John "Jack" Robert Leax

Houghton --- John Robert Leax, Jr., 81, died with family at his side on September 1, 2024, at the Roswell Park Comprehensive Cancer Center in Buffalo.

Known as “Jack” to his friends and “Professor Leax” (or simply “Leax”) to over four decades of college students, he will be remembered for countless acts of kindness and a uniquely wry sense of humor. Although he spent his career in academia, Jack routinely brushed aside pretense and poked fun at anything pompous. For years he kept a small wooden shoe on his office desk and when asked about it would explain that the shoe was called a “sabot” (related to the word “sabotage”) and that in the past workers who felt their jobs were threatened by automation would toss their wooden shoes into the machinery to stop up the gears. The small shoe on Jack’s desk represented his warning to all bureaucratic nonsense: he was ready to fight back and had the means of doing so.

He centered his life on the things that mattered to him, first of all loving and caring for his wife, Linda, with whom he was married for over fifty-seven years, and their daughter, Melissa.

His lifelong passion for literature and writing began in high school after he wrote his first “real” poem. As he later recalled in a book of essays, that first poem came to him as an impulse to explore a set of complicated emotions he felt at the end of a high school wrestling match. Though Jack won the contest, he didn’t feel like celebrating his victory because he’d noticed how dejected the boy who’d lost to him appeared.

Jack went on to study literature at Wheaton College in Illinois and Houghton College in Houghton, where he earned a bachelor's degree. After receiving a master’s degree from the Writing Workshops at Johns Hopkins University, Jack returned to Houghton as a faculty member in the English and Writing Department, working alongside some of his former professors. He taught from 1968-2009 and served as Houghton College’s writer-in-residence. During these years he lived in nearby Fillmore, on 19 Torpey Street, where he kept a backyard garden that delighted visitors, especially ones who saw it grow over the years to include not just flowers and vegetables but also a small pond and a writer’s cabin that Jack built from rescued lumber. He wrote over a dozen books and explored the most profound questions of religious faith, marriage, family, community life, and environmental stewardship.

Besides his wife, daughter, and son-in-law, Guy Stevens, Jack is survived by his brother, Ron, and sister, Linda.

A funeral service will be held on Saturday, September 14, 2024, at 2:00 pm in the Houghton Wesleyan Church, 9712 Route 19, Houghton. Rev Dr. Wesley Oden will officiate.