Jack Sidler Sr. said that when he was a teenager, he wanted to be a Presbyterian minister, but it turned out he was cut from a different cloth.
The 71-year-old is the new priest at St. John Catholic Church in Russellville.
“I grew up Presbyterian, and in my middle-teenage years, I seriously thought I wanted to be a Presbyterian minister but did not receive a lot of encouragement from anyone,” he said.
Sidler was born in California, and his family moved to Van Buren when he was 5 years old. His mother was a homemaker, and his father was a “body and fender man.”
It wasn’t that his parents wanted to discourage him from being a pastor, but they were worried, he said.
“My parents were noncollege-educated. All they could see is their son going off to college and what it would cost,” he said. “Instead of encouraging a dream they didn’t think they could fulfill, they just didn’t say anything.”
In 1962, Sidler graduated from Van Buren High School on a Friday and went to the Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island in South Carolina on Monday. He fulfilled his active duty in North Carolina, then came back to Van Buren. He got a job at the morning newspaper, where he was responsible for putting in corrections and learned to hand-set type, which also gave him the unique skill of being able to read “upside down and sideways,” he said with a laugh.
The newspaper is also where he met his wife, Dee, who is now deceased. She came to the newspaper one night to wait on her roommate, who worked there, to get off work.
Dee was Catholic, and Sidler converted to Catholicism in May 1964, before the couple married in June.
“I asked her, ‘Would you marry a non-Catholic?’ She said, ‘I don’t think so.’ I did not become Catholic to get married. I became Catholic because I felt like that was the most sure way I was going to obtain salvation,’” he said.
“I talk about my faith life as childlike, Presbyterian, heathen, then Catholic,” Sidler said.
Sidler said he had dated Catholics when he was in the military, attended Mass with friends and met weekly with a priest for nine months to go through the Baltimore Catechism before making his decision to convert.
He left the newspaper after a year to work at American Printing, a job shop that printed business cards and letterhead. When that business slowed down, Sidler started his long and winding career in the food industry — big companies such as Gerber, Burger King and Kentucky Fried Chicken, now known simply as KFC.
He first worked in quality control for Gerber baby food in Fort Smith, where he also took classes at what was then Westark Community College and is now the University of Arkansas-Fort Smith. From there, he went to Morton Frozen Foods in Russellville so he could attend Arkansas Tech University. He graduated in 1973 with a degree in biology and a minor in business.
The couple’s two sons, Jeff and Jack, attended St. John Catholic School in Russellville.
“I wound up in Miami, Florida, with Burger King running a product-testing lab,” Sidler said. He oversaw the building of the product-testing lab and the test kitchen. At that time, he said, all the items that went into a Burger King restaurant — from Coke cups to dill-pickle slices — were tested to make sure they met specifications.
Sidler said that from his eighth-floor office, he looked north over the Palmetto Expressway.
“I had a nicer office than the president of Burger King,” he said.
The fast-paced lifestyle of Miami wasn’t where he and his wife wanted to raise their children, he said, so they came back to Fort Smith. He worked for OK Foods in quality assurance and research and development, and from there went to Kentucky Fried Chicken as senior quality-assurance representative. He was responsible for 210 nonpoultry processing plants and distribution centers, and he traveled extensively.
Although he and his wife were content in Fort Smith, a friend told him about a job at Popeyes Fried Chicken and Biscuits (now Popeyes Louisiana Kitchen) in Atlanta, and he got it. He was the majority director of quality assurance.
“The children were out of the house. We could go out to dinner, and we made a lot of friends,” he said. “Atlanta is such a fabulous town for entertainment and restaurants and things.”
Sidler said his wife wanted to move back to Fort Smith to be closer to their grown children and their grandchildren. Sidler — with quite the resume — was hired as director of technical services for Pepper Source in Fort Smith.
Their homecoming was marred, however. Dee was diagnosed with lung cancer in 2005, and Sidler said Pepper Source could not have been a better company to work for during that difficult time.
“They were just fantastic, and anytime I needed to do something and there was a conflict, they’d tell me take off — ‘Do what you need.’ As a company, they were a true blessing to me in this,” he said.
Sidler retired in March 2008, and his wife died in November 2008.
“I did not want to go back into the food business,” he said. “I did not feel that I could be as productive an employee after her death as I was before; it kind of took the starch out of me.”
In January 2009, he decided to attend a “silent directed retreat,” using Ignatian spirituality, that was held at St. Scholastica in Fort Smith.
