TRANSITION

Thanks to the St. Charles Ave group and the various musical groups and my good job I was gradually gaining a bit more maturity. I had a pretty good car, a very nice house to live in, interesting pastimes, a nice job--just about everything I had aimed for. I should have been perfectly happy, but I experienced an increasing sense of spiritual dis-ease. I had everything I had aimed for, but I had nothing. I looked forward in my imagination forty years and felt like under these circumstances life would have proven to be awfully empty. In desperation I began to ask for something more. It was 1956, the beginning of my fourth decade.

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The Fourth Day

The job at the lab was the first significant civilian job I had had since sea going days. It was the most routine, middle American type of job I have ever had. I had a degree in Physical Science which made it possible for me to walk into a civil service job at beginning professional level--GS 5. After one year I was more or less automatically promoted to GS 7. Had I stayed there I could have expected to win promotion gradually until I had a virtual Brahman type existence, and with a minimum of pressure, struggle, tension.

But after a couple of years it had become too boring to continue. In the beginning I worked for a man named Leo Loeb, a Jew, but a good Christian by my definition. He had a crew of 6 or so research chemists working on important secret military cotton fabric processing. In the course of this work I acquired a couple of patents, signed over to the government of course. I was fairly well satisfied working for Leo.

But after about a year he left to go to work at Appliance Park, a GE research facility at Louisville. I was put under another Jew named Leon Segal. Leon and I did not get along together, and I went to see the division head, Dr. Conrad and told him I would have to resign since I could no longer work for Mr. Segal. Fortunately Mary Rollins, the head of the photography section, was willing to take me on, so Conrad transferred me to her area. She proved to be one of the best employers I have ever had; she had enough interpersonal skill to keep me fairly happy in the job.

I did a good bit of developing and printing of micrographic material. We had an electron microscope, and we were studying the cotton processing that was going on in the other sections. I don't remember many of my work associates in those years. There was a boy named Charlie Peacock. I had great contempt for Charlie because he had a high voice and seemed obviously effeminate. He also worked for Mary Rollins. When I transferred to her section, I had occasion to work more closely with him, and my opinion underwent a marked change. He was not effeminate, at least not homosexual. His voice he had come by honestly, and his manner as well--probably just hadn't been around any males in his childhood. He was one of many friends I have had that I started out with unfriendly feelings about.

Although I found working conditions in Mary's shop much more pleasant than they had been in Leon's, I was getting pretty bored after about two years at the lab. Dr. Fagley, a professor at Tulane, was doing some work at the lab, and I must have gotten superficially acquainted with him. I had only one more year to fool around before losing my educational benefits on the GI bill. So I decided to request educational leave, and go to Tulane to pursue my master's in Physical Chemistry. The director granted this and I duly enrolled in Fagley's undergraduate course in Physical Chemistry in the summer of 1956. I was 30. The government was to pay all my expenses and give me a modest living allowance, for up to four years of school.

My educational leave began in the early summer of 1956. I enrolled in Fagley's undergraduate course in Physical Chemistry, since I had never had any Physical Chemistry. Fagley was thought to be a holy terror, who failed half the Tulane engineering students, all of whom had to take his course. He was a brilliant man, and seemed wholly dedicated to his discipline. I had seen in him these qualities and chose him for my graduate professor.

The summer course was the usual accelerated program, and we boned away on Physical Chemistry. I just remember a couple of things that happened in that course. First the lab. I've always had more trouble with hands on stuff than with theoretical. We had an experiment in which I foolishly neglected to take the initial parameters, so I didn't have a prayer of successfully concluding the thing. We were using the blackboard for calculations. I started plotting a series of curves trying to find where the initial points might lie. Fagley came in and looked at what I was doing. He wasn't in the least interested in the fact that I had missed the initial values; he was just interested in the mathematical operations being carried out.

The other incident concerns some help I gave one of my classmates. This boy was trying hard, but he found it pretty difficult. Exam time came, and I suggested he come over to study. He did, I concentrated on helping him prepare for the exam. The next day I made 100 on it. No one ever made 100 on Fagley's tests. The simple lesson I learned was that I learned more trying to help someone else than I would have just trying to help myself.

Actually more important things were happening to me that summer, my 31st. As I intimated at the end of the THIRD.DAY, I had become discontented with my circumstances and my life in general; I began to look for something else, something beyond the flat, one dimensional existence which I saw stretching ahead.

I was coming to understand that my problem was spiritual in nature. I had a checkered career in the religious realm. I had read the Bible cover to cover by the age of 9, and the same year I responded to my father's altar
call with a "profession of faith". Little was made of it; nothing overt happened in our family in the religious realm other than a pro forma table blessing. In my teens I wandered from my childhood orientation, as we all do. I suppose I became a deist. I felt that God had created the world and left it to its own devices. The idea that God had any personal interest in an antlike creature like me, and everybody else, seemed ridiculous. At 17 or so I remember going to First Methodist with mother once. I came out into the sunshine with the comment, "I guess it's possible that people may become a little less ornery because of going to church". That's the best I could say about it.

I always had ambivalent feelings about the preacher. What did his words have to do with his real life? Did he really mean all that, or was he just giving us a great big snow job? I could not see the congruence between the religious words and the reality of people's lives. I still find it mighty hard to see that sometimes. Around 1955 I had drifted into a small group at St. Charles Ave Presbyterian looking at the meaning of membership. Seems like there were four of us. Dr. Land, who had been there all his life, eminently successful, and I suppose an archetypal clergyman met with us. One evening I remember a middle age lady saying that her faith was such a comfort to her. I said, "yes, it can be mighty comfortable."

Nevertheless by 1956 I had become aware that I had spiritual deficiencies and spiritual needs. I also knew it was unlikely I would find a significant answer in a conventional religious service: I was too sceptical, too disposed to doubt the sincerity of the words being said. In desperation I prayed that I might find something to read that would prove helpful. That's when things started happening changing my life dramatically.

The next day I was in a barber chair, getting my routine haircut. A Roman Catholic barber was cutting my hair, and he began to rave about this Protestant clergyman who had been such a help to him. Norman Vincent Peale, and a book entitled The Power of Positive Thinking.

Well I went to the library and got a copy of the book, and it changed the direction of my life. My life has taken many directions, many changes, but never another one as drastic as that one. Peale convinced me that God is personal and that he cares about me and is accessible to me. Since August of 1956 I have never for a moment doubted that reality. I can tell you that it makes a tremendous difference whether or not you believe that.

The minute I started believing in God (in that new way) I started believing in myself. My whole self image changed drastically. I no longer found people threatening. People became fun. They saw in me the gifts, the intellectual power that had for so long been hidden. People were attracted to me. I found myself the center of attention--a very pleasant experience. Most of my life I had been starved for human contact, for affirmation, for love. Now suddenly it seemed to come from every direction. I remember going to school a few minutes early one morning and how entranced I was that everyone came over to talk with me; I had a sort of charisma, a power I had never had before. I remember a neurotic girl at school, who I could tell had terrific needs. It came to me that I could establish a relationship with her and maybe do something for her. Lucky for me I had sense enough not to act on that impulse. I am describing a subjective experience of course. I must try to do it more objectively:

In this new life I could see for the first time how loveless my former life had been. I prayed to my newly discovered Father for someone to love. The next Sunday evening I was eating at the Presbyterian church with the usual friends. But somebody new was there, a girl named Mary Gordon with a sort of come hither look in her eyes. We became friends, and I was soon loving her excessively. It turned out she already had a husband and a little boy, and had had a hard time, living in Houston, and had come home to her parents, the Perdues. We had some rounds, but loving her well was entirely beyond my capability at that time, and it didn't last. Nevertheless it was a spiritual experience of the first magnitude.

