As a church deacon, Charles Glover Sr. helped establish a house of God on a site where a liquor store once stood. As a groundskeeper, he kept the Kansas University chancellor’s residence looking beautiful.

Glover, 66, was old enough to retire, but he kept working because he wanted to provide for the four grandchildren he was raising.

“That’s just the kind of person he was,” said KU Chancellor Robert Hemenway, who encountered Glover almost every day outside his home.

Glover and his four grandchildren died in a fire early Sunday morning at 1205 N.J. Those who knew Glover described him Monday as a hard-working, religious man who kept trying to carve out a good life despite troubles.

“Being raised coming from the South, you just tried to make the best you could out of what you had,” said Josephine Galloway, an extended family member.

Glover’s younger brother, William, said he followed Charles Glover to Lawrence from Leland, Miss., in the 1960s after their father, a sharecropper, lost his farm.

“We started all over as a family,” he said.

William Glover said he remembered Charles as the big brother who pushed him on a tricycle, taught him to drive a tractor and showed him how to shine his shoes. He said that Charles had his wild days in Lawrence but that his life changed in the early 1990s. He stopped drinking and started attending church.

Glover was a deacon at the Praise Temple Church of God in Christ. He was one of the founding members of the church in 1996 and helped it open its doors at Seventh and Connecticut streets.

“Every Sunday, he would come by my place and honk at me because I didn’t go to church,” William Glover said.

Some days, the sound of Glover’s pickup truck pulling into the driveway was one of the first things Hemenway heard while waking up in the morning.

Glover did the landscaping around The Outlook, the KU chancellor’s residence, and often arrived for work at 6 a.m.

Hemenway said he would stop on his way out the door and talk with Glover about his family or the Jayhawks. Glover and his wife, Learlean, were regular guests at the chancellor’s Christmas party.

Hemenway said Glover was soft-spoken and always had a smile. Glover had been part of the Kansas University maintenance staff since 1985, the university said in a press release.

A previous wife died in 1999, and his mother died about three years ago, Galloway said.