By Father Timothy Gollob
Special to The Texas Catholic
I have been thinking about Ecclesiastes 3 a good bit lately. “There is an appointed time for everything…a time to be born, and a time to die…a time to keep and a time to lose.” This meditation was occasioned by the illness of my older brother, Michael David.
He had a time to be born in 1933, about 18 months before my arrival into the J.S. and Mary Lois Gollob family.
That made him my big brother. He probably liked that designation at times, but I am sure that he got tired of his little brother on occasions. I looked to him as the leader in my life for many years. Where he went, I went. What he did, I did. We were in the Cub Scouts at the same time and then we were in the Boy Scouts of America Troop 333 at Immaculate Conception Catholic Church. He started to collect postage stamps and so did I.
During the summer, we went to the local Hillside Park in Tyler for recreational softball and ping pong. We went out on picnics and fishing at Mud Creek with our grandmother and great aunt. We competed in the midget and junior midget swim meets at Fun Forest. At nights, we wandered the hot-top asphalt streets looking for “shooting stars.”
There were times when Mike wanted to make a bit of loose change by various enterprises; e.g. selling cabbages and onions door to door, helping out on the local Coca Cola delivery truck, or selling soda pop at the summer rodeo. I was his partner.
Most folks knew us as Mike and Tim.
Then we had the great blessing of a Catholic school for Tyler. Msgr. Vincent J. Wolf was the proud superintendent of the school. He wanted a football team the first year. Mike was in the ninth grade and I was in the eighth that first year. During our first real game in Msgr. Wolf’s hometown of Texarkana, Mike (being tall) reached up and one-handed caught a pass from his friend and quarterback, Richard Dutke. That was the only highlight of the game for the St. Gregory Wolverines!
Then college time came around. Mike went to North Texas in Denton. The next year I had graduated from Tyler High and was pondering a college career. My classmate, Thomas Merriweather Long, had considered a possible call to the seminary, but he had decided to go a different path. He asked me if maybe I might have a vocation. I was unsure so I asked Mike for advice. He said, “Give it a try.”
Later it was time for Michael to serve in the Army; then he gained a CPA certificate; next he got in the farming and petroleum and accounting businesses, and then he finally found the love of his life in LaVerne. That was a very good thing for both of them.
And in these latter day times when sickness entered his life, he was supported in a very beautiful and spiritual manner by his family, by his friends and by the clergy of the Immaculate Conception Cathedral in Tyler.
Now Michael David is with the great company of saints and angels with the Good Shepherd, who is the one that we all will be wanting one of these times to come.
———
Michael David Gollob, brother of Father Timothy Gollob, passed away Nov. 30.
The founder and president of the CPA firm Gollob, Morgan Peddy & Company, he is survived by Father Gollob, a wife, daughter, son, grandson and sister.
Funeral services were held Dec. 4 at the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception in Tyler.
Father Timothy Gollob is the pastor of Holy Cross Catholic Church in Oak Cliff.