I had always known I was gifted, but I had never had the power to exercise any gifts in the social realm. Now suddenly I had that power. I prayed for a chance to share this, to exercise some sort of leadership. The next Sunday a lady at Rayne Memorial named Laura Rickson asked me to teach the young adult class. (There were four of us in it.) I said I couldn't teach, but I would lead the class temporarily.

That was a great experience. Soon there were 14, then 24. I provided a spark that attracted people. The St. Charles Avenue area in those days housed hundreds of young people who had come to New Orleans seeking their fortune, and many of them explored the large churches on the Avenue. Rayne in general always seemed to be a cold, snooty sort of place, but nevertheless they came, and we had community. For a while.

One of the original four was a boy named Larry Floyd, a very strange sort. Larry was quite young, perhaps in his late teens, large, bright, disturbed. We learned that some years before he had chased his stepmother around the kitchen table with a knife, which earned him a place in an institution and thereafter homelessness. He had been knocking around the world since then and must have had some very strange experiences.

From this distance in time I can't remember many of the details of that eventful fall. Larry had pressing needs, which he articulated to our group. I had this great new power and desire to help people. I found myself praying for the power to help Larry; I desperately wanted to help him. It was so urgent to me that I bargained with the Lord as follows. Lord, if you let me help Larry I'll do anything for you...and I cast about in my mind for the worst thing God might ask me to do....I'll even be a minister, which at the time seemed to me a fate little better than death.

Immediately my attitude about that took a 180 degree change, and I realized that was what I really wanted. I took Larry into my home. But it turned out this was more than I could safely handle. As I have said Larry was a strange sort. I've never known anyone quite like him. He seemed to have been sent to me. He had a lot of spiritual maturity, combined with a lot of emotional insecurity. I asked him if he thought I would make a minister.

He said, "Larry, you'll make a lot more than a minister." He was right.

This was in December I believe. The past four months had been very stressful. The sort of things I've described had been happening; life had become extremely intense. I had lost the ability to sleep. I called Daddy, and he met me and took me to the hospital. They may have called it a nervous breakdown; more likely nervous exhaustion. I was in the hospital for a couple of days. After I got a couple of night's sleep, I could manage again. But I had gone close to the edge, and I felt shaky for some time thereafter. I drew in my horns emphatically.

I think it was after that experience that I made the trip to Houston. I had been through considerable emotional turmoil with Mary Gordon. She was ill, too, in a different way, sick from a destructive relationship with her husband. He was a PR man in Houston. As she said, he did an awful lot of partying, drank too much, neglected her and the boy, etc. etc. As our relationship developed she must have transferred some of her hostility over him to me. I told her I was going to Houston to talk with him and try to see if anything between them was possible.

I flew over to Houston and got a room in the Y. I met their next door neighbors, who were lovely young people. We talked about the Wilsons' problems at great length. They had the pastor come over, and we talked some more. He advised me to get on the bus and go back to New Orleans. I believe I did meet her husband and got the impression he wanted nothing to do with her and basically wanted to protect himself legally. I flew back to New Orleans. It was my first good will tour and certainly as unsuccessful as any I've ever had. I was in a highly exalted, emotionally fragile state by the time I got on that plane. The old lady next to me seemed an understanding sort, and I compulsively poured out the whole story into her sympathetic ears. I could see that I was near the edge, and I more or less retired from my relationship with Mary at that point.

During that fall I had been going through the motions of a graduate student in Physical Chemistry. I was sitting in class, but not really functioning as a student. I was going through these tremendous changes of personality, from one extreme to the other, extreme introvert to extreme extrovert. Or perhaps just adding a new dimension to my life.

I had chosen Dr. Fagley as my teacher and model because he was an admirable man, brilliant and totally dedicated--to Physical Chemistry. He was a veritable priest of science. Had I stuck with him and worked at it I, too, might have become a brilliant Physical Chemist. But my mind was on other things. On interpersonal relationships, on spiritual matters, on ultimate meanings which chemistry doesn't address.

Although I didn't learn much Chemistry that semester, I learned something about Fagley. It happened like this. Fagley's mind worked about five times as fast as anybody else's. When he tried his very best to be slow, deliberate, and repetitive, and his students tried their very best to catch what he said, occasionally the minds would meet and learning would ensue.

One day he was going along in a very methodical and patient way, writing his equations on the board slowly so we'd be sure to get it. I was getting it, and I took the freedom to light a cigarette. He made no overt sign that he had noticed; he just accelerated his pace about 10 fold. As if to say, okay, you think you got that, huh, see if you can get this. My God, the man was emotionally immature--to the nth degree.

Reflecting on that I came to feel that if I was going to be totally dedicated, it might as well be to the highest value. You can see how this led directly into the vocational change I made. The weird thing is that when I went into Fagley's office to tell him I was abandoning Chemistry for the ministry, he told me that I was the third one of his students to do that. Strange!!!

The semester had about a month to go, and I stayed till the end, just going through the motions. I remember sitting at a table, drinking a coke, and smoking a cigarette with some fellow students. One of them pointed out that I had best quit smoking. More about that a little later.

I had a minimal amount of guidance during that period. Al Jernigan was associate pastor at Rayne as I recall, and I talked with him a few times. Clarence Snelling was Director of the Wesley Foundation at Tulane. We had known his family for many years. His father was director of the Mercy Memorial Home for Unwed Mothers. His grandfather, a Methodist minister, lived to a great age. I remember seeing him on a horse at the age of 94. I must have gone to some functions at Wesley. I remember one where Spencer Wren, who was my cousin Mildred's pastor, was trying to convince us of the existence of the devil. I opined that we had created the devil in our own image just like we had created God. I suppose it marked the beginning of many intellectual struggles with the faith.

In January they had a retreat of some sort over on the Gulf Coast. I went to it in a very casual way. I met a number of young ladies there, among them one named Eleanor Babylon, but didn't pay much attention to any of them at that time. I was to get better acquainted with Eleanor a few months later.

I had some other romantic interests during this period. I had never really had the social courage to form relationships in the past, but now I did. In particular Joan Beck, one of the original four in that group at Rayne, a recreationist from the Midwest She had just been through an unhappy relationship with a professor or something of that sort. We both got acquainted on the rebound. She was a very healthy minded girl, should have made someone a good wife, but I was not ready to go that far with her. I did a really foolish thing--went to her apartment early in the morning--I suppose after a torrid evening, and requested admittance--too insistently. I more or less ended the relationship with that folly.

I had now struck out twice--first with Mary Gordon and then with Joan. These experiences left their mark on me and both gave me needed experience. I had to grow from my retarded adolescence, so they were perhaps a sort of crash course. The next entanglement was for real.

After Christmas it was clear to me that I must change my vocation, but not quite so clear how. My choices sort of boiled down to social work or religious work. Basically I wanted to help people, but I knew it was a journey of a thousand miles. Clarence Snelling was a Methodist minister; his wife was a social worker. I consulted with him about my course of action. I communicated that whatever I did would be to a large extent in the nature of a growth process. I remember one thing he said: the School of Social Work is no panacea for spiritual growth. I suppose that had some influence in moving me in the other direction.

