NEXT STEP

I had begun to surmise these financial dynamics through my relationship with Sam Osborne, our lay leader. Sam, like me, was a Methodist minister's son, but unlike me he seemed to be really eaten up with financial insecurity. He and his wife both taught school, which by my books meant a pretty handsome family income for that time and place. He didn't really seem to need expensive things, but he had a terrible anxiety about whether he would be able to put his two young daughters through college. It turned out that his father had been a much more affluent minister than mine. And Sam recalled that as a boy he was the only one in his group who couldn't afford a pony! I guess Sam, too, played his part in setting me free from my "call".

Otherwise Sam was a great fellow. With what we had in common I felt more comfortable with him than with most of my congregation. The rest of them really wanted an unreal relationship with me: hide the beer bottles when the pastor knocks on the door. They put me on a pedestal and meant to get to heaven hanging on to my coattails. I knew it didn't work like that. Sam also knew better; he knew I was human, though a minister. I enjoyed my time with him.

Beginning of a New Career

In one other way Sam deeply influenced my life. His next door neighbor, Roscoe Lyall, had suffered from alcoholism for many years, and Sam had tried to help him more than once. Finally Roscoe went up to Hebron (a religious colony for alcoholics) and came back with the idea he should have a group for support. He had found 2 other Hebron graduates, and they were attempting to be 'in community'. Sam asked me to meet with them.

That meeting in 1963 became one of the primary turning points of my life. I could talk to these men and give them some of the support they needed. More than that one of them had something great to give me. Fred Johnson took me to the jail. In fact I went to the jail 4 times that weekend, and the upshot was we secured the release of one of Fred's alcoholic friends. I had made several long distance phone calls. Hebron, a relatively high quality place, could not accept Fred's friend, but I think we got him in Bethel, a similar place in Lenoir.

That began a new career for me. I had begun to feel that preaching was like plowing the sea. In contrast getting men out of jail was a definite and tangible achievement, and the longer term results of such activity were very discernible, one way or the other. Over the next 3 years I took about 100 men out of the local jails in Wilkes County and got them placed in one of these charitable live-in helping institutions for destitute alcoholics.

The best of these places was Hebron. It was said that 40 ministers had come out of Hebron. It had religious leadership by a non-alcoholic. The others were run by recovered alcoholics, and I eventually learned that generally speaking their recovery had not reached completion.

Unfortunately it was much harder to get my friends into Hebron. They had a waiting list for admission and could afford to be more selective than the other places. I remember my first of several visits to Hebron. I was vividly impressed at what was happening there and reminded of the story in Mark 5 of the Gadarene demoniac. This seemed a definite reenactment of that story. Hebron is on a hill outside Boone, and it seemed to me as sacred soil as I have ever touched. Later I was to have extensive dealings with one of their graduates who had become a Baptist minister.

The House of Prayer in High Point became the primary focus of my ministry to alcoholics. Blair Reed, the director, always had a place for one of these Wilkes Co drunks, and Mr. Anderson, the mayor of Wilkesboro and Judge James Moore, the county judge were always willing to release them into my custody for purpose of help. Most of these men were in court for petty crimes related to their pathological drinking: public drunkenness, malicious injury to property, trespass, assault on a female (usually their wife), nonsupport, etc. etc. These judges had labored with these men year after year to no avail. I found one man, Ernest Dollar, who had served 13 30 day sentences in one year. Ridiculous. (30 days really meant 22 days with good behaviour.) Even the jailor, fundamentally opposed to any sort of therapy, recommended someone now and then.

John Cranor, a prison guard, was a member at Union and one of my best friends there. He seemed to have managed to pursue a brutalizing job without becoming a brutal man, but in general I felt that such work takes a terrible toll on those who do it. They are all too apt to become as degraded as the men they are guarding. The whole process is degrading in the extreme. Every time one of these drunks "built time" as they said, he would come back out into society a little bit less competent to live a normal life. It's easy to see how their alcoholism was a progressive and usually fatal disease.

In a few weeks I had secured the release of several of Fred Johnson's friends, and not being able to get them into Hebron I took them to the House of Prayer. The House of Prayer had been started by Joe Petree and some of his friends a number of years before. I didn't know Joe at that time but soon took the occasion to meet him. In the long term my friendship with him may have affected my life even more than the alcoholic ministry.

