James Arthur Calloway was born on March 14, 1949, in Dayton, Ohio, the second of four children and the only one who could be trusted with his father's tools. His dad, a machinist at Delco, kept a one-car garage workshop on Huffman Avenue, and by the time Jim was ten he could sharpen a chisel, true a board, and, most importantly, his father said, put every single thing back where it belonged. He grew up smelling of sawdust and church suppers, singing in the children's choir at Grace United Methodist and riding his bike to Caesar Creek with a fishing rod balanced across the handlebars.

He met Margaret Ellison at a church picnic in the summer of 1968, when she beat him, fairly, she insists, and he never once disputed it, at horseshoes. He asked her to the county fair that August and carved her a small wooden bird to remember it by. She still has it. They courted through his years at Wright State, where he studied industrial arts education and played exactly one season of intramural baseball before deciding, in his words, that he was “built for the bench and the bleachers, in that order.”

In the fall of 1971, Jim walked into the woodshop at Fairmont High School with a toolbox, a seating chart, and a conviction he never gave up: that a kid who can build something true with their hands will never believe they are worthless. He taught there for thirty-four years. His room, B-114, had sawdust in the heating vents and a line of former students at the door every June. He kept a drawer of confiscated notes he never read, a coffee mug from the class of '88, and a standing rule that nobody, nobody, left his class believing they weren't good at something. They just hadn't found their something yet.

Jim and Margaret married on June 9, 1973, and raised three children, Tom, Sarah, and Daniel, in a brick house on Wilmington Pike with a maple tree out front and a workshop out back that gradually annexed most of the garage, half the basement, and one memorable corner of the laundry room. Sunday mornings belonged to pancakes, a recipe he refused to write down for forty years because, he said, “a recipe you have to feel.” Saturday mornings in spring belonged to Little League: nineteen seasons of coaching, hundreds of kids, and a personal tradition of calling every one of his players on their graduation day, wherever life had taken them.

Music ran through all of it. Jim sang baritone in the Grace United Methodist choir for nearly fifty years, back row, hymnal open, famous among the altos for coming in a half-second early on the final amen. In 2003 he towed home a rusted 1967 pickup that Margaret described as “mostly holes,” and over eleven winters, one panel, one gasket, one patient evening at a time, he brought it back to life. The truck's first drive, in the spring of 2014, went exactly one block: to Margaret's favorite bakery and back, because some milestones deserve pie.

Jim retired from teaching in 2005 to a hallway lined with students, and spent his last twenty years the way he'd spent the previous fifty: fixing things for neighbors who'd learned to just leave broken chairs on his porch, teaching grandchildren the difference between a Phillips and a flathead, fishing Caesar Creek at dawn with his friend Ray, and holding Margaret's hand on the porch swing through every season Ohio offered. He died at home on November 2, 2025, with his family around him and his tools put away, every single one, where they belonged.