"Forgiveness is important if you’re going to keep your sense of well being.”
Those words came from a retired Wesleyan preacher, someone I interviewed at his home the other day. That’s what preachers are supposed to say. That’s what the scriptures say: Forgive others and the Father will forgive you.
But this preacher, G. Richard “Dick” Hoard, had more to forgive than most of us could even imagine, much less experience.
On the morning of August 7, 1967, when Dickey Hoard was 14, he walked outside his home in rural Jackson County, Georgia, and heard his mother screaming from the front yard: “Hurry. Come quick! I think your daddy has just been killed.”
Dickey found his father, Floyd “Fuzzy” Hoard, propelled into the back seat of his 1967 Ford Galaxy, the engine on fire, the car mangled, not even recognizable. Ten sticks of dynamite, placed on a strut on the left side of the car, had exploded as soon as Hoard turned the ignition. Bootleggers and their friends had found revenge for Solicitor General Hoard’s aggressiveness in shutting down their illegal businesses.
Dickey and his older sister, Peggy Jean, tried to revive their father with mouth-to-mouth and mouth-to-nose resuscitation. But he was gone.
For much of the next six years, Dickey went through every destructive emotion you might expect from a young man who saw his father murdered for doing the right thing. He was angry, confused, vengeful, disrespectful, depressed, and mad at God. But then his fight with God ended.
When he was 20 and a college student, he heard that the man convicted of masterminding the assassination, A.C. “Cliff” Park, was taken from prison to a hospital in Athens, Georgia, after he became ill. He wanted to interview him for a book, "Alone Among the Living," he eventually would write about his father’s death. Park wasn’t interested in being interviewed.
Dick Hoard, once bitter and angry, ended his book by describing that meeting in the hospital:
“He had clicked the lower teeth from his mouth and left them over his lip. I reached out my hand. He took it and I said, ‘Goodbye.’ He did not acknowledge my departure as I walked to the door, but when I turned and said, ‘Mister Park,’ he flinched, his eyes widening when he saw my raised elbow and extended arm, and it occurred to me that maybe he had expected to find aimed between his eyes not my index finger, but a pistol. He had been every bit as afraid of me as I of him. And for good reason. I could have walked in that room and blown his head off. He stared at my hand, curious now. I smiled and straightened my shoulders. ‘Mister Park,’ I said after I raised my finger and pointed toward the ceiling. ‘Somebody up there still loves you.’
“He said nothing but turned again toward the wall, clicking his teeth, staring at nothing. I closed the door behind me and walked down the hall, a free man.”