GOVERNMENT JOB

The Fifth Day

Early Days at Winston-Salem

The fourth decade had been for me an outstanding period of fulfillment. I began it a "retarded adolescent", an intraverted type characterized primarily by fear of people; I ended it a self confident extrovert--accustomed to influencing people in various ways and filling an important role in society. Through all this the manic depressive cycle continued to be a real part of my life. Periods of intense physical, mental and spiritual activity were followed by periods of lethargy, boredom, meaninglessness. Being more or less self employed--that is without supervision, I could get away with working much or little.

Going to work for the Probation Department affected my life in a variety of ways. For one thing I was glad to escape the role of public man, which had restricted the energy I was able to expend on family affairs. I felt that Ellie was very glad to get out of the parsonage. (She always denied this.) I hoped to spend more time with her and with the children.

In our last year in Wilkes County she had had a pretty busy time. She spent nine months commuting to Boone, taking education courses to prepare herself for public school teaching. During the entire nine months she was carrying Rob; he was born just at the end of the school year. She also had responsibility for Mark, still pre-school age. The entire experience must have been pretty hard on her. I was so wrapped up in what was happening to myself that I functioned poorly as husband or father.

Regret! People like to say they have no regrets. That's just a fairy tale; I'm convinced that everyone who gives it any thought at all is conscious that he did lots of things he wished he hadn't, and that he didn't do lots of things he wished he had done. Why do people want and need to deny that? For me to say you have no regrets is equivalent to saying you lived perfectly. I have to be sceptical.

I have to judge myself a poor father. In spite of that all three of our sons seem at this point to have turned out extremely well. They have all achieved really significant things; none of them are unduly materialistic; they all have good, functioning intellects and spiritual possibilities. Help us all, Lord.

The first days and weeks as a Probation Officer were undoubtedly stressful. This was perhaps the biggest adjustment I've ever had to make. As a minister I had gotten into the habit of wearing a smile most of the time. In court I soon found I was the only person smiling, and a short time later I realized that smiling was simply inappropriate in most circumstances in court. When somebody is about to be sentenced to work on the roads for a couple of years, someone else smiling will seem pretty offensive. Like smiling in the presence of a dying person.

Court officials in general were sceptical of me. Judge Sams, the primary judge of our court, had no intention to use me for any purpose. Judge Burns was an old, marginally competent person probably not qualified to use probation intelligently. Luckily for me there was also Judge Harper, a fairly young, bright, fairly good man, a member of Knollwood Baptist Church, where I met him one Sunday at some sort of special event. Judge Harper held traffic court, and he assigned quite a number of drunk drivers to me.

Most of my fellow P.O.'s were simply doing a job, I thought. However I had come into this profession for humanitarian reasons. Nevertheless I soon adopted attitudes similar to theirs. At some point during this decade I read a statement to the effect that by the time a person has worked for an institution for 5 years, his values have become largely homogenized with those of the institution. I didn't want to believe that, but I must confess that I found it to contain a considerable element of truth. (It may have been Greenleaf in his Servant Leader pamphlets who made the statement.)

For example before my time as P.O. was over I had become pretty thoroughly convinced that the people who walked into court as defendants were guilty. This is probably close to inevitable for law enforcement officers. You knock yourself out to protect the citizens. Some one messes up 3 different ways and puts you to a lot of trouble to protect yourself and society from them. You finally get the guy in court; he has a smart lawyer, and the judge turns him loose. Every law officer has this experience, most of them repeatedly. It tends to nurture a certain amount of disrespect for the legal process.

After I left the area and the job, a man who had been a federal prison chaplain told me that in Sweden one could not work but ten years at that type of job. To me that makes a lot of sense. Some people have respect for law enforcement officers, and many others affect contempt for them. Society has given them a dirty, thankless, dangerous job, and we have every reason to expect that a fair number of them will become casualties of one kind or another---some physical ones, some psychic or spiritual ones. I never saw a judge function very long without becoming pretty much of a jaded human being. Of course some do succeed in compartmentalizing their lives so as to preserve a semblance of normality when not on the bench.

My father-in-law, a judge for many years, used to spend every minute he could find in a boat fishing. When I first met him, I couldn't understand why he would devote his entire life to something that seemed to me fairly inconsequential. Later, when I started working in court, I understood; he simply fished in order to keep his sanity.

One of the beneficial things abut my change of vocation was that it helped me to even out the mood swing that had afflicted me so long. Reporting to work every morning is a most important discipline, which I had not experienced as a minister. To be accountable to others is an obligation we often choose to avoid whenever possible, preferring our "freedom", but having to report is something people seem to need.

After my decade in Winston-Salem the mood swings were no longer a source of trouble for me.

When I took the job, I had a strong sense of the challenge; it seemed awesome. What we were doing had not been tried before, and our success or failure would have great consequences for the course of Corrections in the state, and even beyond. I also knew that few people would have any depth of understanding of what I was trying to do. I was attempting to serve as a minister, but I would be seen as a functionary of the court; with few exceptions this is what happened.

(One notable and very gratifying exception was a young man named Lloyd Brinson, a reporter for the local paper. He interviewed me and wrote an article on what I was doing. One sentence he wrote will live in my heart forever. He said, after describing the nature of my work, "He came down out of the pulpit to do this work." That almost became the theme of my life. I've been more of a minister since I "came down out of the pulpit", and my young friend helped confirm my awareness of that in the face of popular misunderstanding and indifference. Since that day I've understood the term minister as completely other than preacher. I became a minister in the sense of Paul, the tentmaker. Paul and I both realized that ministering to people involved not burdening them.)

With the best intentions in the world many influences made it difficult or impossible to be a true minister. First of all the court had its own agenda, not often greatly congruent with mine. I was more apt to be called as a part of an agreement between an attorney and a judge than for considerations of rehabilitation. The first, and almost only probationer Judge Sams gave me was Bobby Coffee, a steeplejack who worked for his next door neighbor.

Bobby Coffee had made a lot of money for his boss. He was one of the few men who would go out on a girder 300 feet in the air and do the required work. When not working he pretty generally remained in an alcoholic condition. Judge Sams hoped I might keep him sober to improve the profitability of his neighbor's business. Well I put Bobby in the House of Prayer, and eventually I encouraged him to change jobs, which I thought might further his recovery. He's an example of the flavor of my relationship with the court.

When we moved to Winston-Salem, we found a small house to rent on Sunset Drive very near the interstate. We spent almost a year looking for houses before we settled on the house on Jersey Avenue. I was ready to buy about the first thing we saw, but Ellie had much more discrimination about such a major investment. We did finally make an offer on a really handsome old house on Hawthorne Ave. across the street from Hanes Park. We almost closed the deal, but the owner tried to extort a little more, and I refused on principle. Soon afterward we bought our home; I never expected to have such a nice home. It was so big-five rooms upstairs. Our bedroom was like a two room suite; the older boys had a large, elongated room where they staged many a battle--especially Civil War and War in the Pacific.

A legacy to Ellie of $12,000 had made it possible for us to buy the house; and we in fact paid cash for it, which prompted Mr. Clodfelter to opine that I was a pretty conservative fellow. Little did he know. There's a story about the $12,000, which came from Ellie's cousin Eleanor, but it properly belongs in the fourth day. $12,000 was a lot of money in those days. During the decade while we owned the house it grew in value to three times that much.

I was able to walk to work and did a few times. I might have more often, but the state car I drove was an integral part of the job. The best place to park it at night was at home. We had to be in our office from 8 to 9 every morning. During this time we might hear from Lexington, where the district supervisor worked, or Raleigh, the state headquarters. At 9 o'clock all the PO's went across the street and had coffee and a sandwich at Jimmy's, a Greek restaurant. Through this period I found the conversation increasingly banal.

It centered on cars and sports.

Whitey Bell had been an outstanding basketball player at State, when they had an outstanding team. Later he played briefly for a professional team. (That was long before their salaries had gotten strastopheric.) Everybody in the county knew and liked Whitey, and wanted to talk basketball with him. He was obliging and polite, but he probably got pretty tired of those conversations.

After our morning coffee some of us would go to attend court (in a rotation) while the rest of us got in our state cars and began making rounds. We had probationers all over the county and everyone had a car to make his calls. (By the end of this period we had twice as many PO's as I started with, there was a financial pinch, and the cars had to be shared. The general level of the job had deteriorated.)

I started with a single probationer and gathered more one at a time. It was probably a year before I had 50. Meanwhile some of the other guys had large case loads. Mine were supposed to be harder; they were older and for the most part compulsive drinkers that no one really expected to change. In spite of this Clodfelter was avid for probationers, and he let it be known that the success of the program would be proportional to the number of probationers, and further that we could expect advancement only through getting more probationers than we could handle. That was the tried and true way the department had expanded through the years of his career, and he saw no reason to make an exception for alcoholic probationers; he was really a rather thick headed man.

He had been a probation officer most of his adult life. He worshipped the department, thought it was the next thing to heaven. I'm sure he wanted to help the people under our care. He had become so crusty that he treated everyone like a probationer. His general technique was to make accusatory insinuations and watch you for signs of guilt; he was a kind of walking lie detector.

Someone said that Mr. C had a heart of gold under about two inches of concrete; that very aptly described his character and personality. When I had been with the department about 5 years, I looked at myself in the mirror one day and said, "oh my God, I'm getting just like Mr. C." I knew then that I'd better find something else to do, but I fiddled around for several years before making another change.

