Ed Faxon

Ed said his life was one third businessperson, one third religious academic, and one third redneck.

Ed Faxon was born June 4, 1942 in his grandparents’ house in Albany, Oregon. He grew up the middle child of 5 on the family farm in Philomath, Oregon. Life on the farm was old fashioned, even for the 1940s. There was no running water, no electricity, and no telephone when he was born. He struggled with school, but excelled at math. Several decades later he diagnosed the reason for this struggle as dyslexia. His high school principal told him not to attempt to go to college, so when he graduated (barely, as farm work made him miss so many days he technically did not qualify) high school in 1960, he went to work for Pioneer Telephone, where he eventually became a troubleshooter.

He attended the college-age group at the First Christian Church in Corvallis, where he met Oregon State student Linda Kafton. They began dating in 1961. In 1964 they married in that church, and stayed married for the 60 years until his death.

Linda encouraged Ed when he thought about going to a university, and what’s more he had a college kid working for him at the phone company who didn’t seem too bright. He thought “If that guy can go to college, so can I.” He enrolled at Northwest Christian College in Eugene and began studying to be a minister. His first year was hard, as there was a lot of reading (and he was still a slow reader due to dyslexia) and it was a struggle to support himself financially. By his second year, something clicked and he taught himself to read more quickly. He became a top student for the first time in his life, and from then on books were his constant companions.

In 1964, Ed and Linda moved to Bellfountain, Oregon, where he took his first job as student minister of a rural community church. The logging town was a good fit for the former farm kid. He and Linda moved their trailer next to the church and spent four years loving and being loved by the community. From 1966 to 1968, he also worked on construction of huge steel power line towers that went from the Columbia River to California.

In 1968, Ed and Linda picked up and moved to Oklahoma so that Ed could attend Phillips Graduate Seminary in Enid to earn a Master of Divinity degree. He started his second and final job as a church minister in Hunter, an insular small town where the people who had only been there 20 years were “the newcomers.” In his studies, he was slowly shedding the fundamentalist beliefs he grew up with and moving toward more liberal theology. When he advocated approval of a state ballot measure authorizing sex education in light of the large percentage of teen pregnancies in Hunter, that was too much for the small town and he came within a hair’s breadth of being fired just before his only daughter was born in 1972. He hung on for a couple more months and then the young family left for Claremont, California, where Ed enrolled in the Claremont School of Theology.

He studied for a triple-major Ph.D. in psychology, theology, and philosophy. He came to Claremont to study Process Philosophy. He developed a Christian theology based on grace – the idea that God is trying to influence each person with the best possible use for each moment. He wrote a rough draft of his Ph.D. dissertation on faith development, but decided the did not want to be a college professor and so elected not to spend the work that would be needed to produce a final draft, especially since one committee member was notoriously picky.

Ed switched his focus on church work to pastoral counseling, and was ordained as a pastoral counselor in 1973. He started out counseling at the student center, and was later hired by the Salvation Army in West Covina where he counseled low income people as well as people from the street such as gang members and sex workers. He continued to work at the Salvation and Army, and then transitioned to pastoral counseling at the Corona United Methodist Church for 19 years counseling until 1996, when the demands of his business made it impractical for him to continue. He continued to attend Corona United Methodist Church as a layperson, often teaching Sunday school classes.

In the 1970s, Ed started buying and selling older cars. On weekends he would head to swap meets and buy manuals and literature related to the cars. He started selling spare literature in 1974 in an effort to make space in his 2-bedroom apartment and finance his hobby. When he and his family moved to Corona in 1977 their little ranch house afforded more room for his books, and the business grew. He would go to swap meets to sell manuals on the weekends. In 1981, he bought a former library bookmobile to take his treasures to those swap meets. He hired local teens to work in the business and by 1986 it grew large enough to warrant moving out of the house and into a warehouse of its own. Ed grew his own collection obsessively and enjoyed the wheeling, dealing, and treasure-hunting of his business. It grew rapidly trough warehouses until 1996, when he purchased a building and moved Faxon Auto Literature to Riverside, where it is still run by his daughter. At 28,000-square feet, we believe it is the world’s largest single-subject bookstore. He came to work every day until 2020, when he went into semi-retirement, still doing his favorite part of the job – buying books.

He died November 21, 2024. Ed was preceded in death by his parents, Gilbert Faxon and Viola Struckmeier Faxon, as well as his sister, Ilene Faxon Anderton. Ed is survived by his wife of 60 years, Linda Faxon, his only child Melanie Faxon-Howard, son-in-law Sean Howard, and grandson Carter Faxon-Howard, as well as three brothers: Loren, Owen, and Jay Faxon.

Ed’s memorial service will be held Saturday, February 2, 2025 at Corona United Methodist Church. You can wear a Hawaiian shirt, since Ed didn’t wear suits. In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the church