Sun City resident remembers late friend

For decades the official Sun City motto was “The City of Volunteers.” But one man took those words more seriously than anyone else since the founding of this city nearly 70 years ago. His name was John Schumacher.

John moved to Sun City after 65 years of living in Indiana. A few years after he arrived, one day he walked through the doors of Recorded Recreational Reading for the Blind and asked if they could use his services.

During his years as an undergraduate at Notre Dame University, John had been a radio announcer for WSND, the Student Voice of Notre Dame. After he graduated he spent three years as the station manager of WHFS FM radio station in South Bend. But “station manager” doesn’t quite catch all of what John did for that radio station. He did everything, from hiring to announcing to writing to fixing tech problems. He became the station.

But in 1959 John’s father made him an offer he couldn’t refuse: a job moving up the ladder at his father’s construction company, Schumacher Sons Inc, which had been founded half a century earlier by John’s grandfather. Eventually, John became president of the company. And then in 1979 the company shut down and John went to work as director of operations for Old Indiana Amusement Park, where he remained until he retired in 1997. 

Shortly after, John moved to Sun City, and a few years later he walked in the door of RRRB and asked if they could use his services.  So, for the next quarter of a century, John put in 40 to 50 hours a week as a volunteer. He worked as hard as he ever did for money, but as a lover of old-time radio and radio stations in general, he was now doing the work he had always dreamed of doing. 

As with his previous jobs, John was soon doing everything: announcing, creating programs, writing scripts, hiring volunteers—scores of them before he was done—working as an audio engineer, fixing everything that went wrong. His first task was to take RRRB’s large bare room from a bench with tape recorders on it to a professional studio with three sound-proof booths for recording all of RRRB’s many weekly programs. In a word, John became the hands and heart and soul of RRRB.

Such was the man I met on a spring day in 2021 when, like John two decades earlier, I walked in RRRB’s door and asked if they needed any volunteer readers. For the next four years John was my only audio engineer—and as such he solved every problem that ever came up—and over our four years of working together, I saw first-hand that John was not only the hands and heart and soul of RRRB, he was surely the greatest volunteer in the history of this City of Volunteers.

Together John and I recorded some 200 or so programs. At first I read my own essays and chapters from my books in a program called “Readings by Mel. After two years John asked me to do a second program called “Your Life” in which I interviewed interesting people about their lives. John seemed to take as much joy from those interviews as I and the interviewee did. He was especially fond of the interview with a world-class gate-crasher, the two interviews with Arizona Supreme Court Justices, and the raucous interview with Love Boat trumpeter Dan Reed. At times John was not just the recording engineer but he became a part of the interview. 

Then two years ago I proposed a third program called “Music & Memories,” in which I was a disk jockey for either one performer or for music with a certain theme each week. As we recorded each program I could look through the glass window of the booth and see John glowing: he loved the music I was playing and the history behind that music. 

It felt like we would go like that on forever. But that illusion came to an end in November, 2025 when John was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. That month his beloved daughter Jennifer brought him back home to his family in Indiana. On Feb. 14, John celebrated his 92nd birthday with all his family around him. 

I last heard from John when he sent me a long e-mail letter Aug. 14. To that letter he attached his book-length autobiography, which he had written mostly for the sake of his family. It is worth sharing a few things from that book. After his family, John’s second greatest devotion was to Notre Dame University, where he had been a student from 1952-56. During those years and his high school years John and his brother served as altar boys for the most famous university president in the United States, Fr. Theodore Hesburgh. John’s father’s construction company built several of the university’s buildings, including the original Athletic and Convocation Center known as the Joyce Center, which John himself was in charge of. 

John lived and breathed Notre Dame. In the 200 times I was in John’s company he was never without some article of clothing with a Notre Dame logo: shirts, hats, pants, sweaters, jackets, shoes, belt buckles: at least one item always showed the world his love for Notre Dame. 

On Sept. 11, less than a month after John’s letter to me, John left this life. He had become one of my dearest friends in Sun City—but he was far more than that: he was a deeply good man who gave himself entirely to family, friends, RRRB, and Notre Dame. 

Upon learning of John’s death, one of my fellow volunteers at RRRB, Gary Cohen, wrote to me: “I will forever remember the smile John gave to me and my wife Enid whenever we came to the office. John filled our minds with knowledge and our hearts with immense joy. He had a great sense of humor and an equally great love of life and Notre Dame football. To quote the lyrics of a Tim McGraw song, John is ‘in a better place, where soldiers live in peace and Angels sing Amazing Grace.’"

Another volunteer, Tod Pickett (who in John’s absence this past spring took John’s place as my recording engineer), wrote to me: “John and I hit it off the first time we met, largely over our shared love of old-time radio and our experiences working at stations. John gave unfailingly of himself to make sure that programs for KRUV and the Valley Talking News were of the utmost quality. As you know, he would put in all sorts of hours working at the station, often long after everyone else had gone home. What I'll remember most about John was his kindness towards others, and the stories he shared with me, always with a twinkle in his eye. I'm honored to continue his work with KRUV.”

At the end of one of my last recording sessions this past May, Tod (now my engineer replacing John) said to me, “You may not know it, Mel, but you were probably the highlight of John’s week.” I think of those words often because it was the highest compliment anyone ever paid me during my eight years in Sun City, such was the esteem I held John in.

In honor of John’s deep goodness and his quarter-century-long dedication to RRRB, I am going to make a donation to RRRB. Perhaps others who knew John and readers of these words will want to do so too. Donations can be sent to RRRB, 9447 N. 99th Ave. May my friend and Sun City’s greatest volunteer be with the angels singing “Amazing Grace.”