Mr. C had a special problem with me; he felt I wasn't tough enough; he couldn't see a minister possibly being tough enough. So he extended himself to toughen me up. Every time he saw me he would give me some sort of cold, contemptuous treatment (difficult to describe from this distance, but very real in emotional tone to me at the time.) I endured this as long as I could and got so mad I considered resigning, but I hung in there.

One afternoon he caught me at the wrong time. He began his insinuations, and I reciprocated with interest.

Things became more and more heated. Several younger men were looking on with interest and a certain amount of awe. I had reached the point where I was not going to take any more of his crap. Every card he played I trumped. I really had him sweating; he just didn't know how to deal with the situation. One small example: he sniffed that he worked long hours on the job for many years, insinuating of course that the rest of us were slackers and me in particular. He also liked to talk about being a faithful husband. I replied, "Mr. Clodfelter, if you had worked less hours for the department, you would have been a better husband and father, and probably a better P.O." I took the high ground completely away from him. The conversation finally came to an end.

It was a Friday afternoon. We all got in the car and headed for Myrtle Beach. I felt good. I didn't know whether I had a job anymore, but I had played the part of a man, I felt. The next Monday Mr. C came into my office, and said to me that I was a good P.O. And he never hazed me after that; I had apparently earned his respect. It all seems rather funny now, but it was deadly serious at the time.

Much earlier in the marathon job interview I had told him something he needed to know. He was so slavish in his admiration for the Probation Department and strongly implied that we should give our heart and soul to it at the very least. I said at that time, "Mr. C. I can imagine things happening that would make you turn away from the Probation Department and never look back." I wanted him to understand that he owed (and had in fact) a higher loyalty.

Sure enough about ten years later the Republicans got control of the state administration, the governor announced his intention of "shaking the old apple tree", and Charlie lost his job. He was kind of pitiful.

Charlie had served a year or so as state director, then moved back to his former position as Lexington Division supervisor. The state job had actually been his "level of incompetence"; it had led to a good bit of stress related poor health. We heard that he had terrible arthritic pains, hurt all over. Veritably it seems he was turning into concrete. He was smart to move back to Lexington.

The first four years at Winston-Salem were focused, as best I remember on my job. That was about long enough for it to begin to get old. I played along with Charlie's compulsion to get more probationers, and when I had 180, they hired another man to take some of it: Victor Watts. A Baptist minister, he retained pastorate of a small church in the area, needed all the money he could get, wanted to amount to something. He had two brothers who were doctors, so he had something to prove to his family. They were from Wilkes County originally, but apparently had outgrown it some time back.

I spent a good deal of energy trying to train Watts. He had some values I didn't admire, but he probably made about as good a P.O. as I was. He was anxious to prove to the others his machismo, and one way he did that was to go hunting in Montana; he really aspired to a more affluent life style than I did. At the end he was promoted to PO2, and I left for Washington. But that's getting a bit ahead of the story.

One of the main things I did as a PO was to try to find professional help for my poor suffering alcoholics. I learned two things through experience: First it's a progressive disease, and the sooner treated, the better chance for success. This flies in the face of the truism that they have to hit bottom. They do have to hit bottom, but hitting bottom is a subjective thing, and most of them in fact have hit quite a number of bottoms before they start toward recovery. Those periodic 'bottoms' are the critical times when help may be effective if applied in a timely way. Lacking help they go right through that bottom and continue dropping toward the next bottom. For example one person's bottom may be having a spouse leave; that's a powerful impulse to get help if the marriage had any meaning. But not getting help he (she) may progress to the next bottom, which might be losing a job, or getting in jail, or a hospital, or killing someone, All these are the various 'bottoms' at which various people begin to get help.

Judge Sams was a long term alcoholic. He was habitually taken home from the country club by police. But in his mind you had to do more to qualify as an alcoholic. He came to work regularly; that proved to his satisfaction that he was no alcoholic. Being poured into the squad car every night and taken home was just light stuff. That's the way they deny it: "I'm no alcoholic I can quit any time I want to. I've quit a thousand times." How often was I to hear that kind of sentiment, often from people in jail at the time.

The second thing I learned was that the men who improved were the ones who got the most help. A PO was some help (Someone came out with a modification of the 23rd Psalm that went something like this: "The Lord is my Probation Officer". It was gratifying to see that someone else had a grasp of the theological dimension of the work I was doing. In general people had a peculiar blindness to it.) Since that time I have continued to think of myself as a minister, but few of my friends and associates have been aware of my ministry. People in general have a naive and simplistic and utterly wrong concept of the meaning of the word.

LIFE IN WINSTON SALEM

Beginning this (virtually secret) ministry I felt a great need for spiritual community and support. (That hunger, I suppose, has been one of the guiding motivations of my life, leading me to do things otherwise inexplicable.) I believe that spirituality is social in nature, or at least it may be expressed only through social means. I use the term social very broadly here: a man like William Blake, whose primary communication was posthumous, nevertheless carried out a highly social function, by my definition of the term. It is by the spirit that we speak to others in whatever language, of word or deed, and this is the only way that we may exercise any spiritual gift. As a very young child I was taught that isolated Christianity is a contradiction in terms.

Be that as it may, in our first months in Winston-Salem we looked for a spiritual community. Orion Hutchinson, pastor of Ardmore at that time, visited after we had appeared at his church. I appreciated his visit, but I made it clear to him that my agenda was not exactly congruent with his. We did however find quite a few friends at Ardmore, especially in the adult couples' class which included Carlton and Betty Adams, Lib Johns, and the Pinkstons. This class provided for us some nurture.

We also joined a group that was forming an alternative church. A young Presbyterian minister named Jim Chatham, probably with financial assistance from his denomination, convened this group. It contained people who like us wanted something different from the conventional religious experience. Jim however did not want anything as different as what we wanted. In particular he wanted to exercise spiritual authority and proposed various conforming activities such as litanies. We soon dropped out of that group.Those were the days of Lyndon Johnson's great society. Louise Harris, a black woman of unusual culture and breeding was in charge of the local War on Poverty. She had hired one of my first probationers, Lec, a 63 year old alcoholic with 64 previous convictions. She called him Mr. Hemrick, and they might have actually helped him, although through a chain of unfortunate circumstances I had to revoke his probation.

One of Mrs. Harris' programs was to establish a group of community houses in the inner city sponsored and operated by local white churches. Ardmore took one on 8th Street, and Ellie began working down there, maybe a couple of afternoons a week, getting involved with the local children. This was one of her earliest commitments to working with children, leading to a long succession of highly satisfactory ministries which she has had to children through the years.

The Cutting Edge:

I think Ellie must have gotten acquainted there with some of the people who later joined us in the formation of the Cutting Edge. Anyway sometime around 1969 a group of people, all of whom were friends of a young Baptist minister named Roy Hood, met with him to organize a sharing group. Roy was very different from Jim Chatham, one of the humblest in a profession noted for arrogance. Roy convened the Cutting Edge and made no attempt to shape it; he was content to leave that assignment to the Holy Spirit.

Providentially just after the group became organized, when it was clear and obvious that it was going to be a meaningful experience for us all, Roy Hood got an opportunity to work in Raleigh for the prison department. He shared this with us and expressed some hesitation because of the group. We unanimously released him to Raleigh.

I had a chance to lend him a small amount of money making it possible for him to buy a home down there. Sure never regretted that. With Roy's departure the Cutting Edge became a leaderless group, likely the first in the experience of any of us. Of course every group must have leadership, but our leadership was completely unstructured, free, alternating; each person provided whatever gifts he (she) had in that realm.

Strangely a young man in the earlier (Jim Chatham) group, named Buckalew, had proposed a rotating worship leadership. Jim vetoed the idea, but it struck a deeply responsive chord in me. I had renounced leadership of a religious organization, but I was not disposed to submit to it from a boy with limited spiritual authority. The beautiful thing about the Cutting Edge was that no one wanted to be the leader; no one had "his own agenda" or wanted to exploit the group. I learned at the Cutting Edge that such a group is the only one worth belonging to, but it was another decade before I found another such group.

The formation of the Cutting Edge was a wonderful experience to all of us; we discovered and achieved a level of community that was rare, that perhaps none of us had ever experienced before. Looking back at a distance of 30 years I can see that the absence of constraints probably had a lot to do with the success of the group. It was more like the Quaker groups we experienced years later. Nothing was laid on anyone; no requirements for membership, no expectations! We just met for one another's company and to enjoy spiritual refreshment together.

We met on Sunday about 1 o'clock, had dinner together, had a semi-formal hour of worship, stayed around talking often until 10 p.m. I can't remember exactly how we structured all that time, but it was meaningful. We were in houses where we felt free to stay, and we stayed, going from house to house: Carla's, Miriam's, our house, The Millers, the Prices, where else? The Adams of course. It was more like an extended family than the usual church gathering. We met at Dot's house at least once, at Lib John's house.

The Cutting Edge had been a really great experience for Ellie and me, and for many others who were involved in it. The high point was the first retreat at Betty Motsinger's where we began to pray for one another, laying on hands: certainly one of the most meaningful communal worship experiences of my life. This is how it happened:

One Sunday at Carla's house a young German pediatrician named Chris Seivers, who had been in Washington and had some exposure to the Church of the Saviour, said that she was looking for the Holy Spirit. Carla sort of took charge, had us hold hands and pray. We resolved to have a retreat. I had recently encountered Betty Motsinger's place (I don't remember offhand the circumstances of that) and we determined to meet up at High Pastures.