He or someone must have referred me to Billy McMinn. Billy certainly had more than anyone else to do with my decision to enter the New Orleans Southern Baptist Theological Seminary---in March of 1957. I more or less intended to spend the last quarter there and then move over to Perkins Divinity School at S.M.U. Circumstances changed those plans. Billy was a Texan, I believe, unlike any other Texan I have known. A Southern Baptist, he was unlike any other Southern Baptist I have known. He was a modernist in a school that soon became increasingly oriented toward the narrow compulsive conformity of the Five Fundamentals, and in fact he was forced to resign about the time I finished my theological course. Billy was an intellectual. Furthermore he had a great gift for being candid and for taking a personal interest in his students. He is probably the only teacher I ever had who combined all those gifts. He met me where I was, took me with complete seriousness and proceeded to give me the best information that he had.

He and three other professors at the school had studied at Edinburgh (I've never known why Edinburgh was an acceptable educational experience for Southern Baptists, but there it was). These four men represented, in my mind at least, the liberal faction of the faculty. I registered for a class with each of them. The other three were good teachers, very likely the best at the school, but none of them was the equal of Billy.

Billy McMinn taught Religion and Philosophy. He had a very small class. He assigned creative work for us. We studied the religious philosophers of the Middle Ages. I chose Meister Eckhart for my paper. I turned it in and, graded by Billy's graduate assistant, Jimmy Dye, it got a IV (a fairly low grade). But Jiy Bme a II for the course. Jimmy was about the only teacher I have ever had with the faculty of relating personally to his students in a creative way. He had us at his home on at least one occasion.

When I enrolled at the seminary, I had one small problem. I was employed at Arthur Murray's at that time, a dancing instructor. This is something I had just sort of drifted into; I wasn't well fitted for it, and luckily for me, they let me go before it became an issue at the seminary. If the good Baptists had known I was working at Arthur Murray's, they would have been horrified. I did learn to dance pretty well, a gift almost never used since that time.

The student body at the school were largely from the rural south. By and large they considered New Orleans roughly comparable to Sodom and Gomorrah, but they wanted the certification of a theological degree. Billy's students were largely the liberal fringe. Even so I got the impression that Billy more or less took these kids off the farm so to speak and threw them out into the deep water of developing an individual faith, where they might sink or swim.

One boy I remember, Fred, seemed to sink. He left school, moved down to the French Quarter, and seemed to be trying to develop a Bohemian lifestyle. He came back to the campus a few times, as if to gloat. I remember one conversation he had with some of us. One student asked him how it felt to be out there in the wilderness. He said I like it out here. I thought about Moses, who spent 40 years in the wilderness. I wasn't worried about Fred, but rather glad that Billy had delivered him from the mindless fundamentalism which characterizes so many.

Another boy had a somewhat comparable experience. He "lost his faith", but went to work in the City Manager's Office or something of that sort. I remember one other of Billy's students, one of the people I felt most in common with at the seminary. He was from Arkansas, which I rightly or wrongly considered a slightly more liberated environment than LA and Mississippi.

Just before graduation Billy had Dr. Witmore over from the Tulane Philosophy Department. He came looking for students and recruited this boy from Arkansas. He was a nice boy, with a fresh and natural mind and manner. I ran into him a couple of years later and felt like his time in the Tulane Philosophy Department had been really unkind to him. His vocabulary had become so unnatural.

Speaking of the Tulane Philosophy Department reminds me of a strange experience the year before back in the Chemistry Department. At a meeting of our Science Club a philosophy professor had been invited. He must have been a Logical Positivist. His attitude seemed to me obsequious in the extreme; he seemed to feel that he was talking to his superiors, scientists although largely only graduate students. He was trying to present a scheme of philosophy that would be acceptable to us. Everyone was very polite to him, but when it was over Charlie Brent, my lab partner and I, unlocked our lab, went in, closed the door and burst out laughing. It was hilarious. I've never had any respect for the philosophical idea that only material concepts have any meaning; in my mind it leaves philosophy a curiously shrunken nub. In the 50's it seemed to be dominant; hopefully they have improved their act since then.

Dr. St. Amant taught Church History--also an intellectual and he must have had greater political skills than Billy. We went to the Louisville Seminary for a while, then a seminary in Switzerland.

Ted Clark, I think, taught Philosophy of Religion. He was another enlightened man. I remember once in class asking him how we can distinguish among the ambiguities of life. He said we can't, but God can. He went to Harvard on sabbatical, studied with Paul Tillich, wrote a book which he unfortunately entitled Saved by His Life and lost his position. He did get another faculty position at Stetson, a Baptist school in Florida, and apparently somewhat more liberal than the seminary.

Dr. Eddleman, from Kentucky, became president of the seminary while I was there, and proceeded to run off all the best teachers. He relieved me from any lingering feelings of loyalty to the place which I might have developed. After all the Baptists paid for my education. Tuition was extremely minimal, and they treated me exactly like their own. No one ever made any attempt to convert me. I was the first Methodist student to go through the school, but not the last; I apparently broke ground for others to come.

Clarence invited me to join the staff at Valley Camp, a camp for under- privileged children which he and his wife ran in Pewee Valley, near Louisville. It was a way to earn a little money and do something in the helping way, so I accepted. I got up there early and found a little girl named Eleanor; in camp she had the nickname of Holly.

After the two aborted romances which I have already described, I was a bit more cautious, although still very anxious to find companionship. I determined that I would be receptive, but not pushy. I just let happen what might happen, which means that in essence Eleanor chose me. Soon we were practically married. That made the summer camp an altogether successful experience.

I served as waterfront director. We had about 50 or 75 kids for two weeks at a time. We used an old quarry for swimming, with a shallow end and a deep end. To be allowed in the deep end they had to prove they could swim. On one occasion these kids--8 year olds that day lined up to pass their swimming test. A couple of them did it. Then this little kid jumped right in the deep water and started to swim, but he was not swimming horizontally, he was trying to swim vertically, trying to go straight up. It took me a moment to realize that he hadn't the vaguest notion as to how to swim. I jumped in and got him.

On another occasion I left the waterfront temporarily and drove my car back to the main camp building for some purpose. Coming back I found one of the kids in distress and the boy I had left in charge just sitting there perfectly oblivious to what was happening. I jumped out of the car (luckily it stopped on its own) and into the water to get the person. We were fortunate not to have any fatalities that year.

At the beginning of the summer and at the end we had a week with older kids--15-17. I enjoyed them more than I did the younger ones. They were close to, but not quite at the level of juvenile delinquents. I let some of the boys drive my car. One was going too fast and I asked him to take it easy. He attempted to reassure me that he didn't wreck friends' car, only hot cars.

SETTING FORTH

Near the end of the summer we were all kind of tired. We did a trip to a state park in an open truck, coming home late in the evening and everybody was cold and tired. Margaret Snelling decided that we should have chocolate before retiring. People were keyed up, over stimulated. When the chocolate got hot, a girl poured hers on Robert, a black counselor who was a friend of mine. I made him hold her while I poured the whole pot of chocolate on her. Margaret ordained that we should stay up while they made some more chocolate. That little incident strained relations considerably, but such things happen.

Ellie and I had our own thing going, and we enjoyed the summer immensely-- a new life was unfolding for us. We took some memorable trips on our days off, and spent a lot of time together on our duty hours. Life was good. We drove back to New Orleans together with Liz, an old lady who had been the cook. In many ways it was the best time of life--a time when I ceased to be alone--and never have been alone since. I have great sympathy for all men who have to live without a loving wife.

