As we face our inevitable mortality, we wonder how we’ll be remembered. Will it be positive? Will our life have made a difference?
For those who knew Judge John T. Cripps III who passed away last Tuesday, there’s no question.
Cripps was a Sallisaw attorney for almost 50 years. He served as municipal judge, at one time or another, for virtually every town or city in the area. He was an associate district judge for both the Cherokee Nation and the Creek Nation. He served on the board of directors for Sallisaw Memorial Hospital/Northeastern Health System Sequoyah for more than 40 years, almost all of those as chairman.
But it was a four-year period on the other side of the globe that best described him. While few knew his history from 1968-72, surely no one would disagree that two key words — “America’s best,” from the 1966 song “Ballad of the Green Berets” — could have been written with Cripps in mind.
In an interview for Your TIMES as Operation Desert Shield was winding down in January 1991, it was revealed that Cripps served as a Green Beret with a U.S. Army Ranger company in Vietnam’s Delta, about five miles from the Cambodian border. Upon his discharge from military service, he held the rank of captain.
But like so much of his life, privacy he zealously guarded, he rarely spoke of his time in Southeast Asia. After all, there was so much more — just as important, if not more so — that he did in eastern Oklahoma that defined him and made an indelible mark on his life, as well as the lives of others.
And his passing has left a void with those who knew him best.
“When I got on the hospital board, I thought John was tough and maybe even on the mean side,” recalls Todd Martin, current chairman of the board for NHS Sequoyah. “But after some time, I realized he has a soft heart and a great understanding of taking care of people.
“I thoroughly enjoyed the time that I served with him on the board, and respected his decisions and his convictions. Through that time period, we became good friends.
“I will truly miss John Cripps,” Martin says.
For Amy Pace, director of prevention services for Sallisaw NOW Coalition, her first interaction on a professional level with Cripps was memorable … for all the wrong reasons.
“I got introduced to Judge Cripps on April 2, 2012. It was our first night of a new court program in Sallisaw called city juvenile court. We would meet once a month with those under 18 [who were] arrested in the city limits, and I, as the advocate, would find them community service and other programs to do in lieu of having to pay the fine,” Pace recalls.
“I walked in so unsure of any type of court system or what to expect, and I was eight months pregnant with my son, Koleman, at the time. The first thing Judge Cripps asked me when he sat down was, ‘Do you have any recs?’
“I started to panic and said, ‘Ummm, yes, I mean, I’ve had a few small fender benders and a couple of speeding tickets.’
“He just looked at me and laughed. ‘No, I mean do you have any recommendations for what we’re going to have these kids do as punishment?’” Despite, or possibly because of, that inauspicious beginning, Cripps and Pace formed a bond that spanned the next dozen years.
“Month after month for the last 12-plus years, we’ve met. Except for a few times when he got ill back in 2018, he never missed,” Pace says. “We’d catch up on life, kids, travels and all the things about which kid on our docket was charged with what and so on.
“Judge has been someone that I knew I could always count on, but not someone I talked to often, because those who know him well knew he was very private.
“WhenIwentthrough a divorce, he was the first one I reached out to, asking questions and terrified about what to do,” she reveals. “When I got married, he was genuinely happy for me, so much so that our last conversation was just this month at court. When I sat down, the first thing he said was, ‘You know, you really got a good guy. I’m so happy for you and those boys.’
“Anytime we’d talk or I had a question and needed advice, he would tell me, ‘Amy Faye, I’ll always be in your corner’,” Pace says. In considering how best to describe Cripps, Pace says it’s difficult for her to put into words his personality, but the adjectives she uses are spot-on.
“Proud, private, fierce, stern, caring and genuine. Those are just a few,” she says.
And she already knows there’s plenty she’ll miss about Cripps.
“I’ll miss giving him his yearly Christmas card and getting his message thanking me and wishing my boys and me a Merry Christmas. I’ll miss discussing what trip he or I had coming up to look forward to. I’ll miss the inside jokes and laughs.
“But I promise to make sure your legacy in juvenile court goes on, Judge,” Pace pledges.
“After every kid completed their sentence and would come back the following month, Judge would tell them good job on completing and ‘going forward, I want to see your name in the paper, but only for good things — honor roll, graduation, things like that.’
“He’s just really important to me,” she says. “I’ll miss you, Judge.”
So will so many others.
