ON TO THE SEMINARY

            I grew up in the Ozark Mountains of Arkansas where a person who felt called to the Pastoral ministry just started preaching so what was I doing going to seminary anyhow? My grandfather Lauther Chadwick had a sixth grade education that is of formal schooling. He was self educated and knew the bible frontward and backward. There were other preachers who could not read so when they preached they had their wife or someone else read their text for them. And the pastor of the church in Compton, California where I was a member at the time of my commitment to become a pastor was not college or seminary trained but was self trained. So why go to college and seminary to train for ministry?

            I asked Rev. Van Griffin my pastor at Grace Baptist Church in Compton, California, “Do I need to go to college and seminary in order to be a pastor?” and he told me, “No but it will take you 20 to 30 years to learn what you could learn in college and seminary.”  That influenced me somewhat but the real kicker was that I felt called to be a missionary and the requirement for appointment was a college and seminary degree. So in 1965 when I finished my college with a BA degree, I was ready to go on to seminary

            I resigned my position as associate pastor of First Spanish Baptist Church in El Monte, California, loaded up our household goods in a U-Haul truck and took them some 40 miles to Palmdale, California where I unloaded them into my younger sister’s garage. This was a Tuesday, so on Wednesday I left my wife and 3 children at my sister’s house and headed to Mill Valley, California to find a job to support my family and myself while attending seminary.

            Jack Combs was Director of Language Missions for the California Southern Baptist Convention. He had asked me to stop in at the Convention Headquarters in Fresno on my way to Mill Valley. Around noon I arrived in Fresno and met with Jack Combs. He asked me to postpone my trip to Mill Valley while he worked out a request that had come from the First Southern Baptist Church of Hanford for a mission pastor for their Spanish Mission. He called R. T. Strange the pastor of the sponsoring church and worked out with him for me to go to speak at the mission that night in view of a call as their mission pastor. I drove to Hanford and met with the pastor R.T. Strange and the man (I don’t remember his name) who was the fill-in pastor at the Spanish Mission. They had done a good job at getting the word out and there was a good turnout of Spanish members present for me to preach to that night. I spent the night at Pastor R. T. Strange’s home then returned to Fresno the next day. Jack asked me not to go up to Mill Valley but instead to go to the Jenness Park Baptist Camp and work on the Mission Compound. While the church issued a call right away, the Baptist Mission Board had to process my application as a Student Missionary. Before the summer was over the Board had appointed Barbara and me as Student Missionaries.

            Somehow I made contact (I have forgotten the details) with an aunt and uncle in Lemoore, Ca which is just a few miles from Hanford and my uncle made a large two wheeled trailer available to us to move our household goods from my sister’s garage to seminary housing. Thus I began three years of seminary studies and more than two hundred mile commute one way every weekend.

A Fully-Actualized Person

“Abraham Maslow, one of the giant thinkers of the twentieth century,

brought a radical shift of perspective to psychology

and began an entirely new approach to therapy as he realized

the importance for persons to find purpose outside themselves.”

Maxie Dunnam

Abraham Maslow named Jesus as a fully-actualized person. I don’t think that I will ever be, at least in this life, a fully-actualized person. I think about what I want and how I want things to be much more than I think about others. I have found that when I am focused on helping others find happiness I am happier than I am when I am thinking only on my own self. So why do I keep being self centered? Jesus stated openly that he came into the world to save the lost. The accusation that the mob made against Jesus at the scene of his crucifixion was, “He saves others but himself he cannot save.” They spoke truth without knowing it. He could not save himself from the cross and save us from our sins. We do not have to die physically to defer to our spouse. We do have to die to our selfishness in order to defer to our spouse.

            We cannot change our spouse. We can change ourselves. When I married Barbara she was almost perfect, however, there were a few things that needed tweaking. That should have been a piece of cake. Just take away this and add this no problem. You cannot imagine! Tweaking does not work! But silly me, I kept on trying until one day I had an epiphany. I said to myself I am just going to accept my wife just as she is. Wow, what a difference I experienced. No more bad feelings, no anger that she did not do this or that. Understand she did not change. She was still the same Barbara. It was me that changed and that made me a lot happier. Now if you can change your spouse, bully for you, if you can’t try changing yourself. I recommend it. You will like it.

Automobiles I have owned continued - 4

            The worst deal I ever made on an automobile was when I purchased a Hillman. I am not sure of the model but I know that it was a small foreign made auto. The picture at the left is a Hillman. While mine was not exactly like the one pictured it was somewhat similar. Mine was most likely a later model than the one pictured.

            It sounded real good when I drove it off the lot in the Los Angeles area. We were still living in Riverside Ca. at the time. It still was running like a top when I got home with it. A few days later I had agreed to go on a trip to the south desert to shoot doves and my friend and I started in my new auto. Pretty soon after we started it started making a knocking noise. The further we went the worse it sounded. As I remember there were some others going with us in another car so we parked my car and went on our trip with the others and picked up my car on the way back home.

            A few days later I dropped the oil pan to have a look for what I thought was causing the knocking sound. I found that the inserts that go between the piston rods and the crankshaft were badly worn and that was what was making the noise. The reason that it did not make noise when I first began driving was that someone had put tinfoil material between the inserts and the crankshaft. It took several miles for this to beat out so that the noise could begin. This could have been remedied by just replacing the inserts, but I also discovered that the crankshaft was cracked; A job that was beyond my skills then and now.

