John and Anna McConnell today

Today, John McConnell is well into his 90s. His wife, Anna, is approaching 80. They were married on Christmas Day, 1968. And while John traveled the country extensively as a youth and the couple lived most of their married lives in Brooklyn, New York, they now reside in a humble senior citizen residence near their daughter, son-in-law and grandchildren in Denver, Colorado.

In Pursuit of Justice

John McConnell was born in 1915 in Davis City, Iowa. He is the eldest of six children of J.S. and Hattie McConnell. J.S. and Hattie were evangelists who traveled the country in a converted van in which they and their children cooked, ate and slept. J.S. and Hattie were among the founding members of the Assemblies of God church in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in 1914. As a boy, John had very little formal education, but he taught himself to read in various public libraries. And he had the rare education of meeting people from southern California to Oregon and Washington, across the Great Plains and Great Lakes States to New York, and south to Alabama, George and Florida. Along the way, he observed and noted numerous ethnicities, religious beliefs, occupations and life styles. By participating as a singer and musician in tent revivals across the land, John and his siblings appeared with some of the greatest evangelists and performers of that era, including the Rev. Lincoln E. Caswell who also impersonated Abraham Lincoln, the Rev. Joseph H. Braun, and the Tindley Seven gospel ensemble, which included sons of Charles Albert Tindley, a former slave renowned as the father of gospel music.

Care of Earth

John McConnell's gift as a visionary revealed itself in the 1930's when he and a chemist partner, Albert Nobell, converted discarded walnut shells into plastic, a biomass product long before that term came into vogue.

Passion for Peace

Like his father, John McConnell believed that it was wrong for Christians to participate in war. Yet, wanting to exhibit his patriotism, John served in the Merchant Marine in the early 1940s, during World War II, and conducted ministerial services aboard the ships he sailed. But when drafted into the Army, he refused to participate in rifle practice, seeing in the target the image of Christ. For this, he was sentenced to the stockade. His continued verbal protests against the military and war while in the Army landed him in solitary confinement where his hair turned prematurely white. Going AWOL, John and his first wife, Mary Lou, sailed from Florida to Roatan, British Honduras, where they worked as missionaries among Central American peasants while under observation by the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation. Telegrams from FBI agents to J. Edgar Hoover led the noted Bureau chief to declare that John and Mary were "not engaged in subversive activities."

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