The Adobe Flash Player is required to view this multimedia interactive. Get it here.

Fred Stauffer: A life of fixing things

Springfield’s probation department founder had trouble asking for money, so he turned his into a life of giving.

Birth control mandate causing major stir
Updated 26 min. ago
Legal experts analyze verdict in fatal hit-skip trial
11:33 a.m.
Ohio agrees to mortgage settlement deal
9:26 a.m.
450 new jobs could come to Springfield airport
8:22 a.m.
Broadband expanding to lure jobs to Ohio
7:59 a.m.
> More headlines

By Tom Stafford, Staff Writer 7:25 PM Saturday, July 4, 2009

SPRINGFIELD — He grew up the son of a plumber in eastern Pennsylvania.

He was an Eagle Scout who went on to serve as a radio operator in the Naval Reserve.

With his wife’s encouragement, he went to college, then got a master’s in divinity.

Fred Stauffer seemed to have the character, pedigree and education to enjoy a lengthy career as a minister in the Seventh Day Adventist Church.

But after serving congregations in Toledo and Wooster, said his wife, June, they arrived in Springfield and her husband realized he had an Achilles heel: He couldn’t ask people for money, even for a church building.

Then, after learning that then Kettering Hospital, which was affiliated with the church, had no openings, Stauffer had to find a way to make a living.

He decided to approach then Clark County Municipal Court Judges Gerald Lorig and Richard Cole if they wanted to form a probation department.

Mrs. Stauffer remembers him saying: “I can still help people straighten out their lives.”

The judges made him an offer, Stauffer made them a counter offer, and in 1972, he founded the office in which he would spend more than 36 years.

Stauffer died July 1, 2008, aged 74, and was buried a year ago today.

Reaching out

Judge David Mattes said Stauffer had “had a real interest” and “a good personal relationship” with the court-involved people he worked with.

And if his ability to ask for money from others was limited, said Linda Avery, a department secretary who worked with him for 23 straight years, Stauffer’s capacity for giving was not.

“He reached out to everybody, not just the defendants, but also co-workers and just people in the community.”

Often he did so with the trade skills his father had insisted he learn.

“I’m not sure there’s anybody in the court that he didn’t fix something in their house,” said Judge Eugene Nevius.

Neighbor Dick Rice, who ran an insurance agency, said Stauffer used the same skills to help Rice work during the summers on the Phi Gamma Delta fraternity house at Wittenberg University. The fraternity made him an honorary member.

Stauffer also worked with Rice to rebuild a utility shed for a recent widow whose $500 insurance deductible wouldn’t cover it.

“It became an all-weekend project, and we got $50 for it,” Rice said.

“If he could provide financially or with his abilities as an electrician, carpenter, plumber,” Rice said, “he would do it.”

There also were grittier aspects to Stauffer’s giving.

His wife remembers him pulling over on Ohio 235 just south of New Carlisle to stop a man who was pushing a woman around.

Stauffer sent the man on his way, drove the woman to her home and “saved her from getting a beating,” Mrs. Stauffer said.

The same part of Stauffer’s makeup led the longtime jogger to turn the tables on a neighborhood nuisance to comic effect.

“There was a neighborhood dog that liked chasing people,” Rice said, “and one day he ended up chasing the dog.”

Little things

Ken Brown, who now directs the department Stauffer founded, said “it’s the small things I missed most” about his friend.

“Fred would come in the morning and be the first one here, letting you in, greeting you,” he said. There would follow the required comments about the Bengals, which players he liked and which he thought were bums.

With payday every other week, Stauffer ritually called the off weeks pass over day, then “on payday, he always wore a special tie.”

When the department organized a tribute for him in April, the plaque they made shows Stauffer wearing one of his special ties.

Saying Stauffer was “almost like an old football coach” to the department, Brown said “his ability to work with people” and “keen insight into a lot of folks’ dilemmas” were remarkable.

His last note to the staff thanked them for helping him when he needed it, invited them to have a lunch at his expense and ended with the words “your grateful friend.”

A final visit

Months after her husband’s death, Mrs. Stauffer returned to a place her husband had discovered while traveling back roads to Indian Lake on fishing trips.

The first time they stopped at the Amish or Mennonite family’s roadside stand, the Stauffers bought some cookies, and seeing the number of children on the farm, he left more money than was required.

It soon became a regular stop. Even when the stand was closed, “we would drive back the big lane, and she’d come running out,” Mrs. Stauffer said.

Thinking the woman might wonder why the visits had stopped, Mrs. Stauffer decided to make a return trip.

“I took the obituary along, and I gave her a copy,” Mrs. Stauffer said. “She cried and I cried.”

Following tradition, “I gave her some money, too.”

The woman told her “I was always sure he was an angel from God.”

As for Stauffer himself?

It seems likely he would have claimed he was only a probation officer from Springfield who took the job because he couldn’t ask other people for money.

Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368 or tstafford@coxohio.com.

Share this article