            I think I had paid around $1600.00 for the car. After tax and license was added and I paid a down payment I owed about $1400.00 on the car. I was still in college and had gone in debt for clothes and school expenses so in the early part of 1960’s this was a blow to us financially. I took the car back to the lot that I had bought it from and they told me that used cars were sold as is and no guarantee came with it. I went to the company that had loaned me the money to buy the car and asked for additional money to get the needed repair. They would not loan me any more money. I gave them the keys and said to them the car is in your parking lot it is yours and I left. They sold the car for junk, a little over $100.00. They came after me for the difference.

            Credit was easy to get in that era and I had gone in debt up to my neck. I needed a car to get to work and to school so I went to a lending company in Riverside and tried to consolidate my debts. This company told me they could not loan me the money but if I would go bankrupt they would loan me the money I needed to consolidate and buy another car. I talked to the people who were clerks at the bankruptcy court and they told me I did not need a lawyer. They gave me the papers with instructions on how to file. Two of the companies I owed money to came to court but told the Judge they were there only as observers. Out in the hall after the judge ruled in favor of my petition I signed a new contract with both companies. The next day I went to the loan company and they loaned me money to consolidate my debts and buy another automobile. I am sorry to say that the company who loaned me the money to buy the Hillman car was the only company to not in the consolidation loan. I did not pay them anything I felt badly about that years later but at the time I was angry with them for forcing me into bankruptcy.

            On a good note by the time I graduated from college in June of 1965 I started to seminary  debt free.      

Automobiles I have owned continued

Another automobile I bought during my college years was a 1949 Ford. I don’t know when I bought it or how much I paid for it. It served me well. Coming back from a vacation in Arkansas we spent the night in a motel in Needles Ca. The next morning we got up and left going to Riverside Ca. where I was attending College. By ten o’clock we were well out in the desert when a clicking sound started to get louder coming from under the floorboard of the car. What I did next confirmed my suspicion but I should not have done what I did. Had I not done it we most likely could have limped into Barstow where I could have had a chance to buy the part I needed to repair the car. You see, I thought that it sounded like a U-joint problem. That was the problem alright. But when I pushed the clutch in and released the clutch at highway speed it blew the U-joint. Then with every rotation of the drive shaft it slammed the drive shaft against the floorboard of the car making a banging noise that was deafening. I applied the brakes and pulled off the road and surveyed the problem under the car. The picture on the top is the U-Joint. The picture on the bottom is where it fits on the drive shaft. On the four ends of the U-joint are bearings. The U-joint itself has four shafts that fit into four bearings. What you see in the picture on the top is the casings that hold the bearings. The bearings are not round like a marble but round like a pen is round and about a half inch in length. There are a whole bunch of them in each casing. The casings have these elongated bearings that are packed with heavy grease around the four shafts of the U-joint. The four pieces that you see in the picture on the top are metal locks. These locks are made of spring material. They fit into a groove in the drive shaft and hold the bearings in place. You take a pair of needle nose pliers and squeeze the spring and place it into the groove made to receive it and let go and it snaps into place. The dark part on the inside of each casing is a hard rubber that is there to keep the grease in place.

What happened to my car was the grease escaped and the bearings got hot and over time wore out. It was the looseness of the worn bearings that was making the noise I was hearing and when I put in the clutch and released it threw the shaft end of the U-joint against the end of the bearing casing and knocked it out of its place.

So here we are in the middle of the dessert with two kids and it is ten o’clock and the day is getting hotter by the minute with a car that is going no place. This was in the day of no cell phones. I had a tool box with all the tools that I needed but no part. I had worked on U-joints many times in the past and had parts that fit other cars but none for a 1949 Ford. I even had a can of bearing grease. I tried to find a bearing casing that would fit; they were almost but not quite hardly. The bearing casing did have the barrings in them. Since the bearings themselves were OK the problem was the casing that held them was a tad too large. I could get it started but it would not quite go in, so I turned to an old Arkansas remedy; if it won’t fit get a bigger hammer. I hammered the bearing casing into place. It was like I welded it into place. You would need a blow torch to get in out of that drive shaft. I didn't even need to use the spring locks. I never did have a problem with it again.

To be continued…

Automobiles I have owned -- continued

Sometime along the way I purchased a 1950 Cadillac. I don’t remember what I paid for this car but it was not very much. It had a broken piston pin. See the picture below. In this picture you have two pistons. The round part on the bottom is the piston itself. The rod going up is the piston rod. The rod is connected to the piston with a pin. The pin is a metal piece that has a hole through it’s center. Some people call this pin a wrist pin because it permits the piston rod and piston to move like a person can move his fist and arm. Hold your fisted hand out in front of you and with your arm still move your fist down and up. This is the action that the wrist pin enables the piston and piston rod to do. The car can run on all eight cylinders but every time the spark plug fires that piston, the rod hits the piston and makes a noise like banging two pieces of metal together because that is what is happening. Eventually you would expect that the rod hitting the piston would break the piston. When that happens it will ruin the engine by sending the piston through the side of the engine. At slow speeds it was just ‘bam’ ‘bam’ ‘bam’ but at high speeds It sounded like what I think a drive by shooting would sound like if those doing the shooting were using automatic weapons. I did not have the money to pay for that kind of repair and my wife was, for some reason, embarrassed to ride in a car that called that much attention to us as we motored down the highway. We drove this car for several months before I sold it to someone who had the money to get the necessary repair done. Aside from this minor problem this was a good smooth riding machine.