Hearing that the House of Prayer had been begun largely by a Methodist minister named Joe Petree, I was anxious to make his acquaintance. An opportunity came when I found his name on a list of missionaries. He had spent several years in Costa Rica. We were supposed to have a special missionary activity, so I invited Joe to come to Millers Creek. With practically his first words to me he made a friend for life. I was full of my new alcholic work and at the same time anxious as to whether this was the way that I, the pastor of a large Methodist congregation should be spending my time. I poured all this out to him, and as soon as I paused for breath, he said, "Larry, I thank God that he has set you free for this ministry." It was just the word of confirmation that I needed to hear. It wasn't the last time that he would say something like that to me. But it began a long and very rewarding friendship.

When they started the House of Prayer, they soon realized that they needed a full time director. They brought in Blair Reed, a recovered? alcoholic from the Baltimore area. Blair had a very heavy dose of charismatic religion, which had more or less taken the place of the bottle for him. But he had the usual rigid personality of an alcoholic who is dry, but not fully healed. (Is anyone ever fully healed???) It wasn't long before Blair fired Joe Petree and most of his friends as members of the board and put his own hand picked men in their places. All this happened long before I had so much as heard of the House of Prayer.

Blair's program, fairly characteristic of places of the sort, involved a two month live in form of therapy heavily emphasizing religious teaching. At the House of Prayer almost without exception the clients (patients, drunks, whatever) would experience the baptism of the Holy Spirit some time before they left. Blair expected this of them, and most of them eventually became compliant. Unfortunately the baptism of the Holy Spirit rarely prevented them from getting drunk again soon after they left the House of Prayer. Some of them had been through this cycle a number of times. I felt wonderfully inspired whenever I could get a man out of jail and into the House of Prayer, but wonderfully discouraged when he promptly got drunk upon graduation.

Blair had a great verbal message but limited psychological understanding, and in some cases he may have been doing as much harm as good. The men under his care were terribly dependent; he made them more dependent upon him, and of course he wasn't there when temptation soon overtook them again. He had a great faith, but his faith seemed to me pretty immature. He felt like it was God and him against the world, and they were sure to win.

In spite of the frustrations I continued to take men to the House of Prayer, feeling that with all its inadequacies it beat jail and prison. I met a young man named Sam Cloyd, a mental health worker who was commited to helping Blair with his therapy. I think they had met at a religious function, and Sam had the same brand of religion which made Blair confide in him. Sam worked with a small group, and I took steps to get my people into his group.

Sam seemed to me more healed than Blair, although he had been awfully sick. He had been at Annapolis and had a schizophrenic break and finally got sane again and studied mental health. He had a nice wife and child. We had them over to Millers Creek, or maybe met them in High Point and tried to establish a relationship. They were friendly, but distance prevented our becoming close. A decade or so later I learned sorrowfully that Sam had killed himself.

Sam Cloyd, Blair Reed, and Joe Petree were all part of the charismatic group in the Greensboro/High Point area. Joe was a Methodist minister, and through him I met several others who had become charismatics. I made an attempt to become a part of this movement, primarily through the liking and respect I had for Joe. I always had reservations about these people; Joe in fact was the only one that I had an extravagant respect for, and Joe never came on rigidly the way most of them did.

On one occasion I found myself in a group of Methodist ministers gathered over somewhere east of Winston Salem. They simply assumed I was one of them. The subject of the conversation was how poorly their gifts were received by the rest of the Methodist connection. One told this story on himself: The district superintendent was playing golf with another Methodist brother who asked him if he knew that John Smith (whatever our informant's name was) spoke in tongues. The D.S. said he didn't even know that John Smith spoke good English. That was the general tenor of their conversation. I finally broke in and said, "Well friends, since I haven't had this experience you're talking about, I don't have any way of evaluating it in you except by the quality of your love." At that they changed their tune dramatically and began to show their love in more direct ways.

Once Joe brought a man named Don Tingen up to Millers Creek for a small get together. It was more of the same. I don't remember just what Don was saying. I was most conscious of his glassy eyes; he pointed his eyes at me, but he wasn't talking to me, he was sort of talking at me. That's not the first time I had experienced that; Bob Tuttle, the Asheville D.S. had impressed me in the same way.

This group had loads of great men upon whose words everyone hung. Mr. Pentecostal came through about that time and spoke to a large crowd--maybe the Christian Business Men's group. He propogated the faith in a very hard nosed way. I was impressed with his big ego, as has happened to me so many times. I guess having one I can always recognize one.

