From UP to Nashville, Jody Sparks sang for Jesus, family and her disabled peers
Jim Sparks realized his daughter Jody’s gift for the first time, like so many others, at a talent show at Emmanuel Lutheran Church more than 40 years ago.
It was her first performance, and it blew him away.
It was partly Jody’s voice — pitch perfect, he and his wife Myrna would later learn, and unexpectedly angelic as it delivered gospel songs and Christian hymns.
Even more, it was the effect Jody’s singing had on those listening to it.
The sound and sight moved them, physically to tears during that initial, humble debut, and for years after to inspiration and toward faith.
“I just felt a calling to try to support her, right from the start, never dreaming that she would be able to reach as many people as she reached,” Sparks, 84, recalled during a phone conversation the day after Christmas.
In some ways, it was Jim Sparks’ drive to support Jody — who was born with intellectual disabilities and neurological impairments that she never let stop her from reaching her goal of singing for audiences across the country — that led to the conversation.
Earlier in the week, the retired insurance salesman visited The News Tribune office with a clear plastic folder full of 40-year-old newspaper clippings, newsletters and a DVD of Jody performing more than a decade ago in Huntington Beach, California.
Left at the front desk with a pencil-written note politely asking for the folder’s return, it was a father’s personal archive, capturing yellowing snapshots of his daughter’s remarkable life.
The folder also included a recent addition: a brief obituary.
Jody Sparks passed away Dec. 7 in Renton at the assisted living apartment where she had lived for many years. She was 55.
Cancer, Jim Sparks said, is what “took her home.”
Sparks visited because he thought Jody — who grew up in University Place and was first featured in The News Tribune nearly 40 years ago at the age of 19 — might be worth a newspaper story, one more time.
His daughter reached “thousands of people” during her life, Sparks said, and with a memorial planned for Saturday at Emmanuel Lutheran, back where it all started, he thought people would want to know of her passing.
“It’s really a spiritual thing,” the aging father said of his motivations.
For Jody Sparks, that was often the case.
Jody’s life “was difficult,” Jim Sparks acknowledged, but it was also full and accomplished, and spent doing what she loved.
Sparks recalled the very first time Jody expressed a desire to sing publicly, at the family table more than four decades earlier. Typically shy and reserved, and at times subjected to the cruelty of childhood bullying at school, she was known to stutter and spend hours alone in her room, Sparks said.
Now she wanted to take the stage during the church talent show.
The proclamation came as quite a surprise, though it didn’t come from nowhere.
In the weeks prior, Sparks sat down with his four children — including Jody’s three brothers — to talk about setting goals. He’d even purchased small notebooks for the children to write in, to help them “visualize what they wanted to do with their lives.”
The three boys, Sparks admitted, weren’t terribly interested in the exercise.
Jody, however, immediately took to it, eventually deciding she wanted to dedicate her life to “singing for Jesus.”
That’s precisely what she did.
In late December 1983, The News Tribune’s Nancy Bartley picked up the story, writing in what was then the paper’s religion section.
By then, it had been four years since that first talent show performance took the congregation at Emmanuel Lutheran by surprise, Bartley wrote, and “the young woman with the shoulder-length brown hair has been singing, taking voice lessons, growing in confidence and deepening her roots in her Christian faith.”
Jody’s resume already included accompanying the Emmanuel Lutheran Church Chapel Singers Youth Choir on a 12-day Californian tour, and she was well on her way to becoming a regular at nursing home and assisted living facilities throughout the area.
In the years after the article was published, the list of accomplishments grew. Jody would be invited to sing the National Anthem at the opening ceremony of the state Special Olympics and travel to Nashville to record the first of what would become several inspirational albums, among numerous other highlights, her father said.
“I want to spread the news that there is a handicapped girl out there who loves Jesus,” Jody Sparks told The News Tribune at the time, using the language of the time. “He’s really given me a talent to do something (for them).”
If there’s a lasting message to be taken from his daughter’s life, it’s tucked in there somewhere, Jim Sparks believes. And it’s for everyone, he said.
Health challenges, particularly over the last five years, slowed Jody, though her faith — and the faith of her family — never wavered, he added.
Along with his wife Myrna, there have been plenty of tears since Jody passed, he said, but even more time spent celebrating her life and the gifts she left.
“She did not want people to feel sorry for her or look at her in a sympathetic way. She just wanted any talent or glory or fame to be given to God and Jesus, not to her,” Sparks recalled this week, again through occasional tears.
He then added a piece of parental advice.
“I would say, ‘Look for the light in your children,’” he said. “No matter how bright … there’s a light in there. Support it.”
Jody Sparks memorial
When: Saturday, Dec. 28 at 11 a.m.
Where: Emmanuel Lutheran Church, 1315 N. Stevens St., Tacoma
