Asking for your prayers and good wishes for our friend, John L. Opager, Jr.

We’d like to take a minute to ask a favor of our Buckinghams’ friends and extended family to join us in prayers of healing for our dear friend John Opager, who is currently battling cancer and being such a trooper during the treatment process.

As many of you know who have known us since the beginning, The Buckinghams owe our deepest gratitude and thanks to John. In essence, he gave us our name. We were first known as The Pulsations when we auditioned for and won the battle of the bands, and the right to perform for 13 weeks on the “All-Time Hits” TV show on WGN-TV back in 1965. The producers didn’t like our name and wanted us to change it and have it sound more like the British groups hitting the tops of the record charts at the time.

During our first days of rehearsal, we’d made friends with John Opager, a young man about our age who was the security guard at the TV station. He gave us a list of names he’d thought up and we picked The Buckinghams from his listing. It made good sense. There was Buckingham Palace in England and Buckingham Fountain in Chicago. From that day on, The Buckinghams is how we’ve been known for 46 years.

We were thrilled when John and his friends joined us at Bolingbrook in August, 2011, as we returned there to celebrate Mayor Roger Claar’s annual Jubilee, and we were delighted to introduce him to you, the crowds that filled the lawns of Bolingbrook, and give him some long-deserved kudos.

Today we ask you, our friends and family, if you’ll share John’s name in a prayer and thought for healing against cancer. If you’d like to send him a get-well card, that would certainly make the time go faster between radiation treatments, to which he seems to be responding as best he can. The following address can be used to reach out to him.

Even if you’ve not met him or know him as we do, if you’ve ever bought a record or seen a concert by The Buckinghams, you have been touched by the life of John Opager, just as he touched ours, and continues to, as we journey forward in this life, together. Thanks so much for reading and for well-wishes and prayers you can offer in John’s name.

We send him our love and prayers today,

Carl, Nick, and the entire Buckinghams extended family

Cross-posted on Facebook here.

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