‘He didn’t know a stranger.’ Victim in crash that killed 3 was Fort Worth actor, singer
Buckley Sachs seemed to be at home in front of an audience, whether he was acting in a stage play or belting out hymns for a church full of worshipers.
The Fort Worth native born Paul Buckley Sachs, who went by his middle name, carried himself with a big and boisterous energy that lent itself to the theater, according to his friends. After he met the founder of Fort Worth’s Stage West Theatre in the 1980s as a Texas Wesleyan University student, he became its first box-office manager, the friendly face behind the glass when people showed up to the theater. And he was in his fair share of shows.
An old black-and-white photo from “Lend Me a Tenor” shows him comically outstretching his arms as a grin forms on his face. In “Ripe Conditions,” a play about two brothers battling over the same girl as a tornado bears down on them, he had to be naked in a bathtub, remembers Stage West information manager Suzi McLaughlin.
As he got older and changed towns — from Wichita Falls, to Lawton, Oklahoma, to Fort Worth again — he found another community that embraced him in the Christian church. He added his tenor voice to multiple choirs and was known to share motivational Bible verses each day to Facebook.
Those posts stopped suddenly, after Sachs, 59, was one of three people who died Nov. 8 in a multiple-vehicle crash on I-35W in Denton.
But posts on his page, from people who knew him from the various stages in his life, have sharply increased.
“He really, genuinely liked people,” McLaughlin said of Sachs. “He had an outgoing nature and a curiosity that made him want to be involved in things, and to know people, and to make friends and be a friend.”
The other two victims in the fiery crash were Jennifer Kara Ferguson, 30, of Fort Worth, and Ann Marie Cole, 63, of Denton. Attempts to reach friends or family members of Ferguson and Cole were unsuccessful.
The accident reportedly involved two 18-wheelers and multiple passenger vehicles. Police have said a truck that was carrying liquefied petroleum gas exploded.
The sudden and hard-to-comprehend way in which Sachs was killed has added to the pain of people across North Texas who have lost a big-hearted friend who took pride in his life. He was a proud openly gay man, friends said, as well a devout Christian and a recovering alcoholic who mentored others.
His close family friend Lindy Hudson, considered his unofficial godmother, said he learned from his mother and herself about going through the steps of Alcoholics Anonymous and staying sober. He was a sponsor to several people in multiple AA programs.
“I would describe him as one of the kindest people I’ve ever known, with the most marvelous sense of humor and a real love of people,” the 76-year-old said.
At Stage West, McLaughlin said, he was renowned for the New Year’s Eve parties he would throw, where he would bring a karaoke machine and urge people to sing. He also loved playing games like charades at cast parties.
Melissa Williams met Sachs when he moved to Wichita Falls in the early 2000s to work as a hotel manager and started attending Colonial Baptist Church. Although he only came at first because he heard it could be good for networking opportunities, she said, he wound up loving it.
She sang with him in the church choir and the two became friends. She remembers seeing him in productions at the local Backdoor Theatre, like when he played the pick-pocketing Fagin in “Oliver,” or sang Rodgers & Hammerstein songs in “A Grand Night for Singing.”
He had the same energy on stage, Williams said, as he did singing as part of a choir on Sunday mornings.
“He just lit up when he was on stage,” she said. “Like, he would come to life. You could just see his personality and how much he just loved being up there.”
He moved to Lawton in 2006, taking a job at a Hampton Inn and performing at the Lawton Community Theatre, but moved back to Fort Worth around 2012. He was experiencing accelerating problems with his diabetes, which eventually forced him to lose half of his foot, Hudson said.
That didn’t stop his inherent positivity, she said.
He was working as an insurance agent for the Agency for Retired, Agency & Disabled, and the organization praised his service in a message on Facebook after he died. Sachs, the post reads, showed a desire “to offer the best service possible to those he served.”
At the time of his death, he was living in a duplex with his two cats, Beautiful and Handsome, and his part-boxer dog, Sockie, Hudson said. After Sachs’ death, Beautiful had to be put down at the age of 17.
Sachs had also recently sponsored a young recovering alcoholic whom he was letting stay in his home.
The man, needing help, had asked to stay for seven weeks, Hudson said.
He had been living there for more like seven months.
“He didn’t know a stranger,” Hudson said of Sachs. “I know that’s a trite way to put it, but he didn’t.”
A funeral service is set to be held for Sachs at 2 p.m. Nov. 23 in Western Hills United Methodist Church, located at 2820 Laredo Drive in Fort Worth.
This story was originally published November 15, 2019 at 4:57 PM.