My most negative feelings about the charismatics resulted from a trip we made with some of our Cutting Edge friends (more about them later) over to one of the large gatherings. They made their pitch and gave an invitation for people in need to come down. Our friend, call her Dorothy, came down. They made every attempt to induce the baptism of the Holy Spirit upon her; I felt they were addressing their own need, not hers.

My most positive feelings about charismatics came later in Washington when I visited the Georgetown Prayer Group. Somehow I could feel much better about the Catholic charismatics than I could the Methodist ones. These were young folk primarily, and unlike the others, the group seemed very anti-hierarchical. Their music was tremendous, eclectic folk type music, putting the psalms to music, that sort of thing. (Later we shared this music with our friend, Nona Beth Creswell's husband, Kip, to great mutual satisfaction.)

Most of this music had come out of the charismatic communes in Ann Arbor. I was eager to go there and see for myself what was happening, but never got the chance. The greatest thing about the group was the spontaneous song (noise, murmur). I don't know what to call it. Everyone was silent for a while, then someone would begin a kind of one note, and others would take it up harmoniously, and it went on as a kind of tangible sign of the togetherness, the oneness there with us. After a while it would die down, and after another while someone would have a story (witness, message, whatever) to share. All this took place seemingly without direction, and I found it thrilling. It was years later that I came to my first Friend's meeting, semantically about 180 degrees out of phase with the charismatics, but very similar in their form of worship, namely spontaneous sharing out of the silence. Hurrah.

Pressley Joines, a hard core police case inebriate, taught me as much about alcoholism as any two others. Fred Johnson had recruited him for our group early on in its life. At that time Pressley had a two week cycle; I mean by that that he generally stayed sober about two weeks. Then he got drunk, and he invariably insisted on getting himself locked up. He would often do this by the simple expedient of going to the police station and starting to cuss out the officers. They would overlook him as long as possible and finally comply with his wishes. Strange behaviour! I eventually learned that he had been raised in the Wilkes County jail; his father had been jailor or something of that sort. Although his poor mother was still very much in the picture, it seemed that Pressley's real family was the jail; he was hung up on getting drunk and getting in jail.

Pressley joined our group and insisted that we turn it into an AA. We did. Then we made the mistake of electing someone else the chairman, and Pressley got drunk and made some pointed remarks about "that non-acoholic in the group". I had to explain this to my friend Zane Bumgarner, a younger and perhaps less hardened alcoholic, and his immediate reaction was, "well give that men a sugar tit to suck on."

Zane was right; Pressley was infantile, but he had a redemptive seed within. He could be tremendously mature when he was concentrating on helping another alcoholic. Mrs. Joines had obviously had a hard life. Very likely her husband had been an alcoholic and her father. I found this to be an all too common syndrome. But she understood what I was trying to do. She was a member of the Wilkesboro Baptist church, one of the largest churches in the area with a pastor named Henry Morgan. They had recently built a beautiful new building. She said to me one day, "Henry builds with bricks, but you're a missionary." Ah, appreciation is good for the soul.

Gradually we accumulated a small group of struggling, hopefully recovering alcoholics. I found this work tremendously meaningful; in retrospect it must have been vocation-wise the most significant time of my life. I was preaching on Sunday and doing the essential pastoral things, but my heart was in the "missionary work". I was taking one or two men just about every week to the House of Prayer (or occasionally another institution). Generally they got the Baptism of the Holy Spirit while they were there, and promptly got drunk when they came home. But there were some exceptions. Some of them were staying sober for varying periods of time. The church folks approved of what I was doing and continued to pay my salary while I acted more as an amateur probation officer than as a pastor.

I went through several cycles with Pressley. He taught me a lot, more by his acting out of his alcoholism than by his words. Between his drinking episodes he was an avid AA man, anxious to get help for every one of the innumerable drinking fraternity to which he belonged. I went along with that program and facilitated his efforts to get help for his friends. Anyone who would take the trip to High Point, we'd make the arrangements. It was usually a means of avoiding jail, but sometimes it was a means of getting a man off a drunk. Pressley taught me to give them vinegar and honey to stave off DT's. I have an image in mind of Pressley and me in the front of the 'glory wagon' (the old Chevrolet I used to transport so many of them), me driving while Pressley turned around addressing himself to a poor suffering drunk in the back, focusing on the poor devil with unending patience and self forgetfulness.