Automobiles I have owned

I already told you about my first car a 1939 Chevrolet. It cost $59.00. I kept it for 3 years, give or take, and I sold it for $30.00 and a Willis car. I sold the Willis car for $20.00, which means that the car cost me $9 dollars plus upkeep. That is not bad for three years of driving and dating and wooing the girls.

I bought a Studebaker car from one of my professors in college. It was a much more modern car and looked much better but it was not as easy for me to fix when it developed transmission problems. It had an automatic transmission with way too many parts, not simple like a standard transmission. It cost me a lot more to buy and I did not keep it as long.   

During my 8 years of working my way through college I had a series of different cars. I don’t remember the sequence of them. One was a 1948 straight eight Buick. A strait eight is a car that has the eight cylinders in a straight row and not four cylinders side by side; that is called a V8. Ford motor company was the first company to build the V8. The straight eight was a heavy car so it was a good ride and served me well. There was one problem. It was hitting on only 7 cylinders. It still ran good so Barbara and I went on vacation one summer to El Paso TX in my car of 7 cylinders. My brother was living in El Paso at this time so he and I took the tappet pan off to discover that one of the push rods had the piece right at the top broken off. The push rods control the valves. There are two valves for each cylinder, one to let the gas fumes into the cylinder and one to let the burned fumes escape as exhaust. First the valve opens and the gas fumes go in and then the cylinder closes and the piston comes up and compresses the gas then the spark plug fires the gas fumes and the explosion slams the piston back down and the exhaust valve opens to let the fumes escape. If ether one of the push rods is broken that cylinder does not function. One was broken so I needed another to replace it. We started with Auto Part stores with no luck. Next we tried the Buick dealership. They told us the part was no longer manufactured. Then we tried every Junk Yard place we could find in the phone book. No luck.

I was ready to put my tappet pan cover back on and continue with my 7 cylinder Buick, but then I looked at the socket that I had in my hand and inspiration hit me. The end that the socket wrench fit into was about the size of the push rod and only the end was broken off so I got my trusted hammer and forced the socket over the end of the push rod. I dropped the rod back into its slot and adjusted the tappet bracket and I drove my 49 strait 8 Buick back to California. I don’t how long I kept that car but it was still an 8 cylinder car for as long as I had it.

TO BE CONTINUED

The Dark Night Of The Soul:

The Dark Night Of The Soul: On the 25^th day of May our son Alvin Kerry Chadwick went to live with Jesus. It was an accident, a “Zip Line” that took him from us. He was a godly servant of God so we know where he is today. If I did not know that he is in heaven I do not know what I would do. Death is hard enough on us when a Christian family member dies but it would be so very much harder to have to see a loved one die and know that he or she would not go to heaven.

I am no stranger to death. I wrote in one of my blogs about the death of my childhood friend Crandfiel D. McGovern. This happened when I was very young. The death of my grandmother who I lived with in my teens was a sad and a glad experience. It was sad because I knew I would miss her but I was also glad because she was suffering so much with lung cancer and wanted to go live in heaven. My father’s death was because of a long time sickness and it was easier on me when he died. My mother was in her late 80’s when she died and she had dementia for some time before she went home to heaven. These deaths were hard but nothing like when Kerry died.

A friend who had buried his son when he was in his 30’s because of a car accident told me it was the hardest thing that he had faced in his life. He said you will never get over it. I have a settled peace because I know he served God so faithfully in his life time. The bible says: “Laughter can conceal a heavy heart, but when the laughter ends, the grief remains.” Proverbs 14:13 New Living Translation; and “For his anger lasts only a moment, but his favor lasts a lifetime; weeping may stay for the night, but rejoicing comes in the morning.” New International Version

I did not blame God for his accident. It was not God’s fault but Kerry’s. He was the manager of a Christian camp and they were testing the Zip Line. He said he was going to put a 300 pound weight on the line and send it down to see if it cleared the roof of the building that passed over. He put a 60 pound weight and it was no problem at all. To the naked eye it looked like it would clear the building with no problem. His daughter who strapped him in begged him not to go on it until he had tested it with the heavy weight but he was sure it would be no problem so he went down the line and hit the building roof then the zip line went crazy swinging from side to side and banging him against trees on both sides. He never did regain consciousness and died before the emergency vehicles could arrive. Human error and not God’s fault is my prognosis. Could God have stopped him? God can do anything he chooses. He made man a free moral agent and man can choose to drink and drive or text and drive and for too many it brings death. If God had made us puppets on a string then we could blame him for everything that happens to us. However, God wanted to give us choices thus He made us in His image as free moral agents.  As the people of Jesus’ day said about Jesus when Lazarus died, could not Jesus have prevented Lazarus from dying? Yes, he could have and he could have done a miracle and kept Kerry alive or he could have raised Kerry from the dead like he did for Lazarus.  It was not his will to do so.