“You don’t talk,” he said. “You have a spiritual director you meet with sometimes twice a day, and that’s when you talk, … and at lunch, you meet as a group and you can talk.
“I actually went to it just to get out of the house,” he said. “I didn’t have any great spiritual reason; I just wanted to do something different. I became very interested in spiritual direction and especially Ignatian spirituality and Ignatius spiritual exercises. It was kind of like awakening.”
After that, Sidler went to Retreat in Daily Life at St. Scholastica and did the Ignatian exercises spread over seven months.
“They ask you to meditate/pray an hour a day, and I started doing this,” Sidler said. “About halfway through it, I started having a desire to do more. I had gone and volunteered as a pastoral aide at Mercy Hospital in Fort Smith. I also was doing the theology institute in Little Rock,” which offered college courses in theology one weekend a month. “One day I was sitting in the [Catholic] church in Barling (the church he attended). I basically said to God, ‘I’ll do what you ask me to do. I don’t do subtle very well; you’ll have to make it plain to me.’”
Sidler said a feeling washed over him that felt like a “warm gentle rain.”
“I thought, ‘I want to be on the other side of the altar. I want to be able to celebrate the Mass, consecrate the body and blood of Christ, and I want to be able to hear confessions. I want to be a Catholic priest.’”
This was in 2009, and he contacted a vocations director for a diocese and asked, “Can a 66-year-old man go to seminary and be a Catholic priest?”
“He said, ‘Yes, maybe.’ I never asked him what the maybe meant. He’s got a very good wit about him,” Sidler said. “His point was, we’re never promised anything.”
In 2011, Sidler started attending Sacred Heart Seminary and School of Theology in Hales Corner, Wisconsin, “and they showed me my lovely 10-by-12 room,” he said. The average age of the students was 47, he said. “It was a good place to educate second-vocation priests. We would sometimes laugh at younger guys, thinking, ‘Oh, lordy, you’ve got a lot to learn.’”
He graduated Dec. 5, 2014, and was ordained as a priest at Subiaco on Dec. 20. He was assigned as an associate pastor at Christ the King in Little Rock on Jan. 1, but the bishop assigned Sidler to St. John Catholic Church on April 21 as priest and administrator.
“Although I don’t have a ‘pastor’ title, I do everything the pastor does, and after a year and I’m a good boy, I get the title ‘pastor,’” he said.
Sidler said he does not regret the years he spent in his former career.
“It gave me such a broad education of the food business,” he said. “I was a lot younger, and it was exciting, and it paid well. I met different people constantly. I’m still not good with names. I learn faces a whole lot quicker than I do names.”
His background in the food industry might not seem to matter in being a priest, but he said it was good training.
“It teaches you not to be rigid. It teaches you to think through what’s going on around you. It helps you learn to make good decisions and to process information in an orderly manner. One day, you may be checking the paper manufacturer; the next day, dill-pickle slices,” he said. “You’ve got to be able not only to assimilate the information; you’ve got to put yourself where you are. As a priest, I run into different situations constantly. It doesn’t shock me or scare me or make me nervous to be placed in different situations. I know I can, in fact, function in that environment. It makes you independent. As I say, it separates the chaff from the wheat pretty quickly.”
As an observer, Sidler said, he has watched the teachers at St. John Catholic School.
“I’m very much impressed by how teachers and students interact and the attitude of our teaching staff,” he said. “Our teachers have smiles on their faces, and you can see the kids smile back at the teachers and see the things you really like to see in good people relationships.”
Being in the ministry is better than he imagined, he said.
“You have an expectation of what the experience is going to be like; then one day you’re sitting there, and it dawns on you how happy you are. You say, ‘Wow, this experience is much more than I anticipated.’ When I get ready to say Mass, yes, there’s still a little nervousness there, but it’s a peaceful nervousness. This is not my vocation; it’s God’s vocation. I’m here to do the earthly business, so to speak.
“It’s different than it is in the business world where you’re asked to make a profit. It’s so much more of a peaceful, pleasurable experience. It’s all about the people. How can I best bring the word of God to the people of this parish? God’s the person doing it — I’m just his spokesman, OK? It’s so humbling, but it’s so exciting. It’s just a wonderful, wonderful experience.”
Senior writer Tammy Keith can be reached at (501) 327-0370 or tkeith@arkansasonline.com.