(Betty was a poor little rich girl, an old lady actually, an heiress, a millionaire who had met the Lord and was trying, with partial success to dedicate her gifts to God. She had a lovely home outside of Burnsville at the end of the Black Mountain chain, the other end from Mt. Mitchell. She made her house available to groups like ours who wanted to pursue spiritual endeavours, and she took part in these retreats. Later she became more highly organized, eventually hired managers and turned it into a sort of foundation. I had little to do with that.)

Well we all went up there for a retreat. By that time we had spent enough time together that we were very comfortable with one another. We were sitting around thinking and talking about how we might structure the retreat. Chris again expressed a spiritual need. I made the comment that if Joe Petree were here, he would propose that we pray for her at that point. So we did: we had her sit in a chair, and we gathered around, laid hands on her and prayed for her in turn. It was a moving moment, a healing moment. As soon as we finished, someone else asked for the same. In the next three hours we all prayed for each other, one at a time. Many tears shed, but quietly. I think it was perhaps the greatest release I have ever experienced, second only to August of 1956.

One person didn't join in this activity. Dr. Carlton Adams an obstetrician approaching retirement found it traumatic. He didn't take part whatsoever. He later told us he was afraid he might lose control of himself. He arranged for me to meet Dr. Valse(?), head of the Dept. of Medicine at Bowman Gray for a physical. Dr. Valse told me I might have emphysema. At the next meeting I asked the group for intercession. My emphysema "miraculously" cleared up. More importantly Edna Clark came into the group in a big way. She had serious emotional problems stemming from being raped by her father. After that evening the group became a very important part of her life.

The Cutting Edge experience was downhill for me after that retreat. I guess I've always had to have change, and it didn't seem like anything was happening to the group after that. We had two more retreats at Betty's place, but they were not exciting in the way that first one had been.

One of them was rather interesting however. Joe Petree came to it, and not only he, but a black preacher he had encountered somewhere. This black preacher attempted to take charge of the group. He began to preach, and worse, he had brought his P.A. system, which he hooked up, making his preaching rather excruciating in volume. After a while I turned it off. We told him that wasn't exactly what we wanted. It precipitated a crisis of course. He felt like it was race discrimination; we all guiltily tried to express our solidarity with him. In retrospect it seems quite funny, but it was deadly serious at the time. I resented Joe bringing the man to the group.

(Joe made a habit of doing unpredictable things.) A couple of years later Kenneth Johnson, a local pastor, and I organized a retreat of forty Methodist ministers at High Pasture's (Betty Motsinger's place in the mountains). The bishop was scheduled to take part, but something kept him away. Joe showed up unexpectedly with a Catholic priest, which changed our agenda significantly.

At an early point, when we began to deliberate about what we might do, Joe proposed that Pete, the District Superintendent, might come up and let us pray for him--with laying on of hands. Pete was perfectly amenable to that, but some others objected. That little incident showed the underlying tension which Joe Petree's presence caused in Methodist gatherings; he was persona non grata for a fair number of the brothers. Nevertheless years later one of them, Dallas Rush told me what a thrill it was to hold hands and pray with a Catholic priest--obviously liberated. God's agenda is never ours, and it pays to be loose about it.

The end of that retreat saw another memorable experience. Carla and Miriam, two dear old saints, had provided kitchen help, and prayed along with us (silently) the entire time. When the forty preachers left, they decided they wanted to be baptized in Betty Motsinger's special baptismal font in the midst of a mountain stream that flowed through her yard. So Alfred Amick and I performed the sacrament. (For years afterward I told people that Miriam was the only Baptist deacon I had ever baptized.)

I'm sure the Cutting Edge served a need for a lot of people. We long ago realized that people are starving for community, for intimacy. They hunger for it, and they dread it. To reveal yourself at a deep level is to become vulnerable. I guess almost everyone fears rejection more than anything else, so we arrange our relationships to prevent that rather than to achieve intimacy. To reach out to someone is a risk of being snubbed, and most people just won't take that risk, so they stick with their own, their own clan, their own tribe, and reserve their negativity for the 'other', the alien, the unknown.

Community, when it happens, is a miracle that breaks down that destructive psychic pattern, lets in the stranger and allows him to become the friend. The most powerful force in the world, the love of God expressed in social relationships!

I decided years ago that the Spirit is social in nature. I mean by that that He expresses himself through relationships. I can't love God without loving my neighbor. (We got that from Eric Fromm's little book, The Art of Loving, back in the fifties). At the Cutting Edge the love of God and of the other members of the group coalesced in a beautiful way. We spent lots of time together; there was no sense of oughtness about any of it. We did things for one another out of love, and it all came back seven fold.

Tennis:

In the summer of 1969 Paul went to New Orleans to spend the summer with his grandparents. He had a close relationship with his fisherman grandfather, and in fact he seemed more of a Babylon when he returned.

While he was in New Orleans I began teaching Mark tennis. We both became pretty avid tennis players; Paul joined us in September. Tennis became such a big part of our lives that after a year or so Ellie in self defense joined us, and we became a tennis family. From 1969 to date tennis has been an almost daily experience for Ellie and me, somewhat less intense for the children, who obviously had other interests intrude at various times.

Hanes Park, with a dozen courts, was two blocks from the house, and we were generally down there by 4 o'clock, as soon as I could get through with work. The city decided to spend its 'revenue sharing' to develop it as a tennis center, and one summer Paul got a job running the place.

Paul and Mark both played extensively for their schools. Although Paul was the older, Mark was the more aggressive player. I remember one memorable incident that must be included in this account. After a couple of years the kids and I were playing doubles with another adult. He was quite impressed with their ability, and as the match ended he asked us which of the two was the best. Paul responded, "He is, the little bastard." However Paul eventually outstripped his little brother. They played in quite a few tournaments and in junior and middle high school.

Meanwhile Paul had become a Boy Scout. He and Mark had been inseparable until he joined the Scouts. Then he seemed to turn away from his little brother. I felt this was a tragedy for Mark, who had invested everything in the relationship. (I guessed it evoked in me the painful sibling feelings I had lived through.) It also made Mark probably more family oriented than he might have been otherwise.

Sometimes I felt that the tennis had become very much of a narcotic for me--probably more so in the years in Virginia than in Winston-Salem. Frustrations could become heavy, but I could forget my troubles after whacking the ball for an hour; then we'd go home, I would lie on the sofa and rest while Ellie prepared supper. What a life!

But on the whole we consider our tennis an unalloyed blessing. Above all it has drawn us together, maybe at times kept us together when the centrifugal forces were strong. After 30 years Ellie and I have learned to delight in one another's game, and it has become a more and more central part of our lives. And I'm convinced it has kept me young, and perhaps alive! I hope to play until 85, then take up golf.
 

[Actually I’m now 88 and we’re still going!]

TRY AGAIN

C of S 1972-76

After the first year the Cutting Edge lessened in meaning, and I became frustrated with it. I wanted to go further. But virtually everyone was already a member of an existing church, and none felt like coming out, and I didn't feel like attempting to start another church on my own. Bob Pinkston was especially frustrating. A lovely man, he and his wife Olga had done tremendous

things with their lives--missionaries to Korea and to Brazil and a host of other such things. But they were in the twilight. He found the group wonderful just as it was.

Nevertheless I was getting frustrated. I wanted to move on to a deeper experience. I really wanted a church, but the others (for the most part already had a church and our group was kind of extra-curricular. These feelings I had and the split between my needs and those of the others was enhanced by our experiences in Washington, beginning in April of 1972. This was some two years or so after the Cutting Edge had begun.

In addition I was getting pretty frustrated with my job. I never expected to be there ten years, but we were so nicely fixed, nice house, good roots for the children, Ellie very happy, that I stalled about doing anything. However I was beginning to think about taking a year to travel. I suppose I thought we would all become nomads and look over the country for a year, and maybe decide where we wanted to live next. But before this vision could gestate, another fate intervened.

Miriam had been a member of the C of S, and Chris had some experience with it. I had read of it years before. But it seemed like fate or destiny when we met some folks who were especially interested in it, and they in fact invited us to go up for a weekend visit. That weekend changed our lives in an emphatic way.

This group was primarily from First Baptist Church. The only one I remember vividly was the associate pastor, an elderly man, probably a true minister who had served God rather than the banker chairman of the board, and was therefore the associate rather than the chief minister. Like me he was jaded and disillusioned about a number of facets of society. For example he asked me how much the judge charged to get a man off from drunk driving. I was shocked at his cynicism, but knew there was much truth in his attitude.

It was a bitterly cold day as we drove up. They wanted to stop about every hour for a break, so it seemed like it took twice as long as it should have. It began to snow; the windshielf wiper stopped working. I remember someone (was it me?) driving at a low speed with his head stuck out the front window for vision. We finally found someone who could make temporary repairs, and we got to Washington pretty late that night or early in the morning. We got rooms in the Fairfax hotel, across the street from the C of S.

The church had assigned a task force to introduce us, including Betty O Connor, Kathryn Campbell, Mary Jo Cook, and Paul Coggins. We met around the dining room table for a number of hours. They scheduled some free time for Saturday afternoon, and we managed to lose Ellie's purse in a cab. (It came back some weeks later minus the money.) We convened again in the evening. I don't remember much of the conversation around the table, but I do remember about ten o'clock when Paul came over to our room and the three of us joined in prayer. It began a friendship that survived for many years..

The next morning, Sunday,we went to the early service. I instantaneously felt like I had come home. These were my kind of people. They were committed to God, and they were acting out their commitment in very tangible, concrete ways. I don't think I had ever felt quite like that, until that Sunday morning. This is what I had been looking for all my life. When we all sang The Lord's Prayer, it put a lump in my throat.