Between these experiences Pressley struggled with his own bouts with the bottle. I continuously encouraged him to go to the House of Prayer. He had been there previously and had ambivalent feelings about it as everyone who ever went for treatment must have had. Finally one day we were driving in the car, and I suggested it once again emphatically, and his mind turned, and he said, "Okay, I believe I will." He went, came back before his 60 day commitment was up, and soon got drunk.

But all this time he was making progress and he was winning. The last time I saw Pressley he had been sober for two years, seemed to be a more subdued and less rigid man, and perhaps had a chance to live a half way normal life.

Dugan Minton was a bootlegger with a place a couple of blocks from Union church. Someone took me there on an errand of mercy, and I got to know him. I went back a few times, always looking over my shoulder and hoping that none of the church people would see me in such a place. Dugan's mother lived next door to the church, and she told me how his friends would get him knocked out of his mind and then put him out in her yard. Such had been their lives for a number of years.

Dugan would sell his liquor, or give it away, depending upon whether or not his friends had any money. He was a veteran and had had TB. My friendship with Dugan blossomed to the point that he agreed to go to a rehab center, probably more to please me than for any reason of his own. Another time Dugan took me to the biggest bootlegger in Wilkes County (I forget his name) to borrow the funds to get Peggy McNeil in the hospital in Charlotte. Later Dugan had another bout with TB and I visited him at Oteen Veterans hospital outside of Asheville. Still later Dugan showed up in Winston Salem court while I was attending it as the Probation Office of the day. I got Judge Sams to put him on probation, which was fine with Dugan. Whether or not it helped him I don't really know. But I know I'll see him again in heaven.

Zane Bumgarner was of course related to our first family. A young man, he had a nice wife (I thought, but he left her after getting sober), and 4 or 5 children. A typical plunger, just excessive in so many ways. He got interested in our group and got sober. I guess he became perhaps my outstanding success story. After he had been sober for two years, he told me that 2 years is the absolutely worst time because alcohol was no longer an option, but the pain remained and one began to contemplate suicide. But he apparently turned a corner. He and Henry Pearson became sufficiently interested in our religious life to get licensed as preachers, but it went no further. After seeking religion for a while Zane came to see education as his salvation. He had been very attached to me and no doubt helped, but he lost confidence in me because I didn't pursue Henry Pearson through a relapse. He must have acquired some education, because he eventually got a job with the Alcoholism Rehab Center in Asheville. That's the last I heard of him.

Henry was certainly one of my favorites. He had 20 years in the Marines, probably drunk most of the time. He had a wife who eventually also claimed to be an alcoholic, and they had 6 or 7 children. Henry had gotten sober and was attending Jack Miller's church (mentioned above), but he was kin to some of our people. When he heard about what I was doing, he came to help. We had a close relationship for some time. He, too was licensed to preach. After two years he got drunk again. I went to see him and found him inebriated, and I just let him stew. This is the way I had been taught by the AA people; you don't pressure anyone to stop drinking. They will come back. Henry did, but my attitude toward his drinking episode as I said antagonized Zane. Henry continued to be my friend. After I left Millers Creek, Henry got a job selling cars in High Point and immediately became the star salesman of his agency. He had a terrific enthusiasm and psychic energy, apparently just what was needed to sell cars. But how long he stayed sober, I don't know.

Our greatest success story later turned into a horror story. Tommy Lee McNeil, a local boy kin to half our membership, had gone to Winston-Salem and got an M.D. He married a Winston-Salem nurse named Peggy and came back to Wilkes County to practice. Everyone went to him. But he and his wife both became drunks. He continued to practice after it was evident to everyone that he was in bad shape. Somebody in the church talked to me about him, and as I consequence I went to see him and later to his house to see his wife. I established a relationship of sorts. They were hospitable, but didn't want me talking about their drinking habit. For some months I went regularly to Tommy Lee's office and sat in the waiting room as if I were a patient and eventually got in to spend a little time with him. I also visited them at home occasionally.

I gave them a Bible, and in return Tommy Lee gave me a copy of Henry Miller's Nexus.

(Henry Miller had a considerable influence on my life. I found him at a time when I was seeking new directions, and he provided some. he taught me for example that to "tune my own instrument" is the most important thing a man can do. One of his most vivid images in my recollection is that of Dirty George, the old black preacher who used to broadcast his gospel to a heedless and contemptuous crowd on the street. Henry Miller, as I experienced him, had a peculiar style of writing. He would go on for 50 pages with the most perfect drivel (or so it seemed to me), and then suddenly there would be a fantastic nugget of meaning and delight. I guess I read him when I needed something that he had to say to me. I like to recommend reading to my friends, but I've never recommended Henry Miller. Hurrah.)