I had expected to move over to Dallas for the fall semester, but Ellie had changed my plans. She was a rising senior at Newcomb, the womens' division of Tulane. I had no intention of leaving that area, so I enrolled once again in the Baptist seminary. I had expected to find them too conservative (backward) to endure for three years, but they didn't prove so. They were backward, but not oppressively so.

Most of my theological education passed over very lightly. I have never taken formal education of any kind very seriously. I think I became thoroughly corrupted academically speaking at Duke, when I set out deliberately for the top grades--and nothing else. I had the same attitude at the seminary: I wanted the piece of paper; that's it. In general I had relatively little respect for the teachers. They were not my tribe; their intellect was relatively inferior. I remember very few of them and very few classroom scenes. I will here recall only two.

I think the Old Testament teacher's name was Judge Kennedy (I start out with some prejudice against a man whose first name is Judge!). He was one of the austere, patriarchal, literalists. He told us that the Hebrews were directed to exterminate the Canaanites because they were totally depraved. On another occasion I think we were discussing Jonah's miraculous visit in the insides of the big fish. I heard the usual foolish statement that if we can't believe the Bible (they meant literally), there's no basis for our faith. I rose and testified:

"I don't know whether Jonah spent three days in the belly of a fish or not. Whether he did or not is not the basis of my faith. The basis of my faith is what has happened to me. I was blind, and now I see." (I was referring to the story of the blind man in the 9th chapter of John.)

I later overheard Kennedy or someone saying that I had something to contribute; it was a pity I didn't work harder. (I always seemed to overhear these comments about myself.)

Everyone had to take Archaeology, taught by an old gentleman named Dr. Beaman who was almost universally considered a campus joke. A real romantic, he set out to prove the historicity of every story in the Bible. He sincerely believed the world was created in the year 4004 B.C. He had a high pitched voice and I remember one thing he said that I heartily agreed with. "Brethren", he said, "the Lord sure can use a crooked stick; he has used me." Sitting unobtrusively on the back row I thought to myself, "Beaman, you never made a truer statement." Seriously I learned something in that class. We're all crooked sticks, or speckled birds, a term I prefer which means the same thing.

Dad was preaching at St. Bernard that year. They had spent seven years at Oak Grove, his most successful pastorate, and the only county seat town he had served. Here he was in his element. He loved businessmen, believed in laissez faire capitalism, was a Republican and made mother into one, although her natural proclivities were liberal. After his seven years at Oak Grove he came back to the New Orleans area, first to Slidell on the north shore of the lake and then to a fairly new church which had been established down in St. Bernard Co. below the city. Some of the same people he had served at Chalmette were in the St. Bernard Church, especially the Quillans, my friend Edgar's parents and their whole family.

In the fall of 1957 they needed somebody to direct the choir, and Dad drafted me. I was a budding minister, 1st year student at the seminary, the preacher's son, about to get married. It all fit nicely. They were a nice group of people, and it was a pleasant experience. In the Spring we did the Easter Cantata which Dad had designed from various hymns and readings of scripture. Being a choir director really fit my personality better than being a pastor.

MARRIAGE

We set Dec. 21 for our wedding. We probably would have married much sooner had it been just up to me, but we wanted to observe the sensibilities of both families, so we waited a decent interval to satisfy everyone that it was right. We had a big wedding at the Algiers Methodist Church with a lot of political types there and of course the Algiers people and a handful of my family and friends. With the church full and two ministers in front of us I still remember vividly my feeling that there were really only three people directly concerned and present there. God, Ellie, and me. I've never had any reason to think differently.

We had the length of the Christmas holidays for our honeymoon. I had bought a pup tent, two sleeping bags and air mattresses (that's all I can remember) for the trip. We stowed this in the 1954 Chevrolet which Mother and Dad had given us and strapped my pirogue on the top and headed east.

We stopped the first night at Big Biloxi, a national forest campground a few miles north of Biloxi on a good sized creek. The next morning we loaded up the pirogue with various things for an all day trip and started down the creek. We got about 100 feet, came to a submerged log across the stream, turned broadside and immediately capsized. The water wasn't deep. We waded ashore and I ran a couple of hundred yards downstream to head off the pirogue. I remember standing there in the stream feeling like the safety man in a bowl game with the star runner bearing down on him, knowing that it was up to me to tackle him. I tackled the pirogue and got it under control.

One thing that surprised me about that episode is that I didn't get cold at all although it was a very cold day. We immediately built a fire and got into dry clothes and no real harm was done. We eventually went merrily on our way toward the east.

As I recall our next night we spent at Marianna St. Park in Florida. We got there a while before dark and made camp. We were the only ones there until this big old trailer pulled in from some northern state. The couple in it were desolated to learn of the lack of electricity at the camp sites. They had no idea what to do; we lent them a candle, which they greately appreciated.

The next stop was the Suwanee River. We had planned to do some extensive canoeing down the river. It was a large river with black water and a swift current. We paddled across it, and I decided not to venture any further. I guess the incident at Big Biloxi had made me cautious. I could see us getting in a real peck of trouble out in the wilderness, miles from any help.

We did put the pirogue in the water again, at Juniper Springs, and drifted down to the road, and walked back--a good ten miles. I thought surely we would get a ride, but no such luck. We enjoyed Juniper Springs and have gone back periodically ever since. I remember the albino squirrels who came to beg. It's a subtropical ecology, very exotic and attractive, especially in the middle of winter.

We also stayed at Highland Hammock and in the Everglades. We drove to one of the keys, but didn't go down as far as Key West. We came back up the west coast, stopped at Edison's home and were terribly impressed by the monstrous banyan tree there. We went across the Tampa Bay bridge in a terrible storm, and got a motel that night. The next night we were at a national forest camp in the Panhandle. A man was there, living in his car. It was below freezing that night, the coldest night of the trip. We've often thought about that man, the choice he had made and the lifestyle he pursued, in all likelihood from necessity.

ST JAMES

Ellie moved into the Kenilworth house with me. Dad had given us an old Chevrolet for a wedding present, and we also had the 1954 Ford which I had acquired soon after returning to New Orleans from the Navy. So she took one car to Newcomb, and I took the other one to the seminary. She went to Dad's choir with me on Thursday nights. She has always made the best use of her musical talents, the only person I know who is a skilled song leader without having very definite pitch.

We had no income during this time. We were living on the little money I had set aside from navy days. I knew I had to find work soon. Clarence offered me the position of program director at Valley Camp for the summer; it would not have gone very far toward a year's finances. Then the Methodist Church came through. I had been licensed as a local preacher, and they offered me the church at St. James. Clarence felt I wasn't ready for it, but I was hot to go and, more important, needed the money.

In June of 1957 Ellie graduated at Newcomb and we moved over to Marrero. As I recall the church had 38 members. They were largely rural people who had come to the area to work for the oil companies. It was not home to them; they didn't like it, wished they were back home. In no way could we reproduce for them the religious experiences they had enjoyed in their rural areas.

Mr. Milstead was the main and probably most responsible member. He was an oilfield man from Texas, a good man, but limited, as we all were in that situation. Mrs. Rogers was the spiritual giant. She and her mother, Mrs. Terry, apparently came from the Methodist Protestant group and thought they were living above sin. I tried (unsuccessfully) for a year to convince them to the contrary.