(Years later Auntie used to ask me to sing the Lord's Prayer the way we used to sing it at C of S, but I never would do it for her.)

Kathryn Campbell must have been the church treasurer. During the second worship service we joined her somewhere upstairs where she was counting the money. We helped her in fact. The upshot of all this was that Kathryn and Paul became intimate friends. I was amazed at the gift of intimacy that these people had. They were ten feet tall, but they were still able to allow me to minister to them. They affirmed me and recognized my identity in a way that no one else ever had.

On the way back we were all rather tired and subdued. The only conversation I remember came when all our Baptist friends agreed that the people at the church were not very friendly. Ellie and I emphatically disagreed. We had made two close friends and made plans to continue the friendship. Looking back on it I can only surmise that these Baptist folk simply didn't have our gift for intimacy. They had their tribal customs, and they didn't find the C of S folks to meet their standard of Southern Baptist hospitality. They didn't hear their 'sound', and found the people foreign. We definitely did hear our 'sound' and felt great kinship with the folks we had met.

I was never really content at Winston-Salem after that weekend. The people were so slow thinking, their accents so banal, their thoughts so banal. Even the Cutting Edge became frustrating.

We planned another visit a couple of months later, and this one almost ended in disaster. My tires were slick, and I knew I shouldn't try to go in the rain storm that was coming. But we pushed on. I got tired of driving and turned the wheel over to Ellie. She drove longer than I should have let her. On an oily slick patch just south of the James we got rear ended by a truck. The car was totaled; Ellie was cut on the face a bit. Otherwise we escaped. It was a traumatic experience. We got a motel that night, and I got very little sleep. Paul had come with us, half reluctantly, and I told him I was glad he was with us. I think he understood. We rented a car and come on home.

Since we couldn't spend much time at the C of S, we tried to bring the C of S to Winston-Salem. Kathryn came down for a few days and visited the Cutting Edge. Then Paul and Kathryn came, and conducted a retreat for us, which we had at the First Presbyterian. We also took a lot of our friends up to the church. Once a large party of us stayed at the farmhouse at Dayspring. We also had Margaret Johnson to Winston-Salem once and Myra Thompson;they both had a special relationship with Dayspring. Louise Baker also came with us for a weekend although this may have been after I went to Washington for my sabbatical.

In August of 1973 I spent a couple of weeks up there. I stayed at Hartnett Hall, an old fashioned type of boarding house two blocks from the church, where Paul Coggins lived. Paul spent a tremendous amount of time with me on that trip. He introduced me to a multitude of people in the church; he had long conversations with me about the life of the church. I thought it was a very good experience for him and for me. Paul gave me a valuable lesson in the meaning of friendship. He extended himself the entire time I was there to make my experience with the church all that it could be.

Paul had had a distinguished career in the Navy, a wife and family, and then met the C of S. As he said, the Pentagon was a jealous mistress. He was trying to go in two different directions. His professional and domestic life unraveled, and when we met him, it appeared that the church was largely his life. He worked at Washington Mill as an inspector 16 hours a week at 4 dollars an hour. Even back in those days that was a modest income, certainly less than a tenth of what he had earned. He lived at Hartnett Hall very modestly. He was flirting with the idea of being a homeless Christian, except that he had a raft of books he hadn't disposed of.

1973-5 My First Year at Washington:

I had come to Washington to explore the idea of spending a sabbatical up there. Paul gave me an excellent introduction to the life of the church, and I felt like my plan would be feasible. I still had quite a problem making up my mind to go through with it. It involved the possibility of uprooting my family from comfortable circumstances, venturing into the unknown with the risk of financial adversity, etc. I labored with this for some time. Two people helped me to come to a positive decision about it. Auntie understood immediately when I presented the problem to her. (God knows she had been through many an upheaval with her husband.) She felt it was perfectly right for me to seek additional meaning in my life in this way. And Joe Petree also gave me affirmation: when I laid before him my quandary he said, "Larry, don't you know that you can't make any mistake that the good Lord can't fix up." That was it! It was a risk; it might be costly, but it promised more than life at Winston-Salem had to offer!

I felt a push from my job as well as the pull to Washington. We had a new Republican administration that proposed to shake us up and make big changes. It meant opportunity for some and disappointment for others. I soon saw that I would be in the second category; junior men would likely be promoted over me. I had been "supervising" alcoholics for over seven years and finding it more and more mechanical.

I remember the dynamics of these feelings vividly. One weekend I was leading a group of friends up to Dayspring, where the excitement was, and I was leaving a dismal scene at the courthouse. I saw the past blowing up in my face and the future opening up.

About this time I heard about the Royal Oak Project Misdemeanant. Judge Keith Leinhouts, lacking adequate institutional resources to address the problems of his community, organized a sort of amateur probation department. I was quite interested in that, informed myself about it, got sent to a couple of conferences, at one of which I met the judge and had a good conversation with him. He was a beautiful man; he had had a great idea, made it work, finally resigned as judge and spent all his time going around the country encouraging others to try it.

Congress had recently passed the Law Enforcement Assistance Program, and the government was shoveling out money to local law enforcement agencies to fight crime. All the P.O.'s of the district were gathered at a Holiday Inn somewhere (we always got a good free feed at these occasions). They set us down and asked us to come up with some plans for new programs in our area. The other P.O.'s hadn't the slightest interest. I wrote a proposal for a volunteer program in Winston Salem. We immediately got an allotment for maybe $100,000 to implement the program.

As in the army, it never pays to volunteer. My proposal won for me a personal trip to Raleigh with my supervisor. When I got to Raleigh, I discovered that the only thing my proposal meant to the state director was that he thought I was trying to cut in on his own proposal. I fell in with the idea to make the WS project a part of his state program, which was the only thing that I could do. The other P.O.'s were right to sit on their hands. I felt like there was no real interest in helping people in the department, just ambitious politicians and time servers.

The department allowed me to go to Memphis for a large conference on the Project Misdemeanant idea (I can't remember whether I got use of the state car). It was dogwood time, and Memphis was super-beautiful. First time I had been in Memphis (Mother's birthplace) since I was about three. I don't remember much about that trip, not much in the way of relationships. The assistant director and someone else found me there to their surprise. So it goes.

David Jones, a wealthy contractor, was named director. It turned out they meant to combine probation, parole and prison. I sensed that this would lead to considerable deterioration, and in retrospect I'm pretty confident that it did.

I wrote Raleigh requesting a year's leave of absence to pursue other activities in Washington. I intimated it related to my regular work, which was half true: Dr. Creswell had led some sort of alcohol rehab work, and quite a few members of the church had recovered from the illness. They might have taught me a good bit, but actually their work was over (or seemed so) by time time I got up there.

A short time before my year was to begin we must have done a weekend up there. At this time we brought Paul Coggins home; he was on his way to St. Petersburg to look after his parents. It wasn't clear at that point that he wasn't going back to Washington. I took him to Oak Ridge to meet Joe Petree; they were two of the men I thought most highly of, and I wanted them to meet. I doubt that either was terribly drawn to the other. I guess we put Paul on a plane for Florida, and we didn't see or hear of him again for a long time.

(In fact it wasn't until 1991 that we looked Paul up in St. Petersburg Beach and reestablished a cordial relationship with him. We began visiting him every winter while we were spending a month in Ocala.)

People at the church felt that Paul had left under mysterious circumstances without clearing his plans with them, and they (especially his mission group) seemed to resent what he had done.

That was true of the whole church community in fact. His associates in mission seemed incensed that he had left like that without a 'by your leave'. I was always surprised at the negative feelings of the good church folk when someone of the in group violated their sense of rightness. The same thing happened a while after with Andy Ringle, a beautiful young man, protege of Paul's, who had become church mouse. He left suddenly, missing some kind of responsibility and they (including Mary Cosby) expressed real hard feelings about it.

About the end of November I began my sabattical. I went first to Hartnett Hall, a large boarding house behind the Fairfax Hotel where Paul Coggins had been living. Through Kathryn Campbell I had met Doug Kelly, a very uncharacteristic Texan. He planned to spend a couple of weeks in Texas, so he lent me his apartment while he was gone. It was just down the hall from Kathyrn's on Florida Ave near the Friends' Meeting.

Kathryn was dying; Mary Hitchcock, the manager of Potters House, came to look in on her every day. They encouraged me to spend some time with her. This was rewarding at first, but we had a sudden, bad misunderstanding. Kathryn was a terrible man-hater (Word was that she had been left at the altar many years before, which soured her on the male sex). Anyway she was 'bad-mouthing' Jack Sargeant or Burt Hitchcock, or Paul Coggins or some one of my male friends, and I told her that she and I were guilty of the same things. She became furious and I excused myself and never went back. She probably had me scheduled to attend a gala dinner at her passing, but of course she cut me out of that. I didn't feel any sense of loss about that, but of course I was sorry to part with a dying person on such a negative note. I trust if she is reading this that she can now laugh about it.

Doug Kelly was one of my earliest friends at the C of S. He was in a kind of quasi-therapy group, actually a Bible study group, that Kathryn conducted. It also included these other men I mentioned above as well as several women. She had invited me to attend probably back in the summer, and I had met all these people.

Doug had been the secretary of Laubach, the great initiator of the adult literacy program. He, Laubach, Fern Edwards and Thelma Hempker had all been at Koininia (as also were the Pinkstons). In fact Doug and Fern were married, but the marriage soon aborted, and thereafter Thelma and Fern shared an apartment. Doug felt that Thelma was guilty of alienation of affections. I don't know anyone else who ever expressed any negative feelings about Thelma; she seemed like a true saint to most of us.

