Robert “Rex” King, 84, of Springfield, Missouri, passed away on July 23, 2026.He was born June 15, 1942, in Verona, Missouri, the son of Harold and Edith King, and was baptized as a young man at Verona Baptist Church. He graduated from Verona High School and served in the United States Naval Reserve, which he joined in 1964. In 1968 he took his bachelor’s degree from Southwest Missouri State College — now Missouri State University — and later added a Specialist degree.

Rex gave more than thirty years to the high school classroom. He began among the workbenches, teaching shop — industrial education — at Mt. Vernon and Pierce City. Later he taught marketing and Cooperative Occupational Education, in Aurora and then in Springfield, at Hillcrest, Kickapoo, and Parkview High Schools. His whole career was spent in the practical subjects, the ones that teach a young person to build something, sell something, hold a job and keep it. It suited him. He was less interested in what students knew than in what they could do — and most interested of all in who they were becoming.

For decades he sponsored DECA, and every year he collected a company of teenagers and carried them off to Chicago, Dallas, and cities beyond — the Chicago Board of Trade, the Dallas Trade Mart, rooms most of them had only read about and never expected to stand in. He showed kids from southwest Missouri a wider world and then trusted them to walk around in it. A number of them are still telling those stories.

He retired at fifty-five and was back in a classroom almost at once, substituting extensively for years afterward. He had no talent for being away from work.

The craft he taught at those first workbenches never left him. Rex was a gifted woodworker who could build almost anything and fix nearly everything, and he did neither, if he could help it, for himself. He built for other people — a piece of furniture for someone starting out, a repair for a neighbor, some small necessary thing a person had mentioned once and forgotten mentioning. What he made is scattered now through the homes of the people he loved, which is exactly where he meant it to go.

Rex was a longtime and active member of the Springfield Sertoma Club, which he joined in 1995. Sertoma is a contraction of “service to mankind,” which is about as close to a summary of Rex King’s private creed as three words are likely to get. For years he was a fixture of the club’s Chili Cook-Off, now one of the largest gatherings in southwest Missouri, raising more than a hundred thousand dollars a year for the Boys & Girls Clubs of Springfield. His name appears nowhere on it. He would have considered that the correct arrangement.

He was preceded in death by his parents, Harold and Edith King; his sister, Wanda Valentine, and her husband, Joe Valentine; his brother, Jimmy King; and the mother of his son, Elizabeth Miesner.

He is survived by his wife, Nancy King; his son, Christopher King (Colleen); his sons Nick Venute (Audrey) and Tony Venute (MaryJean), whom he loved as his own; his grandsons, Gavin King and Malachi Williams; his granddaughter, Milliena Richter-Venute; his sister-in-law, Ruth King; his nephew, Mark King (Gretchen); and his nieces, Teri Valentine and Dee Jette (Scott).

Rex King held no office, gathered no great fortune, and sought no notice. By the older and truer count he was a great man, and no one who knew him has ever seriously doubted it. He believed that service to others is the highest calling we are given here on earth. He did not argue the point; he lived as though it had been settled long ago. He put the person in front of him ahead of himself — in good years and hard ones, in company and alone, for eighty-four years, without ever appearing to weigh the alternative. Love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control: in him these were not a passage to be recited. They were a fair description of how he came into a room.

His family will tell you a man could search for a week for someone with an unkind word to say about Rex King and come away with nothing. Anyone who knew him will tell you a week would not be near enough. He leaves no monument bearing his name. He leaves something harder to build and much harder to lose: a great many people who were treated well by him, and who are still trying to pass it on.

Those who were taught, mentored, encouraged, or simply helped by Rex are especially welcome to gather and celebrate the impact of his life.

Services will be held on Saturday, August 15, at Southgate Baptist Church in Springfield: visitation at 10:00 a.m., the funeral service at 11:00 a.m., and a reception following. Family and friends are encouraged to bring photographs, keepsakes, or stories of Rex, written down or simply told, to share during the reception.

In lieu of flowers, donations may be made to the Boys & Girls Clubs of Springfield.