It was said of some people in the Bible that died full of years. It could be said of Kerry that he died full of service for his Lord. He accepted Jesus as his Lord at an early age and served him in his teen years. I took him through the Billy Hanks disciple training; meeting weekly with him in a restaurant every Saturday morning for six months. In college he worked as assistant Baptist Campus Minister and pastored a small rural church in Southern NM. He went to Southwestern Baptist Seminary and pastored a small town church on the weekends. After he graduated he did Clinical Pastoral Training in a hospital in Harlingen, TX. Then he pastored a church in Deming, NM. Then he worked as a Baptist Campus Minister in Silver City, NM. He then went to Sitka, AK where he was a pastor for 10 years. While in Sitka he earned a Doctor of Ministry degree from Golden Gate Baptist Theological Seminary. In May of 2013 he came back to New Mexico to be the Camp Manager of Inlow Baptist Camp. He called it his dream job because he loved the camp that he had attended from early childhood through his teen years and had made a profession of faith and surrendered to preach the gospel. From there he went to Heaven.

ADVICE TO GRANDCHILDREN

            The biggest mistake people make regarding education is they think of education as a finished product. “I have finished my education” is an example of what you hear people say. Education is a process and never an accomplished fact. Instead of a graduation exercise a commencing exercise is better. When you finish High School you are just commencing a life -long learning process.

            When you are born the first four things you learn are the most important to you. They are foundational to you as quality of life issues. The four vital lessons are:

1. Learning to talk

2. Learning to walk

3. Learning to feed yourself

4. Potty training

           

            There are four learning issues that are vital to you as far as eternity is concerned. Without a proper relationship to God all learning will be of no eternal significance. These four are:

1. Learning of your need for salvation

2. Learning of God’s love for you

3. Learning of God’s provision for your salvation

4. Learning the proper response to receive God’s salvation

           

 This general advice I give to you:

1. Be a lifelong learner.

2. Learn from others. It is said that experience is the best teacher. This is not true. I don’t need to break my leg to know that it is not a good idea. Learning by experience is the most painful way to learn.

3. Learn to postpone pleasure. You do not need to have all the latest gadgets today. If you cannot pay cash wait until you can make the purchase with cash.

4. Pay your tithes and taxes first. Divide the remaining money into a ten-twenty-seventy plan. A. Save ten percent. B. Save twenty percent until you have an amount that is six months of your yearly salary. Invest some of the twenty percent.; then save the twenty percent to buy the things  you want to purchase – go on a cruise, etc. Bless others with some of the twenty percent. C. Live on the seventy percent. Never buy on credit anything except a house to live in and no more than one automobile at a time.

5. Live today for life does not allow practice days in preparation for future days.  ^"This is the day the Lord has made; we will rejoice and be glad in it. (Psalm 118:24, NKJV)”

MAKING DECISIONS

            Sometimes when you make a decision you don’t know you are making a change for all time. At other times you know you are making a decision that will not be revoked. When I went to California I thought that I was going there to work for a time and did not know that I would not return to Arkansas to live. When I committed my life to Christ Jesus I knew that that would be a permanent decision. Of course I did not realize how it would affect every area of my being. I did not think this will determine where I work, what kind of work, where I would live or even what amount of money I would receive for my work. But all of these things were affected by my decision to make Christ the Lord of my life. You cannot say truthfully say, “No Lord”. You can tell God no. However, if God is the Lord of your life, you can only truthfully say, “yes Lord.” The reason is simple when you say “no” you are denying His Lordship over your being. By saying, “no” to the Lord you are saying, “You have no right to tell me what to do.”

            When, as a young boy, I repented of my sin; I confessed to God. “I am a sinner; I ask you to forgive me of my sins and come into my life and be my Lord”. I gave up my right to direct my life. The bible says that if you will confess Jesus as Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead you will be saved. Sometimes we say to someone you need to accept Christ as your Savior. The Bible never says that. The Bible says you accept him as Lord. The result of accepting him as Lord is that He then becomes your Savior. There is something fundamentally wrong when you want to be saved for all eternity but not want to have to love Christ enough to accept his Lordship over your life. What woman or man would accept a marriage proposal when the proposal was “I want you to be my lifetime mate but I also want you to know that I will have sexual relationships with other persons when I have the opportunity?”  No one in his or her right mind would consent to such a proposal. God offers salvation on his terms and not ours.

                  I came to Christ as a sinner. Even the good things I did were sin because I was a sinner by choice. My nature was that of a sinner. When I accepted the Lordship of Christ over my life I became, in the Apostle Paul’s words, a saint. This did not happen overnight but the instant Christ entered into my life I became a saint. Paul writes in 1Cor 1:2, “Unto the church of God which is at Corinth, to them that are sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be saints, with all that in every place call upon the name of Jesus Christ our Lord, both theirs and ours…” (the underlined words are my underlining) As you read the book of 1 Cor you became aware of the sins that this church was struggling with, but Paul did not write to the sinners in Corinth.  He wrote to the saints. He did not call them saints because they lived perfect lives, but because they had been, “sanctified in

Christ Jesus.” There is a difference between a saint who commits a sin and a sinner who can do nothing to please God because of his sin nature. I am a saint who sometimes commits sins for which I am sorry and for which I repent. Our problem with someone saying he is a saint is because of the modern day definition of the word saint. We define the word today as a person who is perfect is his actions. The biblical definition is a person who has been sanctified in Christ Jesus. He is not perfect in himself but has been declared perfect by God because of what Christ did on his behalf.