Doug introduced me to the Catholic charismatic prayer meeting of Georgetown (with another one at Catholic U). He referred to them as Catholic 'holy-rollers', a rural south expression of bygone days. He was very fond of them, and probably went to live with a group of them a year or two later, leaving the C of S.

I shared Doug's enthusiasm for this group. I had met quite a few 'neo-pentecostals' through my friendship with Joe Petree, including several Methodist ministers. I always felt great admiration for Joe, but never was very attracted to his neo-pentecostal friends; I tried to share their experience, but simply couldn't feel quite like they felt. But I did feel great about these Catholics. Sort of like the Mexican Baptists in Guadalajara I admired them greatly without belonging to them.

At Georgetown you found about 300 people in a large room sitting in a circle (with quite a few rows). No one seemed to be directing the activities. We sat in silence until someone was led to speak--or sing, or sometimes we'd all give a kind of melodic harmonious 'hum'. These people were worshiping God as best they understood just like the primitive Christians. I could believe it, and found it very moving. Their music was superlative. They borrowed the songs of the Ann Arbor communes, adaptations of Psalms, an eclectic mix of blues, rock, jazz, hymns, etc., some of it very moving. Later I was able to introduce some of it to the C of S worship through our friend Kip Landon, who married Nona Beth Creswell.

The Church of the Saviour was a beautiful place, full of beautiful people. I went there for the relationship with the beautiful people, and I always knew that was the primary attraction for me. Anything that had attracted and gathered so many beautiful people must be worthy of close study. That was my original evaluation of the church. I was fully prepared to give the church my allegiance, such as it is.

As God would have it, one of the first sermons I heard Gordon preach was a report on William Stringfellow's book on Chrstians and Other Strangers in an Alien land. His thesis, reiterated with a lawyer's zeal, was that all principalities (a biblical word by which he seemed to mean institutions) are dedicated to the idolatry of death. Strong words!

I didn't want to hear such a message at that time. I wanted to believe in this beautiful new institution to which I had been newly exposed. But I never forgot it; it has in fact loomed larger and larger in my consciousness since that Sunday in 1973. It's such a big reality there that it's no longer possible for me to view churches in the way most good church people do. The life of the church is contaminated by the 'way of the world', under the 'dominion of the prince of this world'. It's the emperor who is wearing no clothes. Why does no one else see this?

Perhaps I am simply under the dominion of a negative spirit. Perhaps my psyche is just as flawed as the bishop's. His in one way, mine in another. Perhaps we're both lost souls in need of salvation. But I cling to the idea that people exist in a different dimension from institutions (this obsession continuously gets me in trouble with certain people, generally establishment types).

Nevertheless my first year at the C of S (on sabbatical from the probation job) was perhaps the most exciting and fulfilling year of my life. (No doubt the release from the tedium of routine work had a lot to do with that!). I decided, with much fear and trembling to take an apartment at the Ritz; a white girl from the church had just moved into the Ritz, and we were the only whites there. The first night I was nervous, but gradually I got used to it.

I hoped to develop relationships with the other tenants, but it didn't work out that way; I was really too interested in relationships with the church people. So I lived among the blacks and committed my time to making friends with a large number of C of S people. One night I was coming across East Washington, and it seemed like a completely foreign city, and it came to me that if I wanted to help the people there significantly, I would have to become black. And I knew that I had no such desire or intention.

When I first heard about the Ritz/Mozart project, I thought "oh boy, they're going down there." I thought the church was on the point of moving into the area. It didn't happen! The church was a group of upwardly mobile middle class people with liberal inclinations. They wanted to devote an evening each week to helping the poor. I came to feel rather strongly that such help accomplishes little.

I had met Byron Marsh and his daughter, Martha. Byron was a former Lutheran minister; he had gotten too much religion for the Lutherans and more or less lost his place. Like so many of us idealists he was attracted to the church, and he made a commitment to work for a month doing maintenance work on the apartments. Well I went to the Jubilee office to pay my rent, and Terry Flood, the manager, had the understanding that I wasn't supposed to pay rent, so I told her to give the money anonymously to Bryon. He became the paid maintenance worker, a job he had for a year or so. I heard him tell that story about the strange gift he had received often, but I always kept my mouth shut about it.

Byron and I became close friends. We had a strong spiritual affinity. I took my family to visit his at Linthicum, just south of Baltimore. We even considered briefly joining our two families into a sort of intentional community. Unfortunately he and his wife of 20 years or more were at loggerheads, and they eventually split.

I had joined the Thursday night Potters House mission group with a special dispensation from Gordon to become an intern without the usual preparatory classes. The group at that point consisted of Louise Baker and Thelma Hemker. It had been the power house of the church with Gordon Cosby and about 15 others, but Gordon and the 15 others had changed their mission to Jubilee Housing. He had a vision of providing decent housing for the poor of the city. The Thursday night mission group was left with two old ladies. Thelma sounded a call at the morning worship service, and I responded. I also began working one or two days a week as cashier at Potters House, alternating in the role with Thelma. Due to my special credentials as an ordained minister Gordon allowed me to become an intern member without the usual pre-requisite indoctrinations.

Very early in my experience at the C of S I had gotten acquainted with Louise Baker and attended a sharing group she had started. This group was made up of younger people, interested in the church, but not at the point of making the kind of serious commitment the church required. Louise was willing to be present to them and provide hospitality. This fit in very closely with my own values and interests, and Louise and I became partners in a common mission called Gateway. (For the first year or so it had no credentials as a mission group; to be a mission group you had to have two full church members as a minimum, and we had only Louise Baker, a single old lady more or less avoided by most of the members.

Louise was a dear old semi-pixilated lady from Macon Georgia, the beloved daughter of a country doctor. She had married briefly very early in life, came to Washington as a government girl, spent her life there, and when I met her she was well up in her late seventies. She had been one of the earlier members of the church; nevertheless she came through to me as something of a wallflower.

From this role she discovered a calling to the new people, as did I. We were together on mission to the 'new people' for several years although most of the time with a strained relationship. I found it hard to be patient with her 'tapes', a disability of age, and when I organized the 'Second Step', she took this as an affront and never could quite forgive me thereafter. She went back to Macon a couple of years before she died to live with her niece, a lovely, caring person.

I worked hard to rehabilitate the Thursday night Potters House group with what I thought was considerable success. I recruited a number of younger people previously uncommited to the church's activities. Not eligible to be intern members, they nevertheless came to help with the work, and I felt an obligation to give them pastoral and spiritual guidance. It was an incipient mission group, but without meeting the formal qualifications for such.

The third or fourth weekend I went back to Winston-Salem. I was beginning a two year commute between the two cities. During this period Ellie was very patient, kept the family going, and in fact learned that she could handle things very well by herself.

When I returned from that first trip home, I learned that Gordon and his most bosom friends, such as Terry Flood, had come back to the Thursday night group, and that it had become a silent group. I was free to remain and encouraged to leave if I didn't like the silence.

This was a bitter pill for me and began a misunderstanding with Gordon from which we never recovered. I remained, but I became something of a subversive. I had already recruited a pretty good group of younger people to operate Potters House and was looking forward to providing them with guidance and spiritual direction. After a few weeks I began meeting with them during the mission group hour, after which we would join the mission group and assist them in the operation of the coffee house for the next four hours. In the C of S jargon such a group was called a task force.

A couple of friends helped me over this trouble. In particular John Clagett, a flaming liberal who had become a close friend, helped me to see the situation in a way that drew some of the pain. He said "Larry, you're person centered; Gordon is program centered." A few short words, but it told the whole story.

John was what I called a true poet, not in words, but in his life. At one point he and his wife, another Eleanor, virtually invited us to move our family in with them, providing us shelter in very difficult circumstances. It was an impractical idea, and of course we didn't puruse it very far.

John was another one of the those people for whom the romance of the C of S ideas disrupted his life in radical ways: his marriage broke up; he made a valiant attempt to live as a radical Christian.

So early in my year of sabbatical at the Church of the Saviour I became a sort of Peter Pan, relating to the new people on the periphery who were interested in the church and looking for spiritual values. This ministry was to some extent a consequence of the earlier experience with Louise Baker's little sharing group. Louise and I actually had little in common. But we were both deep southerners, and we both had a strong call to hospitality to the stranger.

 

JOURNEY CONTINUES

Potters House, 2018

That year which I spent visiting the church (largely 1974) was devoted primarily to the Thursday night Potters House and the Gateway Sharing group. I could easily devote 30 pages describing my personal experiences with people in connection with those activities. They were largely younger people, in their thirties, from every section of the country, drawn to the church by its high ideals and alternative religious style. I felt that many of them were looking for values, and I took great pleasure in assisting them in their search.

I became an interpreter of the church to the younger generation and of the younger generation to the church. I succeeded better in the first of those than in the latter. Many of the people we knew in Potters House and in Gateway eventually became substantial members of the church. I considered my ministry that year as the highest form of evangelism.

Many of them stayed only briefly and passed on to some other place. All of them touched the life of the church and made a vivid impact upon me. A tremendous contrast to "pushing drunks", this was exactly the type of change that I needed to reestablish my identity as a "man of God".

At the C of S everybody was a 'person of God'. Formally there was no distinction between clergy and laity, each member being ordained at his reception service. Actually there was a tremendous distinction between the pastor and the rest of us. He was very much in charge and he directed activities in an authoritarian mode, although indirect and disguised.

