JOHN EDMUND ORR

Longtime Fort Worth resident John Edmund Orr died Thursday, November 13, 2025. He was 97.

He did not grow up in easy times. At the start of the Great Depression, on Black Monday, October 28, 1929, he was 1; when the Great Depression turned into World War II he turned into an adolescent; in his 18th year was he when the war finally ended on September 2, 1945. But on the various farms where he would spend much of his youth, including his father’s farm near Bryan, he would often break free of the hard times by losing himself in the riches of nature, and it would actually be the hard times that would gift him three of the most valuable traits he would possess – resourcefulness, resilience, and a capacity for hard work.

One of his first jobs was as a United States Crop Corps agricultural worker hand-harvesting 95 acres of milo by himself on a sweltering farm near Coleman the summer he turned 14; one of his last was as executive vice president of an international window company; among the many in between was that of managing his father’s feed store while he was overseas in his capacity as a United States Department of Agriculture economist assisting South Korea in rebuilding its agricultural industry after the Korean War.

He was born in Dallas on July 23, 1928, to Dorothy Louise Bryarly and William Bassett Orr. He was their only son.

He was not the only nonagenarian in his family. There were many, and on his mother’s side were also multiple centenarians, including her only sibling, a sister who lived to be 103, and their paternal grandmother, who also lived to be 103. He was fascinated to learn about his ancestors on both sides of his family; on his father’s side he was a descendant of many of the first families of Virginia, including the Harrison family of Berkeley Plantation, Charles City County, Virginia, the Bassett family of Eltham Plantation, New Kent County, Virginia, and the family of George Washington’s mother, Mary Ball. She was his first cousin many times removed.

His earliest memory was of a fatal plane crash on his paternal grandfather’s farm.

His paternal grandfather was also named John Orr, and to him he was as close as he was to anybody, often staying with him in the summertime sleeping on an Irish-green sleeping porch.

When he was a boy, he was always changing schools because of the itinerant nature of his father’s job. They would move not just from one city to another but also from one state to another, sometimes even in the middle of the academic year.

On his first day at Lubbock High School, when he transferred in as a junior, he won several instant friends for standing up to a bully named Bud. Not 12 months later, however, when he was a wingback on the football team and had many friends, his parents informed him they were moving again. He decided he would not move again; he would stay in Lubbock without them by boarding with a family they knew.

At Texas A&M he was a student leader. In his junior year he was class president; in his senior year he was a senator at-large and the executive officer of the 7,500-man Corps of Cadets. He also had the distinction of being just one of two student escorts to Audie Murphy when he came to A&M amid much fanfare during the weekend of the 1949 Military Ball as the most decorated combat soldier in American history.

In June 1949 he was awarded his bachelor’s degree in animal husbandry and his ROTC commission in the United States Air Force; in June 1950, with the start of the Korean War, he began his own stint in the armed forces by enrolling in flying school at Williams Air Force Base outside Chandler, Arizona, with 59 other student pilots. They trained on a very early jet fighter, the straight-wing F-84A Thunderjet, and he would become one of two in his class chosen for deep-penetration photographic reconnaissance. Instead of guns and bombs, his jet fighter would be armed with cameras. The enemy could shoot at him, but he could not shoot back – and the enemy would shoot at him.

He flew 100 missions in the war, rising from second to first lieutenant and earning two presidential citations and two medals, including the Distinguished Flying Cross; when his tour of duty was up, he remained in the Air Force as part of a special squadron at the air base in Amarillo ferrying P-47s to various countries in Central and South America to also protect them against the spread of totalitarianism.

The girl he was in love with was Diane Broiles of Fort Worth, an English major at SMU, and much of their courtship would occur on the days when a P-47 run would take him through Love Field just four miles from SMU. He would give her his flying schedule in advance, then alert her to his arrival by buzzing her sorority. They would get married on October 3, 1953, in the church she grew up in, and for the last 56 years of their 72-year marriage they would live in a two-story stone house on a hill above the Fort Worth Zoo barely a mile from where they were married, and always would they be each other’s safe harbor.