A change of venue

            In 1955 I graduated from Witts Springs High School with no idea on what my future would be like. I had planned on joining the Air Force when I graduated but changed my mind several months prior to finishing school. My high school coach told me he could get me a full basketball scholarship to attend a small college in Clinton, Arkansas. I had no plans whatsoever to attend college. I was tired of book studies. The principal of the high school wanted me to go into business with him. He would put up the funds to build a store in Witts Springs and I would run the store. It would be a blind partnership. This fell through when another local man opened a store. The principal did not believe the community could support two stores. So what was I going to do?

            My best friend at the time was Sammy Judd and I was also dating his sister who was too young to even consider marriage. Their folks were heading to California to work for the summer months. So I decided to hitch a ride to California. I would live with my older sister and get a job in the Los Angeles area till I could make up my mind as to what I wanted to do with my life.

            I arrived in Compton Ca. sometime in May or June, I don’t remember the exact date. I had no money, no job and no automobile. I began looking for a job in walking distance from where my sister lived. I found a job rather soon after my arrival working for a company that manufactured back yard swing sets. It did not pay very much but boarding at my sister’s home was not very costly. After a few weeks of work I had enough money to buy a used auto.

For fifty dollars I bought a 1939 four door Chevrolet. It was one of my better decisions. It was clean, mechanically sound but needed a paint job. I kept the car for over three years and other than tires, brakes and a carburetor overhaul I had no problems with it. I did the brake job and the carburetor overhaul myself so it was just a matter of buying the parts. Car gas was rather cheap, 17 and 19 cents per gallon.

            After a few months my brother-in law got me a job working for Trojan Battery Co. He had worked for the company for several years and was well thought of by the management. The neighbor who lived across the street also worked at the same place so we car pooled. I drove my car and they paid for my gas. 

A Wagon on the School House

            The Witts Spring School House was built by the WPA in 1935. This may have been the most exciting thing that had happened in our community up to that point. Of course in October of 1936 I was born and for me that was the most exciting thing ever to take place in our community, according to me, myself and I.

            The building was built of native stones. It was a rectangular building, which at first housed first grade through 12^th grade. It also had a gym for basketball with a too short court and a much too low ceiling. There was a crawl space under the whole building which was not tall enough to stand up in, but could house a bunch of things, including benches to be used for seating in the gym for graduation, drama presentations, etc.

            How do you drive a wagon on a building of this height? The answer is you don’t drive the wagon. You wait until Halloween night and get a bunch of country boys who are looking for mischief to perform on their community. They found one of the neighbors who had a rubber tire wagon and after failing at killing themselves by riding it down a curvy hill they came up with the idea to put the wagon on the school house. They roll it up to the school and disassemble it and using ropes they haul it piece by piece to the top. They reassemble it on top of the school. They accessed the roof by finding a window that they could go through into a class room. There was a small room on the stage side of the gym that had a ladder into the ceiling and a trap door onto the roof itself. I don’t know how they got it down. I was not present to witness that event. I assume that adults are as smart as boys and that they reversed the process the boys used to put the wagon there in the first place.

School Dramas

            One bad thing about attending a small school is all the things you miss out on. One good thing about attending a small school is all the great things you get to participate in. I got a part in a school play when I was in the 8^th grade. There were not enough high school boys interested in getting up before a live audience and acting or they did not want to take the time to memorize a three act play. But their slackness became my opportunity.

             The school put on two plays, one in the fall of the year and one in the spring. I  performed in every play for the rest of my years in public school. Back in those days I could memorize my part in a three act play from the time I was given the part on a Friday evening and came to school on Monday morning. My first parts were very small parts with very little dialogue. But by the time I entered high school I had a major role and most times one of the lead roles. Some of the plays were about country hicks so I had no trouble being in character. All I had to do was memorize the words and then just talk naturally. Most of the dramas we did were more laughs than serious stuff.

            We always played to a packed audience. There was not much competition in the way of entertainment in a small community, no television, no Movie Theater, etc. The money we raised paid for the books and the fee that the company who published the plays charged; and the rest, which was most of the funds, went to the school.

Death and funerals

            One thing about living in a small community is that you know everyone who lives there.Therefore when there is a death the whole school can go to the funeral. They are not required to attend but most did. This meant that I went to a good many funerals between first and twelfth grades. Most of them were for old people, some were infants. But the one which affected me the most was when my best friend died unexpectedly.

            His name was Crandfiel D. McGovern. He lacked 3 days being exactly two months younger than myself. He was 9 years, one month and 17 days old when he died. He was on school on Friday and sometime Saturday morning he died. He woke up during the night and told one of his older brothers he was thirsty. His brother got up and went to get him a drink of water. The water bucket was empty so his brother went out of the house to the spring and got a fresh bucket of water and gave him a drink. When morning came, they went to wake him, they found him dead. They never did not know what the cause of his death was.

            My dad went to town on Saturday morning and came home and told my mother that he had died during the night. I overheard him talking with my mother and went and told my older sister and brother that he had died and they accused me of telling a lie.