I sometimes wondered if my feelings about this were simply subjective, but I found corroboration a few times from others, especially Terry Colvin, a young man whom I much admired. I don't quite remember how it happened, but when we got around to looking for a house in the area, Terry acted in an advisory role. He was of great assistance and encouragement in that project, which led to a special relation with him and his wife, Tammy.

Some months later they left the church, and when I saw him again I asked him if he felt that C of S was an authoritarian place. He said, "Oh yes, more than that, it's totalitarian!". He was not the only one who had that experience; it seemed to me that many of the best and brightest were turned off sooner or later. Many of the ones who remained enjoyed a dependency relationship with a religious authority.

My years at C of S more or less substantially determined the final shape of my feeling about religious authority. In an almost unique way it prepared us for the Quaker experience in which the ultimate religious authority is the inner light. After 10 years at a highly structured institution we were ready for Friends, probably the least structured and least authoritarian religious group of my experience. But that was in the Sixth Day.

I had been at the Ritz about three months when Louise Baker had Jim Cregar and me for Sunday dinner. Jim was working on his masters at one of the local universities--in statistics. He had studied at Berkeley and lived in California. Much to my surprise at Louise's house Jim proposed to move in with me at the Ritz.

It was a lonely place, and I was glad to have company. So we got a larger apartment. Jim was one of those younger people seeking values. He saw what I was doing as an exploration of commitment and wanted to try it. Jim and I were closely related from then until the family moved up in March of 1976. We lived together at the Ritz and later at David Dorsey's house, which we renamed Friends' House. (The Servant Community had dissolved by that time.)

Jim got married about 1976 or 77 as I recall. He said that knowing me, a person who had succeeded in a permanent marriage relationship gave him the courage to take the plunge. The young people of that area seemed to be pretty skittish about marriage. They had seen too much hell. The communal experiences that Jim and I had undoubtedly helped him to move to the spiritual point where he could endure a marriage relationship. We used to look at each other and agree that "community is hell", our way of saying that it isn't just peaches and cream.

Shortly after Jim moved in with me Byron started staying with us, at first during the week, but as his marriage was in the process of breaking up, he eventually became a permanent resident. He was the Jubilee maintenance man.

John Clagett had also attached himself to us, and he sort of worked his way into the commune in an informal way. His marriage was breaking up, too. We four formed a commune at the Ritz for a number of months, and after I moved over to David Dorsey's house, the others followed me over there and we formed the Friends' House.

We had some good times at the Ritz. Everyone was on a spiritual journey, and we were able to share deeply in some ways. Jubilee was having a continuous problem with the garbage, so in a spirit of "faith overcomes all", we began to gather the garbage from the Ritz and take it donstairs to the dumpster.

This went on for a few weeks. Meanwhile we were also having spiritual activities. At one of these a young doctor joined us. It was early in the morning. We had our religious fellowship, and then had to gather the garbage, but he felt no call to assist in that. His squeamishness sort of liberated me from the garbage call.

One weekend we had a silent retreat. The only outsider who came, as I recall was Conrad Hoover, the retreat master of Dayspring. Conrad was impressed with our spiritual depth and stated that he had had to amend his opinion of me. I don't know exactly what his opinion had been before that.

Conrad, a former Presbyterian minister, had become one of the key people at C of S. About that time Gordon preached on the new land. He said in essence that he no longer felt called to pastor the whole church; his call was now to Jubilee. This led of course to a crisis, and a committee was formed to work out the shape of the new land. Conrad may have been the chairman. This was too much for him, and he retreated to the monastery at Berryville. Some meetings of the committee were held out there, but eventually Conrad became a monk. (He now lives at Belmont Abbey near Charlotte.)

They eventually settled on a new format for the church, called the "New Land". They divided into 5 or 6 'faith communities', each with its own organization and weekly worship service. It was probably a good move on the whole, but it was not good news to those of us who had just arrived. For us the old land was our new land, and we watched it dissolve before our eyes.

Ellie and I had established a goodly number of important relationships with people who we now saw scatter to the various faith communities. This made it difficult and often impossible to continue those relationships. We began with 'leanness' (Ps. 106; Isa 10). We had our vestigial Gateway group, which became a mission group just in the nick of time, and we remained part of the 'ecumenical' aspect of the church, not attached to any faith community.

It appeared to me that Gordon 'crawfished' considerably over the New Land. I had surmised some time before that he was tired of being a pastor to everyone. In fact I never thought he was a pastor to me or to many of my friends. He had undoubtedly been pastor to the old heads who had been around there for 20 years, but his interests had changed.

Ed Schnedl, another minister from North Carolina, and his wife became special friends after I had them come to Winston Salem on mission. Ed had given up his episcopal orders right after graduating from the Union Theological Seminary (He had originally been an architect). Infected with C of S ideas, he just couldn't tolerate the stodginess of the old line denomination. So he had made a radical commitment to C of S. He and his wife were in fact in Gordon's mission group, the Jubilee group.

I remember a conversation with Ed in which he said that Gordon's behavior was Promethean (stealing fire from the gods; the first definition in the dictionary!!). I understood exactly what he meant. Thinking less charitably I came to see Gordon as an idolater: his compulsion to "change Washington" took the place of loving fully those he was given. Every outstandingly successful person must face the grave temptation to use people for his own purposes. Cynically one might take that as the primary criterion of success in our world.

Ed made a valiant effort at C of S, but eventually left it, as so many of us did. (I amazed myself once again at how long I hung around with all this awareness and 'attitude'.)

I think the worst thing that ever happened to me was losing my relationship with my oldest son, Paul. I said something unforgivable in a thoughtless moment, and he never forgave me. It changed everything. Prior to that I would probably have said that my worst moment was when my father belted me at the age of 11 or 12. And in retrospect I came to see how similar the two incidents were (Paul was about the same age). For me the first experience in a real sense set the agenda for my life. Henceforth I have been an incorrigible rebel. Authority is never good enough to commit oneself to whatsoever: that's my agenda, and I suspect that early experience had a great deal to do with it.

So it was with Paul. He went off on another path. He left the family emotionally for his peer group. That experience (those experiences) show how the smallest inconsequential things can have life changing effects on people. But I continue to believe that "all things work together for good to them who love God and are called according to his purposes", even bad things that happened in the distant past. God is ever at work redeeming all of our mistakes.

About nine months into the sabbatical I decided to take the plunge and bring the family up. We made arrangements to move into the Servant Community. They occupied a house in Mt. Pleasant (across the street from the National Zoo) owned by David Dorsey. He and three other (younger) people, all full members of the church, had formed a commune in order to live out the C of S ideals more intensively. It wasn't working too well, and it soon dissolved. When we came on the scene, they needed additional people, and they changed their requirements to allow us to move in.

That didn't work too well either. I was immediately disappointed at the minimal way in which these folks could or would relate to my family. They pretty well kept their distance. They had their own agenda. Kip Landon and Nona Beth Creswell soon got married and moved out of the Servant Community. But before that the Claytons had had their fling and returned to Winston-Salem.

Aside from disappointment at what I perceived as a failure of community, the matter of the schools became the real sticking point. The schools were simply not appropriate for our children. Within a month I had decided this and more or less insisted that they return.

Rob had been fortunate in his school assignment. The schools in the immediate neighborhood were simply out of the question as far as I was concerned. But a friend we had met at Al Rose's house helped us make arrangements to get Rob in Hearst, a rather special and superior school over in the white area of town.

It was another disappointment to me to find that Mrs. Creswell, a supervisor in the public schools gave us no encouragement or help in that direction. That cut off another avenue at what I thought might have been a creative and helping relationship. The Creswells were from Mississippi, no doubt had much in common with us, but not our vision of friendship. Their daughter, Nona Beth, a cool young woman, I thought, did develop kindly feelings toward us, especially as the years have gone by and as Ellie has sent her money for the Montessori school she operated in the inner city

Nona Beth, one of the few second generation C of S people, has made a really serious effort to live out the ideals of the church. Her husand, Kip Landon, seemed to me one of the coldest people I ever met. He had been an autistic child, I believe. Their marriage lasted longer than I expected, but eventually it broke up.

After a month the family returned to Winston-Salem.

One of the worse things about that abortive move to Washington was that it knocked Mark out of his year as Senior Patrol Leader. (All three of them were elected SPL by their fellow Scouts, a fact I mention here with great pride.) Paul had served his year and won much prestige and honor with his peers. A couple of years later Mark was elected, but a month later they came up to Washington, and he lost his place.

When they returned, he was just a Scout. New, establishment type adults had taken over the trip, and soon they ordained that one must be in perfect uniform to belong. Mark only had an old uniform which he had long outgrown. Paul, who had retired from Scouting went to the Scout meeting to try and reason with the adults about it, but to no avail.

Nevertheless on the whole the Scouting experience was beneficial to our children. Today we are strong exponents of Scouting, although we are keenly aware that there are good, bad, and indifferent troops.

In November I returned to resume my job with the Probation Department. They really didn't know what to do with me: there were now three alcohol specialists at Winston-Salem. I went to Raleigh to talk with the new (Republican) administrators. I told them a few things about the halfway houses in the state, and I think they were beginning to think of me to start a halfway house program, but I made the mistake of mentioning that I was a Methodist preacher, and I could immediately see that that ended that. I returned to Winston-Salem and took up the same work I had left.

I had to hang around the office (without my own office) for about a month while they decided about my assignment. My spirit was still much in Washington. I did a good bit of journaling during this time, taking a piece of paper out of my coat and writing on it. I believe the other P.O.'s thought I was taking notes on their activities, likely a spy for the new administrators.