Mr. Milstead was the main and probably most responsible member. He was an oilfield man from Texas, a good man, but limited, as we all were in that situation. Mrs. Rogers was the spiritual giant. She and her mother, Mrs. Terry, apparently came from the Methodist Protestant group and thought they were living above sin. I tried (unsuccessfully) for a year to convince them to the contrary. She wanted her little boy to learn piano and prevailed upon me to come over once a week and give him a lesson. It wasn't a very successful learning experience for either of us.

The Moormans (two or three families of them) were rural Mississippians, good, plain people. They never missed a service, and they always said they would be there, "if nothing happens". I understood that it was probably a corruption of "if God wills". Many years later we found that Moorman was a Quaker family originally. Very possible their "if nothing happens" may have been a corruption of the Quaker caveat, "as way opens". But enough of that.

Ray Tenken was my special friend at the church, a navy man. He and his wife were a little different from the rest of the group. Not rural southerners, the Tenkens were always outsiders like the Claytons, and hence we were closer to them. Mistake. A pastor above all must not have any special friends.

Mr. Moore was Sunday School superintendent. Once I was visiting his home and his wife informed me that she knew there would be nigras in heaven, but they wouldn't be anywhere near her. In those days we were "coming up out of the miry clay" as far as race relations is concerned. The school desegregation ruling had come down in 1954, and not a lot had happened since then. I had liberal views about race, but I knew if I opened my mouth about the subject I would immediately be in trouble.

What to do? I kept my counsel until Race Relations Day in Feb., and then I let them have both barrels. I said the spirit of Christ was stronger in that Catholic Church down the street where negroes worshiped with whites. To rural southerners that was like waving a red flag at a bull. I said I knew some people who would eventually get up to Heaven, and St. Peter would assign them a place to sing in the celestial choir, and they would look up and discover that that section of the choir was directed by a great big black negro. They would have their choice, to sing under his direction or to go find themselves a segregated corner of hell.

The good folks told the district superintendent that I didn't visit enough, and we were on our way in June. It was a great shock to me to learn this, and a hard matter to deal with. I felt (with some truth) that I was being persecuted for righteousness sake. Actually I had been a damn fool; the extenuating circumstances are that I had only known how to talk to anybody about anything for a very short time. But I was learning. A minister to have any success at all has to be a master politician. My daddy never really learned that lesson, and he was kicked around from pillar to post his entire professional life. I was determined to do better, and I did better for the rest of my career with the church. I did uproot my children once; thankfully they didn't have to change schools a dozen times like I did. They didn't have to walk ten miles to school, through the snow, barefooted.....

Paul came in October that year. Ellie had a hard time for a full day. Meanwhile I was going about my (so important!) pastoral business, making points, focused on everyone but her. Luckily God and her doctor looked after her. I remember sitting in the waiting room late at night. As I recall Edgar came by, bless his heart. I remember late in the night the doctor coming to ask me if he should do a Caesarean, and I told him of course to do what he thought best.

Paul came into the world about 3 A.M. The first time I laid eyes on him I said, "There's the Billy Cannon of 1980. (Billy Cannon at the time was a phenomenal ball carrier for the LSU football team.) Paul had a big chest, a more highly developed torso than I expected. He wasn't a Clayton physically! He was a Babylon. Mark later seemed to have more intermediate characteristics, and Rob seemed to me more of a Clayton than either of the others. Genes, genes, genes! One basis for that judgment was that the first two were more mechanically oriented, more graphically, while Rob is about as unmechanical as I am and musically inclined. I love them all, equally, I hope.

Late May came, and we had made plans to vacation in the Smokies (a life changing choice!). Our future was very much up in the air. Henry Rickey, my D.S. was skeptical about finding me another place; I had visions of pumping gas for a living. I was very upset about the rejection of my congregation. I couldn't sleep the last night and got Ellie up before 4 A.M. to begin the trip. I found driving a little more comfortable than laying in bed staring at the wall.

I know that trip was hard on Paul. It was hard for all of us, but as I said above, life changing. We fell hard for the Smokies. I remember more of that two weeks than most periods at that time. I remember the first time we camped in the Smokies; it gave me a story I've repeated to innumerable people, and probably to some people innumerable times. I had set up the pup tent at Chimney's (a campground in those days), and was sitting there resting, when this Yankee lady came running down the road. I could tell her region by her speech. "Can you tell me where I can find a ranger." "No ma'am, I'm afraid I can't." "Well a bear has gotten into our car, and we don't know what to do." "Lady, I'm sorry, I can't help you in the least." She continued running down the road. It gets a little bit funnier every time I think about it. Of such is the kingdom of God.

After Chimneys we stopped at Smokemont, the first of many times. We found the mountains enchanting. So many times I've been in that kind of situation, an unhappy place behind and an alluring one before. That's almost my name; I guess it's often what has kept me going. We made two circuits around the east end of the park (I think the second must have been on our second trip the following year.) The first time we drove a good 30 miles on a dirt road around to Cataloochee and on to Tennessee. We visited Cosby and Greenbriar--at that time a primitive campground on the Gatlinburg-Cosby road. At Greenbriar we were there alone, except for a bear. We could see his eyes a ways from the campfire, and the next morning we found he had mauled my shaving kit. This was a leather bag, a present from the Cesar Franck Choral Society when I had left for the navy.

We had to neglect Paul at times. I remember putting him in a swing somewhere while we did camp chores over his protest. The first child always gets the short end; the parents learn by the mistakes they make on him. If I had it all to do over, I would do a lot of things differently. Years later Dr. Carlton Adams was talking in this vein: he had been dealing with his granddaughter. She wanted to do something 'wrong'. He didn't tell her no. He just told her the consequences and let her make up her own mind. And he said to us, "Why didn't I have that much sense with my own?"

The second trip (probably the second year) we made a wider circuit--to Lake Junaluska and from there to Hot Springs. The clutch was slipping, and it was foolhardy to attempt to cross those mountains. We managed to get across with the clutch almost gone. We got to Newport and had a new clutch put in. Luckily I had the money or a credit card. As I remember that was the old Chevrolet which Daddy had given us. In 1960 he gave us a newer Chevrolet, his blue 57 with only 35,000 miles on it. That was a lovely car; we drove it well over another 100,000 miles. But the first week we had it (smelling so nice) we managed to get four kinds of human and animal excrement in it. Life was hard in those days.

We returned to Louisiana in time for the Annual Conference at Shreveport. Wonders! Willie Poole, one of the real good guys in the fraternity of ecclesiastical politicians, had picked me up, and we were going to Angie/Varnado. The good folks at St. James had done me a favor by asking for someone else to struggle with them for the coming year.

ANGIE/VARNADO

Angie/Varnado was not exactly a great church, but a step up the ladder. Like St. James they were paying for a new building, at Varnado, the biggest of the two churches. The parsonage was at Angie next to a church with a very small congregation. The schedule at the seminary ran from Tuesday through Friday to allow people like me to commute to outlying pastorates; some went as far as Arkansas. I stayed in the dorm 3 nights and with Ellie the other four.

She had a bike which she used for local shopping--about two blocks to the center of town with probably one grocery store/gas station. Often she would strap young Paul in the front basket and wheel over for the groceries. On the whole it must have been a thin time for her.

I had learned my lesson, and at Angie/Varnado I was careful not to offend the members. They seemed to appreciate me, and we might have stayed there as long as we cared to. We did in fact--two years. It wasn't that they couldn't stand me; they liked me, but I couldn't stand them--not as persons, but the situation I was in. I liked them, and most of our relationships were extremely amiable.

