Good was born in Centerville and was active in soccer. After his father passed away, his mother, Marcia Pickens Good, attended a single parent’s group where she met Richard Bennett, the man she eventually married.
Good’s stepfather had only been married to his mother for two months before her death. Prosecutors said he drove her to a remote part of Arkansas where he threw her off a bridge and drowned her when the fall didn’t kill her.
“My relatives knew something was wrong when my mother disappeared, so they told us to just get out of the house,” said Good.
Good moved into his grandparents’ house with his sister, Gloria and brother, Matt. His grandmother, Dolores Pickens, was already caring for her husband, Edwin, who had Alzheimer’s disease.
“It was non-stop media coverage while it was going on,” said Good, who picketed in front of his parents’ former house when Bennett returned to Centerville and auctioned all of the Good family furniture and belongings. “He sold the house too, before he was caught and went to trial.”
Bennett was convicted and sent to prison where he died of cancer in 1992.
Meanwhile, Good graduated from Centerville High School in 1982 and earned a degree in liberal studies from Bowling Green State University. Unsure of what he wanted to do, he moved to Asheville, N.C., to live near his sister, Gloria.
In 1993, Good moved back to Centerville and began taking journalism classes at Sinclair Community College. He eventually earned a journalism degree from BGSU, where he was later honored as a distinguished graduate. In 1998, he became a reporter at the Xenia Daily Gazette and later for the Times Community Newspapers. It was as a journalist that he had an amazing transformation after seeing a sign outside of Bowersville, which is near Jamestown. The simple sign announced Bowersville as the birthplace of the famous Christian writer, the Rev. Norman Vincent Peale. On a fluke, Good decided to read Peale’s most famous book, “The Power of Positive Thinking.”
“I wasn’t into religion at the time, but I checked one of his books out of the library and he saved my life by introducing me to Jesus Christ and the power of positive thinking,” said Good, who cared for his grandmother in his home for 10 years before she broke her hip and died in 2008.
In 2001, Good founded the American Orphan Association, american orphanassociation.org, a nonprofit organization established to provide scholarships to orphans.
“Fifty percent of orphans don’t graduate from high school and of the 50 percent who do, only 17 percent go on to college,” said Good, who emphasized the emotional trauma suffered by orphans who lose parents to murder like an applicant whose father beat the mother to death with a baseball bat and then hanged himself later in prison. “I get applications from all over the United States and I can relate to them.”
Good is currently promoting his new book, “Selected to Suffer,” published by Tate Publishing & Enterprises, that addresses challenges that many face daily. Each chapter starts with a personal example from Good’s life like the chapter on fear, which tells the story of complications that Good experienced with an irregular heartbeat that sent him to the emergency room.
In addition to being an author, Good also is embarking on a public speaking career.
Contact this columnist at (937) 432-9054 or jjbaer@aol.com.
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