Eventually his passion for flying morphed into an even deeper passion for sailing; it was on the water that he felt the absolute freest. He would own three sloops – the Cindera, the Blue Dolphin, and the Eleanor O’Neill – plus a glorious wooden dinghy he built in his basement, the Captain Jack – all of which he kept at Eagle Mountain Lake, where for many years he was a member of the Fort Worth Boat Club. One of his favorite days at Eagle Mountain Lake each year was an annual regatta and hamburger cookout he helped organize at the Fort Worth Boat Club for area residents with intellecual disabilities, and also especially gratifying to him were the many voyages he sailed on the open sea as well, including in the Gulf of Mexico, the Sea of Cortez, the Caribbean Sea, and the Atlantic Ocean.

Also morphing into something else was his aptitude for aerial photography for the military; it morphed into an affinity for civilian photography with his feet on the ground. The photographs he took as a civilian, however, had the unordinary quality of always being in black and white. He had a particular fondness for still-life photography; he would sometimes stop in the middle of nowhere to photograph something, and magically would the images materialize in plastic developing trays in the murky red light of a dark room he built on the east side of his basement.

He was also a longtime member of St. Francis Presbyterian Church, where always richly mixed in with the teachings of Jesus were the humanist ideas of philosophers and psychologists like Pierre Teilhard, Paul Tillich, and Abraham Maslow. He was a leading participant in many of the activities of the church, including many of its study groups. And he was also an elder of the church, a member of its governing board.

What got him out of both the feed-store business and the cattle business was the Great Drought in Texas and a job offer at Bert Tolbert Machinery in Fort Worth designing and selling agricultural irrigation equipment. He also worked at Texas Steel Products in Arlington as manager of their line of feed equipment, and for three decades would he be in window manufacturing, first as a manager at Superior Standards Co. and Anadite Inc. and then as an executive officer at Hehr International.

When still at Hehr, he went back to school at age 60, earning a master’s in organizational development at American University, and for many years after his retirement from Hehr he worked as an organizational-development consultant for various local organizations, including MHMR of Tarrant County.

He had his share of distinctive qualities, like most people, and many of his were born of his agricultural and military heritage. In the 1970s he would be the only father at the ballgame or at Back-to-School Night in a pair of saddle-soaped lace-up Red Wing work boots. If he needed his children to come home before the streetlights came on, instead of crisscrossing the neighborhood by foot calling for them by name, he would take just a few steps outside, insert two fingers in his mouth, and let out a whistle loud enough to shatter the sky, and immediately would they come running. He stood apart from others in the precise way he would clean a rifle, in the precise way he would shine a pair of dress shoes, in the precise way he would dig a grave for a dog, the high walls as vertical as if carved by a machine. He was the only person his children knew who would drown his pancakes in sorghum molasses; he was the only homeowner in Park Hill with a substantial food crop growing in his back yard. And what also set him apart from others was the martinet side to his personality, his characteristic sternness, especially in the face of delinquent behavior.

Always a martinet, however, he was not. In fact, in the absence of delinquent behavior he could be thoughtful and tender and even indulgent, particularly with his wife and their children. At bedtime he would rock his children to sleep to the whine of his harmonica; on weekends he would make them waffles or pancakes for breakfast while whistling “It’s a Long Road to Freedom” or “Today” or another favorite song. In the evening when he came home from work, as they came running up to greet him, he would put down his very serious Samsonite briefcase and pick them up by turns, playfully tossing them from the floor to the ceiling. With delicious homemade vanilla milkshakes would he soften the hurt of their physical injuries; with an old Army satchel bulging with delicious chocolate candy bars would he banish the bleakness of a freezing-cold deer stand when hunting with one of his sons.

He was also very good at teaching his children some of life’s most important lessons. From him they would learn it wasn’t money that defined a person’s worth; it was their character. Character was the single most important quality in any person.

Among his survivors are his wife, Diane Orr; their five children, the Rev. Jan Orr-Harter, Dr. John David Orr, Bill Orr, Beth Gandy, and Tom Orr; one son-in-law, Tom Harter; three daughters-in-law, Susan Ayres, Susannah Touzel, and Robin Huston; eight grandchildren, Neysa Joseph-Orr, Jack Harter, Daniel Orr, Katie Orr, Della Orr-Harter Jensen, Henry Orr, Ben Orr, and Harper Orr; one sister, Elizabeth Bassett Thompson; and three nieces and three nephews. He was preceded in death by his older sister, Ann Grant; one son-in-law, Bill W. Gandy; and two nephews.

A private memorial service will be scheduled for a later date.