            At his funeral I looked on my best friend lying in his coffin and seeing the freckles on the bridge of his nose and on his cheeks and thought what a good looking boy he was. His death was a hard thing for me to deal with. This was the first time that I had felt a personal loss at a funeral.

Party games and not dances, closed door and corner kissing, musicals, cross questions and crooked answers

            In the hill country where I grew up there were not a lot of things that were acceptable to the mores of hill people. This was in pre-television days and there was not a lot that a boy and girl could do that would not be censored. The big no-no was dancing. This was a sin that the people looked down on, however it was ok to play games. One game I witnessed was one in which the boys and the girls would stand in a circle and when the music would begin the game would begin. I had never been to a dance of any kind so I did not know what a dance looked like. But since television I have witnessed square dancing so that was what they were doing but it was ok because after all it was just a game set to music.

            Another acceptable game we liked to play was for the girls to go into a room and line up behind the door. The boys would line up outside the door and knock on the door. The girl on the inside did not know who was knocking and the boy knocking did not know what girl was behind the door. The girl would open the door and the boy and girl would lock arms and go outside of the building and walk around the building kissing at every corner. This game was played at night preferable in the school house since it was the largest building in the area. I don’t know if every boy and girl kissed because you would sometimes get paired with someone you did not like. I never did get paired with anyone who did not kiss me. The value of this game is that it gave opportunity to shy girls or shy boys to get to kiss and begin to get to know someone of the opposite sex.

            The most boring thing for me was the musicals. The people who could play an instrument or sing could participate; that left those of us who did neither to just sit and listen. When I could choose I chose to stay home.

            A fun game we played was cross questions and crooked answers. You divided up with girls on one team and boys on the other. You then separated and someone would give the boys the questions and someone else would give the girls the answers. You came back together and stood in line facing each other and the boy would ask the question and the girl would answer. You had to ask and answer the question three times without laughing. An example would be: Boy’s question. Does your mother let you kiss boys? The girl’s answer. I get the hiccups when I laugh a lot. Since the person making up the questions and the person making up the answers do not know what the other person is doing you can get some pretty funny answers to the questions. Then you would switch off and let the girls ask the questions and the boys answer. 

Playing marbles

            As a kid marbles was one of the games I loved to play. In fact my knuckles were always rusty from having my sweaty hands in the dirt so much during the time when it was warm enough to play the game of marbles.

            There were two games that we played. One was to draw a round circle in the dirt and place a large marble in the center of the circle. Standard size marbles were placed at intervals around the circle line. The placement depended on the number of marbles one had to play with. If you had a lot of marbles they were placed closer together. If fewer marbles were available the marbles were not placed as close together. Each person had a “taw.” This taw is a marble that you used to shoot with. Everyone had their favorite taw. Some people would use a steel bearing that was the size of a standard marble. Others would not play with you using their marbles if you were using a steel marble because the steel would sometimes break or chip a glass marble.

                   To start the game you would draw a straight line in the dirt about six feet from the center of the circle. Each person playing stood behind the line and tossed their taw toward the center line. The person whose taw was closest to the center of the circle began to shoot first and the next closest shot and so on down the list of players. The first player then shot his taw from where it laid toward a marble on the circle line and tried to knock it out of the circle. If you succeeded you kept shooting until you failed to knock a marble out of the circle. When you failed, the next person began to shoot and so on. When all the marbles in the circle were knocked out of the circle you shot to knock the large center marble out of the circle. If you agreed before the game began that the one who knocked the large marble out of the circle was to be called the winner then that is how you won the game. If you did not make that the rule then you counted the number of marbles each person knocked out and the one with the most was the winner.

            There are two ways to shoot the taw. The standard way is to pick up the taw then place your hand on the ground where the taw was. Close your fist up like you are going to punch someone then you place the taw in the crook of the pointing finger with the thumb behind the taw and flip the taw with the thumb while your hand remains in contact with the ground. The hand must not move toward the target when you flip your taw. To move your hand toward the target marble is called fudging. Another way I have seen people shoot the taw is to balance the taw between the pointing finger and the third finger using the middle finger as the flipping finger and the thumb to hold the marble in place between the first and third finger. You must still not move your hand toward the target marble. You must still have some part of your hand in contact with the dirt. The favorite way most of these kinds of shots are taken is to put the small finger on the dirt and the rest of the hand is above the dirt. I have shot both ways but was much more accurate using my thumb as the finger to launch my taw.

            The other marble game is a gambling game. For this game you draw a cat’s eye in the dirt. It is about two feet from corner to corner of the cat’s eye. You put a line in the center about a foot long. You line the marbles up on the center evenly spaced. Each person puts the same amount of marbles from his own stash of marbles on the line. They agree as to how many marbles they want to bet. You proceed as in the other game except you keep the marbles you knock out of the cat’s eye. Thus you use marbles to gamble with. Some boys ended up with a lot of marbles playing for keeps. My folks would not let us play for keeps.

The day the Sheriff came to school

             Boys will be boys, they say, but that’s not an excuse. I never did get the full story. I don’t know how it got started or who started it. It must have been really popular because only 4 boys did not get called out the day the sheriff and his deputies came to our school.

            They took the boys outside and positioned them a good distance from each other. They were far enough apart that they could not hear what each was saying to the sheriff and his deputies. They would talk to one boy for a while then go to the next one It was around and around but not a merry-go-round. Someone broke and told the sheriff what he needed to know.

