vance Engleman, which served as the hotbed of student awakenment and activism in which I and a lot of other students were caught up. We recruited students and faculty to attend the weekend religious seminars of the Ecumenical Institute (EI) and organized caravans to make the road trip up to EI in Chicago’s Inner City at least twice a quarter. We labeled ourselves the FATAGS, the Friday Afternoon Tea and Glee Society, and eventually helped lead some 5000 students and faculty to protest the school administration’s reduction of our first amendment rights. We hammered out a bi-weekly off-campus student newspaper called The Drummer paying homage to Thoreau.* While Ron Stevens served as its editor, two of our intellectual leaders were Rob Work and John Giancola. While Rob was quieter and laid back, John was more spirited and outgoing. Indeed, John was the life of our parties.
The most bizarre parties we held in the small auditorium of the Foundation were a re-enactment of The Sound of Music movie that came out the year before. I have no recollection as to how or why we got into this as our cabaret. We’d dole out the parts and invariably John lobbied for and was always cast as the Mother Abbess whose rendition of “Climb Every Mountain” was the highpoint of the evening. John’s casting was perhaps a hint of his future inclinations.
It was John’s spirit and energy, though, that I remember the most. He was the center of whatever discussion or activity we were caught up in at the moment. His enthusiasm engaged all around him and none of us ever expected that whatever windmill we’d be going after that we wouldn’t conquer the giants. His smile played the tune of the pied piper and it was hard not to follow him whatever road he took. John had the gruff appearance of Tevye from Fiddler on the Roof. His compassion for subjects, causes and the people around him was infectious.
John and Rob graduated in the spring of 1966 and both found their way to Chicago eventually to join the staff of the EI, which modeled itself as a “lay ecumenical religious family order.” Vance Engleman and Judy Sparks Montgomery would take the plunge as well and other Wesley Foundation folks would join up in Chicago, myself included. But, alas, the structures of EI were too confining for John. He marched to a different drummer. So he moved to New York to find his bliss.
I have not seen him since he left OSU. But, obviously, he had a big impact on my life. My tribute to John is that he played the role in my life of the Avatar. He served as an embodiment of the essence of a superhuman being in an earthly form. He was, in other words, bigger than life. He transcended the particulars of the moment to enable us to see the larger picture of what we were about. He led us to new awarenesses that we couldn’t see for ourselves. And, for an unformed adolescent who was caught up in the whirlwind of the ‘60s, he had a profound influence on my life direction.
John died recently due to complications arising from the COVID virus. Thank you, John, for being you.
Jim Troxel
