Andrew Jackson Obituary

Andrew Jackson, affectionately known to family and friends as "Bill", died Oct. 10 at Durango's Mercy Medical Hospital after a stroke and head injuries from a subsequent fall. Andrew was born in 1923 near Sapulpa, Oklahoma. His parents were Robert Jackson and Bertha Ryder. In the late 1930's he moved with his father and two older brothers to the Montrose area where he briefly lived before moving to Colorado Springs. There he met Ruth Doubt and they married April 21,1942. Andrew had earlier become associated with Jehovah's Witnesses and his religion and faith became his lifelong devotion. His new faith was put to the test when around 1940, the police chief of Colorado Springs, who was very hostile toward the preaching work of Jehovah's Witnesses, arrested and jailed Andrew and his companion, Carl Donley, for their door-to-door witnessing. To the chief's consternation, bail was posted by W.D. Corley, builder of the Corley Mountain Highway, now known as the Gold Camp Road connecting Colorado Springs with Cripple Creek. Corley's wife Emma was a Witness and so he was sympathetic to the situation. The case was appealed through three courts until on August 9, 1941 in Donley v. City of Colorado Springs the Federal District Court in Denver ordered the city to restrain from applying their restrictive ordinance to the distribution of religious literature. After the war in 1946 Andrew and Ruth attended the Watchtower Bible School of Gilead for missionaries at South Lansing, New York. They then served as missionaries in Cochabamba, Bolivia until 1950. His sisters Betty and Mary were also missionaries in Bolivia during this time. In 1950 Andrew and Ruth returned to Colorado Springs to raise a family--their son Curtis, and daughter, Karen. For most of 19 years Andrew served as an elder in the first congregation of Jehovah's Witnesses to be established in Colorado Springs, then located at West 18th St. He helped to establish their second congregation in 1955, then located on Vermijo Ave, serving as its first Congregation Servant from 1955 to '57. During the 1960's he was the regional director for the Witnesses' public relations department to the news media. A memorable example of his work was to make a counterpoint to the "God is Dead" philosophy of the sixties. He arranged to have Witnesses from the Colorado Springs area assemble on the sloping hillside of a local park and then spell out "God is Alive." The photo and article were published in the Gazette Telegraph and Pueblo Chieftain. Andrew loved Colorado, but was not too fond of Colorado winters and yearned to live in a warmer climate, so in 1969 Andrew, Ruth, and daughter Karen moved to St. Thomas, U.S. Virgin Islands, a place he truly loved and enjoyed and really all of the Caribbean for that matter. Still desiring to make an active contribution to one of the St. Thomas congregations they took their Bolivian Spanish and served a spanish speaking congregation for the Puerto Rican residents of St. Thomas. Eventually Andrew and Ruth retired to Farmington, New Mexico, to live closer to their son. During those years of quiet retirement he was known for his picture perfect home landscaping and carpentry. His final year of life was at his son's home in Durango and the new senior citizen center at East Animas Village Dr. in Durango. Throughout his life he had a love for astronomy and the natural world, being an avid reader of anything on those subjects. He had a knowledge of geography second to none and he loved to travel--every state but Alaska and much of the world. His mother-in-law not so fondly once remarked that if there were a tourist sight to be seen within 50 miles a detour had to be made to see it. The one great grief of his life was the loss of his daughter Karen to breast cancer in 1994. Years later he told his daughter-in-law that he still thought of Karen every day. Andrew was preceded in death by his brothers Raymond and Peter, daughter Karen, and grandson Anand. He is survived by his wife Ruth of 69 years, his son and daughter-in-law Curtis and Anitra Jackson of Durango, his son-in-law Muliyil Shridhar of Las Vegas, his sister Betty Jackson of Patterson, N.Y., sister Mary Seelye of Tulsa, Oklahoma, and sister Fern Penn of Bristow, Oklahoma as well as nieces and nephews. A memorial service will be held on Saturday, Oct. 22, 2:00 PM at the Durango Kingdom Hall of Jehovah's Witnesses. Andrew rested his trust in life again with Jehovah's promise of a resurrection for all mankind during the Thousand Year Reign of Christ. "If an able-bodied man dies can he live again? All the days of my compulsory labor I shall wait, until my relief comes. You will call, and I myself shall answer you. For the work of your hands you will have a yearning." Job 14:14,15. NWT