Eventually they all confessed. So they carted them all off to jail.

            Of the 4 boys who did not get called out, the sheriff and his men did not even question them. Up front they knew all who were involved because every boy who was called out went to jail. The sheriff was not on a fact finding tour. He knew up front who he was after; it was just a matter of getting confessions. Someone had been watching and knew who the guilty parties were and passed the information on to the sheriff. Who was this person? I never found out.

            They had been stealing gas from the High School supplies. I don’t know if stealing candy from the school’s candy store was a part of the equation or not. I do know that that was also happening because I was offered candy that had been stolen. The boy who offered it to me told me he had taken it from the store. He had broken into the store on the weekend and had taken boxes of candy, but since he told me it was stolen I refused it. I felt it was wrong to eat stolen candy; but I did not think I was obligated to turn him in. That is how we Christians sometimes get our ethics all mixed up.

            None of them went into a life of crime. They, as group, were basically good boys who thought they were being cool. My guess is that some of them did not want to steal but did not want to be seen by their peers as “not cool”’  

Jump Board

             A Jump Board works on the same principal as a Seesaw, except it is not attached in the middle as a Seesaw is. You use a plank that is about a foot wide and close to two inches thick and somewhere around 10 to 12 feet long. You center this board over a log that is around 10 to 12 inches in diameter and about 2 feet long. Instead of sitting on the board like a Seesaw you stand on the board, one person on each side of the board which is centered over the log. Each balances themselves on their end of the board and they start to seesaw back and forth

picking up momentum as they go until when one person comes down on his end of the board and sends the other person up in the air which results in the person in the air coming down with more force which will send the other person even higher. Eventually they are propelling each other higher and higher until they will be going up in the air with their feet being 4 to 6 feet off the ground. If one person comes down and hits the board crooked the result will be a spill for both of them.

            If one of the persons on the Jump Board weighs a good deal more than the other, they can either center the board more on the side of the log of the person that weighs less or the heaver person can move in on his end of the board until a balance is reached. It looks dangerous but I never saw anyone get hurt seriously doing this fun sport.

            Where I went to school girls were particularly good at this sport. Both girls and boys would many times position the Jump Board next to the side of the school building to help them keep their balance. Many times there was a girl on one side of the Jump Board and a boy on the other side. It was a lot of fun. 

Fist fighting

              This was not an everyday event or even an every week event but fist fights were something that happened every so often. We did not have school monitors during recess. The teacher did whatever it is that teachers do during the recess time and the students played outside.

Occasionally a fight would break out between two boys. They would fight until one boy was beating up on the other or until they were tired. I never knew of boys getting into trouble with the teachers for fighting, it may have happened but I don’t remember it.

            The last fight I had in school was when I was about 15 years old. Vernon Serratt and I got into a fight. I have no idea what we fought about. We went at each other for about 5 to10 minutes. He was a year older than me but no larger. We most likely weighed about the same.

I was wading into him and giving it my all. I backed him up the width of the school building. He gave me as much I gave him. I thought I won the fight but he gave me a black eye and there was no end of the teasing I had to endure because of that black eye.

            I went toe to toe with my older brother many times and I always came out the loser. I would give him some good licks before I turned tail and ran.

            One day at recess we were playing basketball and my second cousin and I were bad mouthing each other during the game. One of the school bus drivers decided take up for my second cousin. He started coming on to me pretty strong and my second cousin and I both turned on him. In the course of our encounter I made a statement about the character of his mother.  He went to the principal and complained. The principal came out and got my side of the story. He told me to apologize which I promptly did. The bus driver did not like it that the principal did not give me a whipping. So the principal and the driver got into an argument in which the driver told the principal that if he did not give me a whipping that he would give the principal a whipping.

The principal said here I am come on and do it. Thankfully the bus driver backed down. My take on the situation was the principal did not think that an adult bus driver should mix in with boys at play.

Spelling and math competition

           We had spelling and math competitions through my grade school years. I did ok as a general rule, but I never won a competition as an individual. When we would compete as a team we won some and lost some. There were some girls in my classes who were simply too good at spelling for me to ever win.

            I consistently made an A in spelling. This was not because I was a great speller but I was great at short term memorization. The teacher would give us 20 to 30 spelling words for the next day and I would memorize them in short order. The next day I could spell them all. One week later it would have been a different story if I had ever been tested on those same words.

            I would have most likely won some math competition but for one boy who was in my class who was a whiz at math. He was not good in other subjects and he spoke with a stutter, but he could make the chalk fly when he was at the board doing math problems. 

The way we did math competition was to chose two people to begin at the board with chalk and an eraser the teacher would give the problem and let them write it on the board. Then she would say begin. The student who got through first with the correct answer would win and the next student in line would come to the board and the process would repeat itself. When all the students had been to the board, whoever was the person who won the last problem was the winner. I don’t remember if the math whiz won all the time. He most likely did not. I don’t remember me ever winning. Although, I was most likely in the top 25 percent of my class.

Basketball

Basketball was ’’THE” sport where I went to school. I began playing basketball on the Junior Varsity when I was in the seventh grade. This was a small mountain town with a consolidated school district which bussed kids from twenty miles away and still only had a school population of around 200 in first grade through 12 grades.