I remember old Mrs. Varnado (one of 4), who reacted so respectfully when I knocked on her door. "It's our pastor.", she said in a reverential or at least delighted voice. I went back to the seminary and told Billy McMinn that the people up there made me feel like a lord of creation. Her comment was fairly representative of the good people at Varnado; they knew how to be very polite and warm with their preacher.

Varnado appeared to be an old saw mill town, from which all the respectable people had moved away long ago. Two (very large) families remained: the Methodist Forneas and the Baptist Seals. They were just like the Hatfields and the McCoys. The railroad track ran down the middle of the two with the Methodist church on one side and the Baptist on the other.

The Forneas made up about 80% of our membership. There were four old Fornea men (not all living) who had married four Stallings girls (all living as I recall), and each of the four families had had a pile of children. I can't reconstruct all the relationships after these many years, but they were important at the time.

Al and Myrt were our best friends and kind of godfathers. We went back to see them once after we had left. Al was a very easy going, cheerful type and affirming to me. He must have been retired; I don't remember anything about his work. They had a horse named Prince, virtually a large colt, but very tame and easy to ride. Al let me ride Prince whenever I wanted to; I made several long rides through the woods in the area.

A lady named Yvonne Jones was one of the active members and seemed a bit less tribalistic than most of the Forneas. Her husband, named Snow, was less religious, but perfectly affable. I remember one snatch of conversation with Yvonne: I had suggested there is more important work to do in Heaven, and she commented that oh, she hoped there wasn't any work in Heaven; she was getting enough of that here.

Dr. Lewis, an Oklahoman, had settled in the area and with his wife, children, and parents become mainstays of our church. He lived on a farm between Varnado and Angie, kept cattle, and was not as popular with the people as Muggins Fornea. As I recall, they practiced together.

One of Muggins brothers was a druggist and a bad drug addict. Another brother, Scrap, taught high school and coached football. Scrap had a very strange mentality, perhaps the most intellectual of the Forneas, but I felt that his ideas often seemed twisted, cynical perhaps, distorted in a kind of strange, illusive way. I suppose it was inevitable considering the checkered career of his family.

Another brother, John Paul, worked with timber, I believe, as did quite a few of the Forneas. John Paul was Sunday School superintendent and took up the collection. This group of brothers had a mother who seemed bright and whom I liked very much although she wasn't active in church. It was very clear that she had had a hard life, but she had made the best of things. Her husband was dead.

Mutt and Bull may have belonged to the same family; I'm not sure. Mutt, one of the younger brothers worked with timber, wasn't very bright, and was an alcoholic. Muggins was an alcoholic, John Paul was an alcoholic, the druggist was a drug addict. All you could say about Bull was that he was plain sorry. Actually it was a pretty sorry family, I'm afraid, but they more or less dominated society in Varnado. I came to realize that I couldn't really help them without dedicating my whole life to the project, and that I wasn't willing to do. That decision determined me to leave the area.

I remember two of the old Fornea men. Joe, the father of Al, but I don't remember any of Al's siblings. Then there was Tom and Louella. She was the one who had been so pleased with a visit from her pastor. They were rural types, attached to their garden. They were both quite feeble; they would take a chair out into the garden and sit there and do gardening.

Tom had been a climber at the Crown Zellerbach Paper Mill. It apparently involved putting his body weight transversely on his legs for long periods. The years had caused marked deformation of his legs, but I don't think workmen's compensation ever occured to him. Al operated a drag line for the paper company.

Tom's son, Johnny, was a kind of anxious type. He had a wife and 5 or 6 children, at least one of them married, to a Boone man. Johnny and his wife had apparently had problems for some time, although she gave no sign to me. She just went home suddenly--after 20 years of marriage, leaving Johnny in a terrible state.

She was the sister of John Dawson, as I remember. He had married a Fornea girl, likely Johnny's sister. He was a solid citizen. Sputnik had recently gone up, and there was talk of man going to the moon. He said he didn't think that would happen because God put the moon up for a lesser light by night, quoting Genesis of course. I told him that if God didn't mean for man to go to the moon, it wouldn't happen.

Mr. Harris was school principle. He and his wife were good Baptists, but attended our church faithfully. Apparently the local Baptist church didn't meet his criteria. He was a man of extremely good character, one that I would have liked to become friends with. Once they invited us home for dinner after church. I looked forward to some good conversation with him, but he just wanted to watch the football game. I suppose he was old and tired, and had enough social intercourse at the school. We all have different needs.

I set as a goal to bring the town together. I attempted to cultivate the Baptists as well as the Methodists. Someone invited me to their revival so I went. I must have made quite an impression on them because a few weeks later, when we had our revival on Thursday night, practically the whole Baptist congregation gave us a visit. It had never happened before.

We were glad to learn that we were coming back to Angie/Varnado for a second year. We made arrangements to have Paul baptized that year at conference. Coincidentally the name we had given him (for Paul the apostle and Martin, the reformer) was just the name of the bishop, Paul Martin, and the bishop foolishly thought we had named our first son after him. Of course we made no attempt to disabuse him of that idea. He and daddy officiated at the baptism, it being quite customary for preachers' children to be baptized at conference.

Another funny thing happened at that conference. A midwestern preacher named Webb Garrison, I think, was preaching during the conference. Daddy and I had gotten into a theological conversation. I guess he quoted Jesus words, "he that is not for me is against me." I reminded him that Jesus had also said, "he that is not against me is for me." He denied this, "oh no, he didn't say any such thing." Then the preacher used those very words for his text in the next sermon.

On another occasion one of daddy's acquaintances was talking with us about my joining the conference (I became an elder and full member that year), and said (jokingly of course), "well I hope you make a better preacher than your daddy." Pretty bad joke, I thought. I replied, "I only hope I can do half as well."

Fred St Amant was an even poorer politician than daddy. He was always sticking in his oar for a losing cause. The bishop once referred to him as the watchdog of the conference, but of course he had very little success in climbing the career ladder. He had been on my licensing committee and had made a big deal about smoking. He said he was sick and tired of seeing these young preachers come through the committee and faithfully promise not to smoke, and the next week he would see them on the street with a cigarette in their hand. I faithfully promised him not to smoke, but the next year I found him at conference and accosted him as follows, "Well Fred you got me on my cigarettes, but you didn't say a word about my beer; I'm in the clear on that." In those days it was understood by everyone that Methodist ministers did not do things like smoke and drink, although in times past drinking on the frontier had been well nigh universal.

(According to his journal Francis Asbury once stayed at the home of my gggg grandfather, David Leech. They sat down and "He offered me a Bible and a bottle of brandy; I took one." (We'll never know which one.))

Back at Varnado money as usual was tight. We had payments to make on the church mortgage. On one such occasion nothing was coming in, so we decided to hold a fish fry and try to raise the money. Varnado is near the Pearl river, and most of these people were outdoorsmen and fishermen, but nobody was catching anything at that particular time. Until the day of the fish fry, the ladies were about to buy chicken to serve, when a church relation, a man I never saw who practically lived in the woods, came in with a 95 pound channel cat. That's all the fish we needed to raise our mortgage payment.

The second year I was prevailed on to be Scoutmaster, just as had happened to Dad years before. Unlike him I took to it readily. The church work was so minimal and relatively insignificant that I was delighted to find another meaningful activity. The troop was made up largely of 11 year olds, enthusiastic about all outdoor, grown up activities. I was able to give them a few such experiences--as meaningful to me as to them. I tried to introduce them to horse back riding--with Prince and another horse that Dr. Lewis had lent. All went well except for one boy. He didn't want to ride, but I insisted. When he mounted, Prince immediately realized he was afraid and started for home. The boy fell off, luckily without being seriously hurt.