C. 1975-6 My Second Year in Washington

I had been back three or four months when word came that the Transportation Department had called me and left a number. I assumed it was the Raleigh office; we had occasional business with the N.C. DOT. But it was the U.S. DOT calling about a job. I had taken the P.A.C.E. (Professional and Career Examination) back about August and now 6 months or more later I was in line for a civil service job.

I was ready to go, extremely glad to get clear of the Probation Department (after ten years the work seemed pretty old and moldy), but not wanting to cause any more strain on the family. I told Ellie about it, and she said "Are you going?" I said "with your permission" or something of that sort. It took her about ten seconds to say yes, characteristic of the way she has always supported me.

Unfortunately the second year wasn't quite as much of a banquet as the first had been. The first year I 'enjoyed' fulltime. The second I worked fulltime. I had never before had to serve as a wage slave. In some ways an 8 to 5 job was a welcome change: I no longer equated my identity with my profession; it was just a job I did for bread. In other ways it was a damn nuisance, such that March 7, 1988 (in the Seventh Day!) became one of the most significant liberations of my life.

The first week at NHTSA was sheer hell, and one of the longest weeks of my life: everything was new, and it was a terrible adjustment to assume the awesome responsibility of docket clerk and keep up with the work load. It soon became much easier. I would have stayed there if they had treated me decently, but I was one of the few Indians in an office with a lot of chiefs. Worst of all there was no longer any room for any more chiefs.

After three years I found a better opportunity down the street at EPA.

Working full time in 1975, living in a group home with a number of other struggling pilgrims, life was much harder than it had been the year before. I had much less time and energy to devote to church activities, counseling, generally being a friend to a lot of lovely people, and still keep up with my family 300 miles to the south!

I soon began to compare myself with Daniel Boone, who spent 2 years in the Kentucky wilderness before bringing his family from NC, in fact from close to where my family was now. I went home every two or three weekends. In August I got a week off and went hiking above Damascus with Mark. I would have loved for Paul to go with us, but he had other ideas and plans by now.

Starting that trip I was so 'hyper' that I managed to get a ticket for reckless driving (my last ticket fortunately until the present; knock on wood!) Mark and I both enjoyed this trip, and it made us closer. The fact that Mark could still affirm me after Paul had practically disowned me caused me to lean on my relationship with him-- from that time to the present ( likely the other boys perceive that as favoritism. Ah me! Life is so unfair!)

I probably pushed Rob too hard at times because he seemed (and still does) somewhat less responsible than the other two. But I guess he is responsible enough; maybe it's possible to be too responsible. Rob was always the Joseph of our family, with or without his father's approval, with a coat of many colors, the widest variety of gifts. And one of his outstanding gifts was not needing to 'win', to beat anyone else. We are extravagantly proud of all three of them.

Paul had gotten badly turned off by a really stupid 10th grade English teacher. She convinced him that academia is for the birds. Still he stuck out high school. At an early age he had moved down into the basement at Jersey Ave. and saw us mainly at meals. He became his own man and had less to do with the family than the others.

We had decided that the family would remain in WS for another year to give Paul a chance to finish at Reynolds High. So in March of 1975 I went back to Washington for another year as a part-time batchelor. The Servant Community had completely dissolved about this time and David Dorsey, the owner of the house didn't know exactly what to do. He invited me to return and soon Jim Cregar, Byron Marsh and John Clagett were living there, too, and also a young woman named Ann Carr with a small mulatto son. We continued to have painful, as well as pleasant, lessons in the meaning of community. We called ourselves Friends' House.

Some of it was petty squabbling: 6 highly individual adults don't become a smoothly functioning living unit overnight. Some of it was serious, about real values. The biggest problem seemed to be sex. Jim entertained a girl friend in his room one night. I objected to this strenuously. We were all related to the C of S, and I thought we should maintain the best moral standards: my reputation was already shaky enough in the church; many of the good people simply couldn't understand a man leaving his family for so long as I was doing. I think some of them probably just assumed my marriage was on the rocks.

We had some earnest discussions of the matter, and my viewpoint carried the day. A couple of years later Jim told me that I had been right. The worst thing about that crisis was the loss of friendship with Byron. In the course of the discussion he felt that I was judging him for his extra-marital activities. I had no such idea in mind. I felt that anything anyone did off the premises was entirely their own business, but not in my home! Byron simply couldn't understand that and became estranged, and I feel that he probably never fully recovered from that incident. All too many times that's the way life has proven!

Lillian Kleiser was a middle aged doctor's wife from Lebanon, Pa. Like so many of us she had come to the church to lick her psychic wounds and to find new direction for her life. During the year she was around she became a member of Gateway and a close friend . This happened partly because she decided she wanted to live over at Friends' House. I explained to her that it was for church members, but she wouldn't take no for an answer. She cooked a meal or two for us, and worked her way into the house.

She brought a nice chair with her to add to our living room furniture. I admired her chair, which led to her giving it to me when she left for an apartment at Upperville. (The chair still resides in our living room.) Lillian got a crush on Bryon as I recall, but by that time Byron was pretty well committed to another middle aged lady, who had left her minister husband. So many of those refugees from broken marriages seemed to flock around the church! I suspect that many at the church casually put me in that category, but it was far from the truth; I always simply trusted in Ellie's understanding to allow me to follow the leading that came to me.

David Fitch was another of our refugees at Friends House. David differed from the rest of us in that he was very much of a senior member at the church, married to Carole Fitch with 3 or 4 grown children. Then they split, and he moved into our place.

Ellie and I felt that this was one of the least credible things about the Church of the Saviour. It was entirely for adults; the children's program was miniscule. The mission group experience was so intense that many people seemed to take it for their primary community. That put a strain
on marriages, and an awful lot of them broke up. Maybe those folks would have split anyway, but I always tended to blame the church for each one. The church is a center of spiritual strength, but the leaders did not understand that good marriages are spiritual achievements far beyond the puny things the church was doing.

The Claytons understood this, and so did the Browns--Tom and Carol. These were two of our oldest friends at the church. They were early members of Louise Baker's fellowship group. Thoroughly middle class people, they owned a split level in Annandale and had belonged to Annandale Methodist Church. At least Carol did; Tom was something of an agnostic in those days. He had enjoyed a good career with the Department of Labor.

They had graduated from Methodism and were exploring the Church of the Saviour about the time I came there. I remember one year they had the Gateway group to their house for Thanksgiving dinner; it was a gala occasion. When I organized my task force at the Ritz to renovate the apartment, Tom joined it. One thing Tom and I had in common: we realized that marriages endure when man and wife do things and spend time together. When the rest of life becomes more exciting and more of a commitment, the marriage may likely fizzle. That seemed to happen all too frequently at the church, but perhaps it was simply a more or less universal attribute of society in that milieu.

I should write a word about the Ritz task force. When Jubilee began, some 18 or so task forces were organized to renovate that many apartments (there was probably pretty intense competition for workers since we had a community of about a hundred people to draw from!). Each task forced worked one evening a week on one apartment. When an apartment was finished, a tenant moved in, and the task force moved on to another apartment. In that way these good, middle class, well scrubbed people would do good for the needy and feel better about themselves, and go home to their nice houses in the suburbs for the most part.

When I moved into the Ritz apartment it was with the understanding that I was to fix it up, and move on. I had no trouble attracting a group of what I considered young people (actually 30's for the most part). But my style of work differed considerably from the generality. For example Betty O Connor and, I think, Gordon as well had organized a task force that met the same night as mine. It was silent! That meant that they gathered in silence, worked in silence, and supposedly disbanded in silence.

This was supposed to be a spiritual exercise, but I sometimes suspected that it was a device to get work out of people without the labor of relating to them; perhaps I was subjective about it. Anyway my task force operated from the opposite pole; it's entire orientation was relational. We began with a common meal--pot luck with the usual good fellowship of breaking bread together. Then we turned to for a couple of hours, and then we moved over to Potters House to celebrate our victory. No doubt we got less done than Betty O's group, but I was not that interested in the material progress of the project. I was, and am, most vitally interested in convening and nurturing community.

At the Ritz task force I got well acquainted with Dort and Bob Pohlman, Kathy Franklin and her brother, Tom Brown, and Larry Mead. I had attracted these folks to the Ritz, and we were becoming community!

I was most surprised that Larry Mead was interested in my task force and in me as a friend. He showed up with the other volunteers, and we soon developed a creative relationship. A PhD from Harvard in Political Science, Larry wrote speeches for Henry Kissinger, at that time Secretary of State. After a couple of years at that he went to work for the Urban Institute, the same research firm where our friend Bob McGillivray worked.

Larry was soon in Gateway with us, and in 1975, shortly before the New Land came into existence, Gateway became a mission group, and Larry was one of the first intern members. Larry was brilliant and (for me) exotic. (At C of S, for the first time in my life I had intimate exposure to quite a crop of PhD's. Few of them were 'stuffed shirts', which had alays been my stereotype of a PhD.)

Larry came from an upper middle class family on Long Island; his father was an aeronautical engineer. Larry had gone to Amherst College, and then graduate school at Harvard. When I met him, he was pretty fresh out of school; he seemed to feel moderately humiliated that he wasn't chosen to continue on the staff at Harvard. Much against his will he had come to Washington for job opportunities, and found a job writing speeches for Kissinger, the Secy of State.

Larry was an egghead of course, but he had some real social gifts as well. He was able to show you your good side in a commending way without really flattering; in other words he had a real gift of affirmation. I basked in his approval, and reciprocated it. He more or less cast me in the role of the 'wise old man'.