Seventh through eighth grade was Junior Varsity and tenth through twelfth grade was Senior Varsity. As I remember it you could only have 15 players on a team. We played a few teams that had 15 players but most had less. When I first played while in the seventh grade we had ten or twelve players but by the time I reached Senior Varsity around seven to nine players which meant that the better players were expected to play the whole game without a substitution.

            The best record our team had of any year that I played basketball was my first year. our Junior Varsity team that year had a record of twenty two wins to two losses. I was the first person to come off the bench to substitute for the point guard position. My older brother was the starting point guard. I got to play a good bit that first year and I was the starting point guard every year after that through the twelfth grade.

            The only game I got to start during that first year was the championship game at an Invitational Tournament  at Harrison Arkansas. The coach started the second string players and when we were down about 20 points he put the first string players in and they would come storming back and get ahead by a few points then he would put us second string players in and the team we were playing would charge ahead of us again. He did this for the game making sure that the other team would win the game which they did with the help of our coach.

            After the game he took us out to a nice restaurant and told us to order whatever we wanted to eat because he would pay for our meal. I don’t know who paid him to let the home team win but it was obvious to us that there had been a payoff. The other tournament game we lost was because of our overconfidence. We had already beat the team two time that year during regular season, so we thought we have this game already won. We lost.

            In my best year I average 20 point per game. My highest scoring game was 48 points.

I had two people talk to me about a basketball scholarship during my High School years. One was my High School coach. He told me there was no question about it that he could get be a scholarship at Clinton Teacher College. The other person was a referee at a game that we played in Hector Arkansas. He asks where I planned on going to college. I told him I did not have the money to attend college. He said if you can play ball all the time like you did tonight you can get a full scholarship to attend college. At that time I had no plan whatsoever to attend college. Two years later I was married and enrolled in California Baptist University and working my way through school. I did not even attend a basketball game during my college years.

Softball

           Softball was not an organized sport where I went to school. We played softball during recess at school. The number of players depended on how many people wanted to play on a given day. Two of the better players would flip a coin to see who would chose first and then they would alternate choosing until all persons who wanted to play had been chosen. This meant that sometimes we would have less than nine on each team and sometimes more than nine. Very seldom would there be the normal nine on each team.

            The softball was used, or maybe a better word might be mostly used up. Often times the cover on the ball was missing so the size of the ball varied depending on how much unraveling had taken place. The bats were pretty well used up also and the number was two or three. We had no adult supervision, no umpires and no referees. We called our own game. Sometimes arguments would ensue and mostly peer pressure was what kept things from getting out of hand. We could not play nine innings in the time allotted for recess so whichever team was ahead at the end of recess was declared the winner.   

Running Base & Stink Base

 Two games we played in my school in the Ozarks that I have never seen reference to in any way was Running Base and Stink Base. Any number of people could play the games. Two of the better runners would flip a coin to see who would get first choice in choosing his team. They would then alternate in choosing until all people who wanted to play had been chosen.

            You would take a stick and draw opposing lines in the dirt. The distance between the two opposing lines would depend on what land was available. I would say that the distance was usually about the distance between home base and second base on a baseball diamond. Sometimes we set out of bounds as off the school property and sometimes we set no out of bounds.  The object was to capture all the opposing players. One team would send out a player from its base and when the opposing player would come after him a faster runner would be sent who you would hope would catch the runner from the first team. The player who had touched his home base last was considered poison. If he caught the player he was chasing before someone from the opposing team touched him that person was considered captured and they would continue back to the base of the one who captured him. The captured person would then be a member of the team which had captured him and when one team had captured all the players on the opposing team the game was over.

            Stink Base was different in that on the right of each line drawn in the dirt you would draw a circle attached to the line and each captured player was placed in the circle. If one of his team members could touch his out stretched hand before being captured by the opposing team he was free to go back and actively compete for his team. Each person who has been placed into the circle (Stink Base) had to have one foot inside the circle. He could reach out as far as his arms could stretch as long as he left at least one foot inside the circle. When all people of an opposing team were captured the game was over. 

            I preferred playing Stink Base to Running Base because there was no penalty to Running Base. I believed that some boys would intentionally get caught so they could be with their friends. We mostly played Stink Base. I never did see a game won, but I think it had to do with time restraint. We played during recess at school. We had at most 45 minutes which with the number of players it was not possible to complete a game.   

Clearing new ground –We had 140 acres on our farm in Arkansas. My father purchased our farm over the course of years. The first purchase was when he mustered out of the Army. That was the land on which our house was located and it was 60 acres. The next track the land that he bought was across the road and it was 40 acres. He later bought a track land behind the 40 acres which was 20 acres. Around half of the 60 acre plot was covered in timber. The 40 acre plot had somewhere between five and 10 acres which were timber. The 20 acre plot was all timber.

The first 60 acres had somewhere between 20 to 30 acres that had trees covering it. It was this land that we were cutting down trees and turning the land into agriculture farm land the clearing of trees was done mostly in the winter months. We would cut down the large trees and turn them into wood to burn in the wood heater which we used to heat our home. The smaller limbs and underbrush we piled up to dry out and we would have large bond fires when the wood was dry enough to burn. This was time consuming since we cut the trees down with a cross cut saw. Also it was hard work but most work on a farm is farm work