A dreadful calamity. I made a visit to the boy's house to explain the incident to his mother and to apologize. She was not nasty about it at all, very understanding.

Even with the scouts I has hard up for something to do: I found a book about Christian Yoga and began the discipline--one of the few things I have stuck to for the past 40 odd years, mainly the physical part. The exercises have stood me in good stead through the years, helped me to settle down many times when I was agitated or upset about something. We also began watching the stars, and even went so far as to get a large telescope. And I studied Greek; enjoyed that very much and might have continued if I had stayed there.

But I was getting pretty frustrated. Nothing significant seemed to be happening in the church. It seemed like a real hard case. I realized that to make any real impact in that community it would be necessary to give my life to it, and I knew all too well that I didn't want to do that. In desperation I thought of going to see my old Greek mythology professor at Duke to see if I could study Greek with him. Or trying to get a job in Scouting. Anything to get out of my present circumstances.

We were drawn irresistibly to the Smokies; Louisiana no longer had any attraction. I reasoned that as a second generation Methodist minister it would be better for me to work in a different conference where my father was not known. (That has its pros and cons like most things.) So I went to the bishop's office in New Orleans. Bessie Kerr, one of Dad's old members at St. Mark's was secretary there, and she found for me the addresses of the District Superintendents who seemed on the map to serve in the North Carolina mountains. I wrote to five of them requesting an interview re a possible appointment. I received invitations from all, so we planned our trip in April and hit the road.

The first man, Dr. Few of Gastonia, didn't want us and didn't need us. I could discern that from the hour we spent together. Bob Tuttle was a man with a great reputation in the conference; I found it surprising he didn't make bishop. He had a great missionary zeal. He served the Asheville district and tried to interest me in Bald Creek. He earnestly discussed a number of his rural appointments and usually summarized them in one of four ways: the worst ones had neither water nor industry, some had one thing, but not the other, and the best ones of course had water and industry. As he talked his eyes were pointed toward me, but I felt that he didn't see me at all; I didn't feel any warmth in the man. I decided that he needed us, but didn't want us.

Fletcher Nelson of Morganton made a really big impression on us. A big, warm hearted man, he had worked as president of Lees McRae College at Banner Elk and later worked in Development at Duke. He was doing a stint in the cabinet. He didn't need us, but seemed to want us. I think he would have made a place for us out of the goodness of his heart. He was from Arkansas, and had been roommates with Aubrey Walton, my Louisiana bishop. He told us among other things that he frequently went to the Smokies where he would get an Indian off the reservation as a guide and go fishing. That was practically the only time I had any conversation with him, but I'm glad I met Fletcher Nelson.

Garland Stafford was superintendent at North Wilkesboro. He wanted us and needed us, so there we went. He originally had us slated for Watauga Circuit, west of Boone. Bishop Harmon, a Mississippian, vetoed that idea when he learned we were from Louisiana, "Don't send that man to Watauga; he'll freeze to death up there." So we got Millers Creek, about as happy an appointment as I have ever known.

After the April trip to North Carolina, our third consecutive spring in the Smokies, I went home and told my good church folk what I had done. They would have been glad for me to stay, but accepted the fact that I wanted greener pastures. Not so the bishop. He came with other brass for the dedication of our sanctuary. He didn't really think very highly of me; I could tell by his manner, being fairly intuitive. Anyway we had the dedication, and I said nothing to him about my plans. Then I wrote him about them requesting to be transferred to the WNC conference. I said that his old roommate, Fletcher Nelson, had convinced me the fishing was better up there. He replied angrily: he was piqued because I had told my congregation. "You may not move", he said, but I wasn't worried. I knew he was just ventilating his displeasure at my presumption.

I understand the Methodist connectional system better than most people, from having lived in it throughout my childhood. I used to tell people that at the age of 9 I sat in our living room and listened to the presiding elder (District Superintendent nowadays) lying to my father about where we would be living the following year. (That may not be strictly true, but it's poetically true.) I knew that the big shots expected to use the little men for their own purposes. You got your appointment at their pleasure, saluted and said yes, sir. They made their own appointments dealing directly with the larger congregations. I've noticed many of the biggest preachers went to a new conference at every appointment. And I also knew that by jumping to another conference I would have a chance to do some bargaining that was not open to me in Louisiana. Bishop Walton just hated to see a little fellow like me doing such a thing. But he really had no choice, but to accept Bishop Harmon's request for me when it came. Through the years I have found myself in that position re authority all too often.

In 1961 we attended two conferences: first the Louisiana conference in May, a kind of bittersweet farewell hearing my appointment as transferred to the Western North Carolina Conference; then in June we attended the WNC at Lake Junaluska, and found out about Millers Creek. In between we spent a pleasant three homeless weeks exploring the mountains more deeply and fully than we had, especially the northern section. I guess I had an inkling that we would be in the North Wilkesboro area, so we looked around up there.

After conference I left Ellie with one car and two babies in the campground at Julian Price while I drove back to get the U-Haul trailer which contained all our possessions. I drank four cups of coffee and drove right through--close to 24 hours driving as I recall, some 900 odd miles. I had the old black Chevrolet, and it gave out crossing the mountains between Elizabeth City and Boone. I found a local mechanic and asked him to help, then hitchhiked back to Julian Price. We went back for the car a day or two later. He had made a major repair job and asked me if I thought $40 would be too much. I was very happy to get by with $40; it would have cost at least twice that much in a larger population center. We drove tandem down to Millers Creek, and my brakes just about gave out going down the escarpment. I was pretty foolhardy to take that thing down the hill with the trailer behind and no brakes, but managed to make it.

MILLERS CREEK/UNION/ARBOR GROVE/CHARITY

 

I was really delighted with Millers Creek--a much larger congregation than we had been struggling with in Washington Parish. Four churches with a combined membership of around 600. The main church was a lovely little pocket cathedral, a T shaped building with Georgian columns, everything lovely, a divided chancel, robed choir. It was really the high church of that part of the county, both a blessing and a curse. The blessing was that we had the best people in the area, many teachers and generally high class cultured people. The curse was that no one else in the area would be caught dead in such a place. Evangelism seemed to be a hopeless proposition there.

Arbor Grove and Union each had almost as many members as Millers Creek, but they were very different. Arbor Grove was a mountain community; it was more like a Baptist church than most, the people very independent and tending toward fractious. They had once locked out their preacher, Rev. J.L.A.Bumgarner. He preached on the steps and told them they would love him before he was through there, and he was right. The worst thing was the former pastor had married a girl from Arbor Grove. I suppose the people there liked me the least of all the churches, but we had a relationship of mutual respect. They knew I had a measure of integrity and they tolerated me as their pastor, about as well as they would have tolerated anybody. They would much preferred to have had a local person for pastor. In fact there was a Baptist minister living on each side of the church, two fine gentlemen who became very good friends.

Dol Eller had a really sterling character, I thought. He pastored Lewis Fork Baptist Church about ten miles southwest of us, but he lived next door to Arbor Grove. At least one of his daughters was a member of Arbor Grove; I think she was the one married to Paul Warren, a truck driver who had a brother at Union, one of my other churches. Many of the families at each church were closely related to people at the other churches.

Dol had two twin daughters who were rather odd. They seemed to have emotional problems and difficulty adjusting to the ordinary world. They were in the Mental Hospital at Morganton several times. Finally the two went together. They had agreed that if they were separated they would die. The doctors did in fact separate them, and they did in fact both immediately die. Curious.

