John Marvin Bunton

John Marvin Bunton was born in El Paso, Texas, in 1937.  John believed that from birth God helped him make good choices.  To begin with, John chose stellar parents who loved him and taught him Christian values. During WWII, he lived on the Bunton Ranch in Magdalena, New Mexico while his father served in the US Army. His grandmother and grandfather taught him the value of planting trees, conserving water and caring for the land.  When he was 14 his father taught him how to run a transit to conduct land surveys and his interest in city planning and land use was born.  After the war, his father took a job in Lubbock and John graduated from Lubbock High School. From the age of 13, he seldom needed money from his parents because he took his first job by delivering 200 copies of the Lubbock Avalanche Journal twice a day.

Following high school, he joined the United States Navy and served on the carrier USS Hornet for four years.  For three of those years he was on the almost unbeatable Hornet 45-caliber pistol team. After his release from the Navy, he earned his BS degree at Texas Tech where he was a member of Sigma Chi fraternity and the Saddle Tramps spirit organization. He met his wife Sue and they married for 62 years

Upon John’s graduation from Texas Tech he began his career in park administration and city planning and worked in cities in Delaware and Colorado.  In 1985 he left public service to become a corporate facilities manager.  Later he established his own construction company.  From his first days of employment he was always excited on Sunday evenings because he looked forward to going to work on Monday morning.

John and Sue were confirmed in St. Paul’s on the Plains Episcopal Church in Lubbock after their blind date had turned into marriage.  John would tell anyone that the secret of their marriage included common Christian beliefs and participation in the church.  While they learned to play and laugh together, worked and raised a family, they never forgot that they should serve their church and community 

If you go to Longmont, Colorado you can see a sample of what John’s early downtown planning looks like today.  His plans to provide for growth in a small front range town with a long main street included the work he did to establish water supplies by locating and renewing an old dam with water rights. 

 As Park Planner in New Castle County, Delaware, he designed and built a broad range of public recreation facilities that produced enough revenue to pay their own way.  These included two restaurants, an equestrian center, a tennis center, a golf course and a sports complex.  He also convinced the County administration to give him the chance to equip and train employees for the care of 3,000 acres of forested urban parkland.  During his lifetime, John was responsible for the planting of more than 4,000 trees across three states.

After becoming a general contractor in Colorado and California, he became an early leader in “green” building.  He sometimes stepped away from his work to help with church building projects and project managed construction for 10 churches.  When Sue took an assignment in Chicago, John took on the project that most changed his life.  He was the on-site, hands-on full-time construction manager for Habitat for Humanity in the Uptown neighborhood of Chicago.  When he moved to California two years later, a dangerous burned out crack house and drug addicts’ neighborhood, had been turned into twelve duplex buildings where 24 families owned their own home for the first time.  As the Reverend James Queen said when asking John to take on the job, “We have been praying and waiting for you to come.”  

After John retired as President of Gold Rush Construction, he and Sue moved to Georgetown, Texas where he constructed their house using insulated concrete forms on a lot that some deemed “unbuildable.” A big part of the construction was helping the City of Georgetown adapt building codes to accommodate new construction materials and techniques.  Soon after, John developed interstitial pulmonary fibrosis and was given two years to live.  Once again, God intervened by a circuitous route and John received a double lung transplant at UT Southwest Medical Center where he remained a patient of the Lung Transplant team to the end of his life ten years later.    In a letter to his donor’s family he said, “I hope you will discover some day that I took very good care of my gift and that I used my breath to do good things for others.”  He did both.

John is survived by Sue, his wife of 62 years.  Others are his daughter Diane Bunton Langston and son-in-law Mark Langston of Anchorage, Alaska; his son Craig Bunton and daughter-in-law Karin Bunton and four grandchildren, Seth, Emily, Eliza and Luke of Euless, Texas.  

Life was always an adventure for John.  He believed that the greatest adventures came when he was seeking God’s direction.  As a witness  in church renewal weekends around the United States, he testified that he was “fearfully and wonderfully made.”  John’s new life has begun! 

A memorial service for John will be held at Grace Episcopal Church, 1314 University Avenue, Georgetown, on December 16 at
11 a.m.  In lieu of flowers, you may donate to the Grace Episcopal Church Building Fund or Habitat for Humanity.