Well Tommy Lee and Peggy continued to go downhill. They were continuous drinkers. To get the effect like most medicine the dose eventually has to be increased, and it will finally prove fatal. Peggy's eyes turned yellow. Someone else in the church mentioned Tommy Lee to me, and at the next Sunday morning service I violated a rigorous taboo: I mentioned the two of them by name, and I said let's pray for Tommy Lee and Peggy.

The following day we put Peggy in a hospital in Charlotte and a few days later we took him to the ARC at Butner. I suppose it worked like that because he was willing to face her illness first, or maybe he was only willing to do something about himself once she was taken care of. Anyway that was the end of their alcoholism to my knowledge. I visited him at Butner a time or two. I hoped he would come to our church, because I knew he must have a different life and life style for any chance to achieve true recovery. He wouldn't; too many of his people were Baptists. I heard that he had gone to a Baptist church a time or two, but they could not really meet his needs. I wish I could end the story there, but a few years later, after we moved to Winston Salem, we learned that he had blown his brains out. We got him dry, but we didn't get him healed.

In my mind he carries the archetype of the person who leaves his tribe and gets lost. I think he might have had a better chance if he had broken free of Wilkes County, but that's just a theory. It seemed that he was neither fish nor fowl. He carried the mark of the rural culture and of the medical profession, which together was just too much for him to handle. That's my theory. Of course we know that alcoholism and other drug addictions have always been extremely common among the medical fraternity. The word I got was that Tommy Lee gave up alcohol and went to another drug.

I will write about only one other of my drinking friends. Fred Johnson was one of the original four in our little helping group. Fred had a periodic compulsive drinking habit. That meant that he would generally stay sober for 9 months at a time. During this time he was the soul of respectability. It was not uncommon for him to become the chairman of the training union of his local Baptist church. But eventually Fred would take a drink, and then he was off to the races. It usually took three months on the chain gang to get Fred off his spree.

I went through a couple of these periods with Fred. In fact the first time (in my acquaintance) that he fell off the wagon was my first big test as a helper of alcoholics. I tried to be present to him, talked with him several times, even made arrangements to take him down to The Harbor, one of the religious caring centers in Lagrange, Ga. He was going to quit drinking and go with me down there, but the time came and he was drunk as a lord. I finally decided he was just too much for me, and to get away I took the family up to Doughton Park on the Blue Ridge Parkway.

When Fred had finished his 90 days, he called me as I had urged him to do. He had gone home to his wife Mabel to a torrent of abuse from her, but for once instead of going from her to the bar, he came to the parsonage. I talked with him at some length and I guess I eventually helped him get a room in town. He stayed sober. I decided that Mabel was some kind of a facilitator. She wanted Fred drunk because she needed a butt or scapegoat. That was the shape of their relationship after many years.

I learned from them that alcoholism is a family illness, rarely confined to the active drinker. Mabel was at least as sick as Fred, probably more so. I said to many people that if I were married to some women, I would have to stay drunk all the time. Later, as a Probation Officer I found myself a time or two encouraging a man to leave his wife, and had one really notable success story as a consequence. Often the man was what I call the sympathetic alcoholic, that is the dependent one who drinks to be sociable with his wife. Often the woman is the strong one, and there's no chance of the man getting straight as long as he has the dependent relationship with her. That was Fred's case.

I could write about many more memorable episodes in my battles with alcoholism, but I don't want to protract this any further. Suffice it to say that I found this work more meaningful than preaching to good people on Sunday. One thing bothered me immensely. My wonderful good Christian folk, and I use every adjective with complete seriousness, simply would not mention anyone with an alcohol problem (the Tommy Lee incident being the notable exception). That would have violated one of their basic premises that you do not speak ill of anyone. To say a man was dying of the bottle would have been speaking ill of him by their value structure, so they just let him die. I guess that attitude among the finest Christian people I have ever known did a lot to cure me of the need to be a clergyman. Sooner or later I met close family kin of practically every member of the churches I served, but none of these people had ever been so much as mentioned to me by my good church folks. That hurt me deeply.

In 1965 I was getting free from my 8 year role of pastor. I came to see it more and more critically. Preaching became more and more unreal. The work with alcoholics was where the action was, and I was moving toward another vocational change.