(One of the most memorable compliments I ever received came from Larry when he was visiting us in Winston-Salem. Although quite athletic Larry was not an extra good tennis player, so we were able to impress him with our game down at Hanes Park. He was especially impressed with Ellie's game, and he said that we were "just a couple of jocks".)

At a deeper level he had some serious psychological deficiencies. He seemed to be quite addicted to a game which Eric Berne, a pop psychologist of the sixties, called "Now I've Got You, You Son of a Bitch" (NIGYYSB). The oldest of four brothers, he was utterly convinced that his parents had shorted him badly in favor of his brothers, and actually loved them more. (My attempt to wrestle with this neurotic pattern led eventually to the breakup of our friendship.)

On one occasion Larry had Ellie and me to his apartment and fed us with the largest lamb chops I've ever seen. (I suppose I had told him that I liked lamb.) On another occasion Larry, who was quite a small boat sailer, took us down to South River, an estuary of Chesapeake Bay, and for a nice cruise on his sailing cruiser.

That was lovely; but a storm was coming up, plainly visible in the west. We decided we had better make for port. We didn't quite get in when the storm hit, but close. Larry made Ellie and me go below while he rode out the storm; it only lasted 15 minutes or so, actually a squall line that had passed over with violent wind and rain for a few minutes. An exciting experience.

Larry introduced us to his girl friend, a young woman he had met at the State Department, a career foreign service officer. She seemed ideal for Larry, and we were delighted with her. But soon Larry decided that she didn't care enough about him and gave up the relationship (NIGYYSB!). Ellie and I thought he was a damn fool. At any rate she was soon posted to Moscow, and that was that.

Over a period of two years Larry and I had an intense spiritual relationship through the Gateway Mission Group. I was spiritual director of the group and received everyone's report once a week. Larry made quite a thing out of this and seemed to be working hard at his spiritual and psychological problems. For a year I think he must have been 'prior' of the group, because I also reported to him. After a couple of years Larry fell out with me and the close relationship more or less terminated, although he did visit us in Arlington after he had left Washington. (More on this in the Sixth Day.)

So many of those friendships terminated after a certain period; maybe I was playing Larry's game, too. I guess we both had our share of self-righteousness. Anyway the C of S was pretty much of a hot-house for close relationships. Many or most of us were still working on primitive psychic disabilities we had incurred in early childhood. The Mission Group was very much of a primary group for many people who had been more or less alone since early childhood.

At times it seemed like many of them over-committed themselves to the power and intimacy of the mission group with unfortunate side effects on the rest of their lives--such as marriages, jobs, etc. Some of the radical changes were no doubt creative, some destructive. Who am I to judge!

In 1975 the church was scattering to the New Land. In a way it was like musical chairs. A few of us were not ready to leave Headquarters, at the risk of being the old maid. Gateway had just become a mission group through the help of Sherry Stryker, who became the required second full member. The Shepherd's group was another holdout, and the Threshhold group, who had special responsibilities connected with the morning service. I had brought Phil Warner into our group as an intern member (he had spent a good 15 years on the periphery of the church).

(Of all the members of Gateway Phil Warner is the only one who maintained a close relationship with us after we left the church. 20 years later he is still a special friend, writes regularly and visits every winter. Phil had suffered two unsuccessful marriages and had some unhappy experiences of various sorts, but he also had a beautiful character. We had offered him affirmation at an important time in his life, and he has been a true friend ever since.)

Betsey Groomes, a lovely unmarried woman, had been in the forefront of the church's ministry (perhaps in Jubilee), but backed off, as so many did, feeling that the disciplines were too much for her at the moment. She was ready to get involved again, and she joined our group. I think she saw a chance to be of service to us, for it must have been largely through her initiative that Gateway eventually established its unique place as an ecumenical mission group.

Working out our identity we had a vision of Gateway, Shepherd's, the old group which had run the School of Christian Living, and Threshhold combining to form another community. She and I went to see Russ Anders, prior to Gateway getting together with them. Russ wouldn't hear of it; he simply wasn't ready to give up what he had. (Ironically within a year his wife Mary was in our group, and he was dead of stomach cancer.)

George Creswell, a young doctor, was one of the handful of second generation members. He had recently married Caroline Banker, a western heiress, and they were for a time much in Gordon's inner circle. Then Carolina had a serious illness, and they felt like they had been abruptly dropped. They came to one meeting we had about becoming a faith community, but didn't go for it.

We had several meetings at the home of Jedd and Sydney Johnson. They were very much a part of Gordon's inner circle, and it was probably due to their interest and commitment that Gordon allowed us to become (not another faith community) but an ecumenical mission group. We eventually inherited the functions of the old Threshhold Group, arranging the chairs, getting someone to take up the offering, ushering, etc.

Frank and Dorothy Creswell were the originals, who with Gordon, his wife and his sister-in-law, had founded the church in 1947. They had another child Diane, who became a doctor and who married a Jewish doctor. She became a part of our group for a while, but drifted away.
 
Jedd and Sydney also gave up Gateway after a year or so. I'm afraid that my argumentative spirit probably antagonized one or more of these people. I suspect that I have often come over as too heavy and offensive to a lot of people.

Louise Baker remained in the group for a while, then retired to Macon. Louise and I had worked closely together and built a valuable and meaningful program, meeting the needs of numbers of people who were "falling through the cracks" of C of S. Without Gateway they would have been marginal at best. But after some months of this I did something that Louise could never forgive: I convened a small group of the more responsible people in Gateway (plus some other personal friends) and started meeting with them on another night of the week.

Although these people for the most part continued to be active in Gateway, Louise, rightly or wrongly, felt that I was skimming off the cream of Gateway and 'including her out'. I'm sure she had some justice for her feelings, but I never regretted what I had done. Gateway required no commitment whatever; we simply provided hospitality for whoever chose to come on a given night. I soon wanted to go further with some of the more responsible ones. I knew people who I felt needed and wanted more than Gateway could offer, so we began the Second Step.

Russ Woodgate, Janet Mallone, Bob McGillivray, Kathy Franklin, Alice Benson were the primary members of the Second Step besides Ellie and me. Larry Mead was tempted to become a part of this effort, but he somehow never quite brought himself to it. This group must have begun sometime in 1975, but my recollections of it largely concerned the 'sixth day', after March 7, 1976.

There were many other interesting and fascinating men and women at C of S, with whom I had personal friendships during the first two years I was there. I could write many pages describing them, their gifts, their foibles, their adventures. In all I probably lived more intensely for a sustained period than ever before or since. In a way it was my reward for the hard years with probationers and a fallen court system, to be surrounded for two years with beautiful people who recognized my gifts and allowed me to minister to them in various ways. Hurrah.

Becoming a Member

As the fifth day ran out, I was approaching the point of membership. I had taken all the required courses at the School of Christian Living. I had been an intern member for a couple of years, served as spiritual director. I had jumped though all the loops and over all the obstacles set in the path. I had worked with a sponsor (a young man named Al Rose from Birmingham who had been a special friend), and was on the point of seeking membership.)

At the same time I was in a parlous state re my relationship to the Methodist church. After being appointed by the bishop as a probation officer for ten years (at my request) I received in 1975 appointment to the Church of the Saviour (without salary of course). But in 1976 I heard nothing and began to get edgy. It was an addition to a heavy load of stress and pressure, and I wrote a nasty letter to the bishop. I wasn't foolish enough to send it, but, perhaps worse, I sent a copy of it to Gordon, who had been instrumental in getting the first year's appointment.

It was a serious lapse of consciousness and had dire consequences. I got a phone call from Bill Price, one of Gordon's close confederates advising me to withdraw my request for membership. Gordon had problems with it, and he, Bill, would oppose my membership if I insisted on going through with it. This was the second emphatic and fundamental disaffirmation I had received from Gordon. It was a bitter pill, but I had enough maturity by now not to let it distress me too much.

I also had some outstanding support from a few close friends. Sherry Stryker heard about it, and immediately came over to our new house (we had just purchased the house in Arlington) with extravagant sympathy and support. Larry Mead also, though not a member, extended strong support, and in fact was instrumental in getting the problem worked out. He and Bill Price more or less mediated the problem between Gordon and me and convinced Gordon that I was worthy of membership. And I became a member. (I know a number of people who, I believe, had similar experiences, and walked away from the church.)

I read my spiritual autobiography before a gathering of church members and others, and then I was received into the membership. However Gordon indirectly indicated to the whole congregation that I was someone to be watched; he "hoped that a 'root of bitterness' would not grow." He more or less negated the possibility of me ever providing significant leadership in the church. In a private conversation he accused me of having an 'authority problem', and I replied "Of course I do, and so do you!"

I became fundamentally convinced that Gordon had spent his life reenacting the Gideon story. He could easily have had a church of 5000 members, but he seemed to make a continuous effort to discourage all but the most radically committed. This radical commitment began as a most attractive feature, but eventually seemed to me overblown. It wasn't entirely on the basis of my own experience that I reached this conclusion: I could name quite a number of bright and beautiful men who had apparently suffered a fundamental rebuff re their attempts at membership.

About the time of my 50th birthday I took possession of the house in Arlington. I will always remember the relief I felt when I walked in that house to live there in the future, after two years of residence in the inner city. I had not been aware of the level of stress involved, but now I felt much like a soldier leaving the battlefront. I had been mugged once, had car windows broken twice, and things stolen, including a battery out of my car. Arlington in contrast seemed so peaceful, so 'middle-American', and there were three police cars parked habitually in the neighborhood. I guess Daniel Boone felt that watchfulness his first two years in Kentucky, and some relief back in N.C

 END OF FIFTH DAY