While we lived at Millers Creek, Dol Eller got word that he had prostate cancer. He declined the course of treatment which the doctors proposed. I visited him regularly during his decline, and of course he eventually died. Actually visiting the ill and buying the dead were two of my primary functions as pastor of this large group of Methodists. I often found myself for that matter assisting at the burial of Baptist folk, especially after I got involved with dozens of alcoholics in the community; they were more apt to be Baptists, and they wanted me to help with the funeral of their parents, etc. We were a little island of Methodists in a sea of Baptists. I had a pretty good reputation with the Baptists, perhaps partly because I had attended a Baptist school, more significantly I believe because I made it my business to be sociable and respectful to them all.

I don't know where Wiley Carroll pastored; he lived on the other side of Arbor Grove. I visited him as often as I did Dol Eller, largely because he had three sons suffering from muscular dystrophy. A terrible misfortune and calamity for good people; they made the best of it, did what they could for those boys. Each one had a small platform with skate wheels upon which they would wheel around the house.

I was invited to attend a weekly meeting of Baptist preachers. I accepted. It was largely a prayer meeting. There were about 5 or 6 or us. After greeting one another one started praying; soon another, and soon all 5 of them (us) were praying vocally, raising our voices to our common God. It sounded rather cacaphonous. I respected those people, but I never went back to that meeting.

On another occasion we visited a Primitive Baptist Church up near the Blue Ridge. The pastor there began to preacher, and he was not speaking but singing. With a smile on his face he carried out a very melodious singsong type of delivery of his message. Custom of the place.

One of the members at Millers Creek had come from a primitive Baptist background. She had apparently run from it fast enough to marry into the best family in Millers Creek, and she was still running fast. I suspect she had a lot to do with the divided chancel and robed choir. Near the end of my five years there she asked me if I would wear a (preacher's) robe if she bought it. I told her I sincerely hoped it wouldn't come to that. I often think about that woman and about how her religion was mixed up (I should say contaminated) by her social pretensions. She had achieved the height in her community (religiously speaking), but she wanted it higher. I felt just the opposite. I felt that they had isolated themselves from the community and severely handicapped the amount of good they could do. They were wonderful people, but they had no concept of reaching out to others in the community.

My final and most significant (to me) Baptist story concerns Rev. Jack Miller of Harmony, down the road between Millers Creek and Union. He was a terrific evangelist; people were crowding in to his church in droves. His style of preaching was to give them unmitigated hell. And they asked for more. I attended a revival they were holding, an uncommon thing for a Methodist minister to do in that area. He was pleased and gracious so I invited him to come preach at Millers Creek some Sunday night. He came; the good people knew what to expect, and those who came heard him prayerfully. That night as we were leaving, after all the laymen had been greeted and filed out, he was in a warm kind of mood, and he told me that he had wrecked 8 cars before he became a minister. A man full of aggression; he had redirected it in a dramatic way.

It is easy to feel contemptuous about that kind of religion. But I had to face the fact that he had about 10 times as many reformed drunkards in his pews as I had, although I had particularly specialized in that area. Maybe they needed the law, and he gave them the law. Maybe they needed to transfer their dependence from one strong influence to another. I don't know the answer, but I know he was doing some good; as we say in the holy vernacular, the Lord was using him.

My real pride and joy at Millers Creek was Charity. A real mountain church, it had 28 members. As one of them said "we're too small to fight." They were lovely; they expected nothing and were so grateful for the things I did for them. Two of the members, two maiden ladies named Miss Bessie and Miss Dollie lived in a 19th century farmhouse, complete with a well, and lived pretty near a 19th century lifestyle.

Miss Bessie was communion stewart. First you should know that the Methodist for many years have frowned on any use of alcohol. Our communion wine is grape juice. At the four churches on the Millers Creek charge we served communion only once or twice a year rather than the more customary once a month. Well time came for communion at Charity. I had forgotten until the last minute, so I told Miss Bessie not to worry about the grape juice, that I would bring some. She said, "you don't need to do that; I have it."

I preached on the first miracle, the turning of water into wine. Then I proceeded with the Lord's Supper. The preacher (acting as priest) is supposed to partake first, the idea being I suppose that he thereby becomes worthy enough to serve the others. Well I partook of that grape juice; it was the best grape juice I had ever tasted. Homegrown in fact. They cap the bottle but don't shut out entirely all fermenting agencies. Then they let it sit on their shelf a while. You might say they had a sort of 19th century communion service at Charity.

The last pastor had planned to shut down Charity and send its 28 members to Millers Creek. I saw no such need and in fact enjoyed very much going up there once a month to spend an hour with them. The church prospered. It was strictly a one room deal, but they decided to put three rooms on the back in the form of a T. We met to discuss the financing. Mr. Clayton McGlamery, bless his heart, a wonderful great saint and dear friend, began, "I'll give $100." The next person said "I'll give $100." I was sitting there so I agreed to give $100. Then came Miss Bessie. Miss Bessie hesitated and then commited herself, "Dolly and I'll give $50." Mr. McGlamery replied, "Now Bessie, you can do better than that." And she did. Ah they were wonderful people, and my memories of Charity were all fond ones. Our little ones called it Chekki. Paul was great for coming up with close approximations of words he had not yet fully mastered. He enjoyed going to Chekki just like I did.

When we went to Millers Creek we were told they would build a new parsonage. Meanwhile we were housed in an old house, about equivalent to the one in Angie. No problem for a while, but nothing happened about the new parsonage. No one seemed in any hurry to do anything. After about a year I got on my horse and started pushing it. It took me a while to figure out how to get it going. Finally I drew three floor plans (just call me an amateur architect), took it to the board meeting, and asked them which they liked best. That was it. Van Caudill wanted a bigger house, but I felt 30 by 50 was big enough--plus a full basement with two finished rooms, an extra bedroom and my study.

When it was completed, I felt like it was perfect. Anything more would have been foolish extravagance. It was certainly as comfortable a house as we have ever lived in. I came to question our level of comfort in fact. Why should people living in very modest circumstances give their scarce money to keep their preacher in such affluence. That's a question I have never been able to answer satisfactorily. In my own mind I simply can't justify a man of God living better than the people he is supposed to be serving.

I came to feel that ministers have been seduced to the standard of godless American materialism. Their success is measured by their level of affluence. Every man prefers to be the banker's pastor rather than concentrating on the needy. The banker of course wants his preacher to have a respectable life style, to take some of the heat off himself for his own extravagance--and acquisitiveness. These things contradict the gospel, but one hears about that all too rarely. These considerations had a real part in my decision after 8 years as a pastor to give up professional religion.

The question came to a head for me when I made a trip to Charlotte to see one of our brother ministers named Jerome Hunnicutt. I can't recall the purpose of that visit, but I remember vividly the effect it had on me. It was my first meeting with Bro Hunnicutt, and here is my impression: he was serving a middle sized city church, the kind of place that I could expect to attain if I behaved myself and acted discreetly for about 10 years. But his problem was he needed two Buicks; one for himself and one for his daughter. It seemed really strange to me that his mind was on that to a marked degree. Apparently he felt the need to keep up with the banker, which I take to be an incurable disease. There is always someone a little better off that you need to equal. Unhappiness! And certainly a long way from the Christian gospel. Bro Jerome helped set me free from the need to be a professional minister, and for that I thank him.

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.