Reverend J. M. Holder was a Baptist minister who, in 1931, was pastor of a Baptist Church in Liberal Kansas. In 1944 he went to Central Baptist Seminary in Kansas City, Kansas as a member of the faculty, and then served as pastor of the Baptist Church in Pine Bluff, Arkansas. He entered military service on June 12, 1945, and was commissioned a U.S. Army chaplain. He was serving with the 11th Airborne Division in 1949 when he volunteered for duty in the Pacific. When the Korean War began volunteered for service in Korea where he was assigned to the 24th Infantry Division, earning a Silver Star in the first six months of the war. When fellow Airborne chaplain Holland Hope was severely injured in an action in which he was himself awarded the Silver Star, Holder volunteered for duty with the 11th Airborne Division and became chaplain of Hope’s 186th Airborne Regimental Combat Team. After his war service he moved to California where, in the 1960s, he was pastor of Cresenta Valley Baptist Church in North Hollywood.