About this time I went to a Methodist minister's retreat in Hickory. I passed through another mountain top experience. The interaction was super stimulating and all the things in my head came to a head. Jerry Murray was there purportedly as a simple member of the group, but with great prestige as the leader who had experienced the Church of the Saviour and other important things. One night my inner life came to a climax. I was crying in my room and going through all sorts of big changes. The next morning at breakfast someone commented on hearing this, and I apologized. Jerry was there at the table. I said I've just been through a Joe Petree type experience. Jerry said, well you can't live on the mountaintop forever. I said, "You don't know me; I live at Miller's Creek."

Jerry was a very controlled person. His control had led to immense success in his profession. He apparently felt threatened by my emotional experiences and needed to project his negativity about them. The leader of the group, an understanding person, assigned people to drink coffee together, and put me with Jerry. But not much came of it. (About ten years later Jerry had a terrible psychic break leading to the breakup of his marriage.)

That retreat definitely led to the breakup of my vocation as a parish minister. I could not translate those experiences into the conventional mold. Going home I was on cloud nine, about ten feet tall. I learned that Fred Johnson had broken over into the active phase of his periodic-compulsive alcoholism. I did all the wrong things, all the automatic reactions that people do under those circumstances becoming not a part of the solution but of the problem. I realized that the Holy Spirit, who had been so strong at Hickory, had deserted me (or better put I, it) under those new circumstances.

Looking back on that episode 25 years later I see it as a paradigm of our new life. Our new life is for minutes at a time; we get up on that high plateau of grace, but it's an elevation we don't often achieve with any permanence. It comes and goes. At last I've come to see that as the primary end or goal of life. I go up there several times a day now, but I still can't stay there. Any little thing that happens recapitulates that dismal lapse I experienced over Fred's drinking. Help us, Lord. We are truly helpless, simply reacting to each accidental occurrence impinging upon our consciousness. As G. told Ouspensky, we can do nothing. Not until we become Man #4.

My congregation at Millers Creek undoubtedly suffered through these dramatic changes in their pastor, but they were very supportive. After I told them flatly that my call had run out, they continued to support me, pay my salary, come to church hoping for spiritual nurture, etc. I heard one of them, one of the best, had said, "He has outgrown us." He was half right. I'll never outgrow those great people, but I did outgrow the role I had in their society. Larry Floyd was right; I was more than a Methodist minister.

The first half of 1966 was another period of marking time, waiting to see what the future might hold. I knew I didn't want to continue in the parish ministry. I wanted to pursue a helping profession, working with alcoholics, or maybe work as a campus minister. I told my District Superintendent, Herman Duncan, about this, and he tried to help. He got me an opportunity at Western Carolina as campus minister. I went over to Cullowee and had a look and turned thumbs down on it: it involved being the associate of a young son of a D.S., who was pastor of the church there. No thanks. It's very doubtful we would have been happy there. Perhaps I lacked the necessary humility for such a role.

I looked around for work in alcoholic rehab. I had promoted the Wilkes County Alcoholism Council and we had hired a man named Will, a recovered alcoholic who had lived in Marin County, Calif. and drove an old cadillac. Will was a decent sort; he offered to withdraw so I could take the job, but that didn't suit me at all.

At Asheville I heard about the Probation Dept. program: six positions for an experimental effort to help alcohol offenders. I immediately applied. This was around March or April. I earned a trip to Raleigh to talk with Mr. Clodfelter, the state director of Probation. It was a marathon interview that lasted until about 10 P.M. Mr. C did most of the talking. At one point he said that he had found that people who did extremely well in college were not often very good Probation Officers. I said, "Mr. C., you should know that I was Phi Beta Kappa at Duke."

Months or a year later he told people that he decided at that point that I was honest and that he would probably hire me; I wasn't really that honest, I was just outthinking him.

Anyway Clodfelter stalled. He thought ministers were most unfit to be probation officers, but finally in desperation he hired five ministers. The truth was probably that no one else qualified for the job was interested in it. I precipitated his decision by giving him a deadline. Our Methodist conference was about to meet, and my future must be determined, one way or another. Lacking a definite job I would have taken another parish appointment (Highland was mentioned as a possibility.) I wrote Clodfelter that I would not be available after June 1. On May 31 he had someone call to tell me I had the job.

I was 40 years and two months old at that time. I had a loving wife and three small children--a time in life when one ought to begin limiting his adventures and settle down for the long haul. Instead I made another radical vocational change and committed myself to using all my psychic (and physical) energy to a new life.