Chapter One--Personal History (short version)

I was born in Dallas, Texas, August 15, 1937. I did not know it at the time, but the population of that little town then was about 350,000 and one could, for a few cents, ride a city bus downtown, get on a loud, clanging, banging electric street car and go almost anywhere there was to go. Some of my earliest memories involved going downtown with my mother to some of the large department stores of the era like Titche-Goettinger (which is now Dillards) and Sanger-Harris. We would walk on the sidewalks and I remember keeping myself attached to her hand, because the city was a big noisy place. Now I cringe and tense up just driving through that place of more than a million souls, all in cars and big trucks on big highways that engineers had not even dreamed of 60 years ago. My hometown has changed and I have changed.

I remember riding my bicycle to school with my bicycle lock key tied on a string around my neck, which was a sort of badge of achievement. Sometimes I walked the mile or more past a large place that I know now was the VA hospital, to school and in bad weather we were taken in a car. It must have been a large school for the time, as they had blue birds, red birds and yellow birds in what was called “baby low first.” I was a yellow bird. Funny how some of those minute details of childhood seem to just be stuck there, but if one wants to remember a detail, even if one thought that that detail were pretty important, it just will not come through the fog. I remember clearly, for example, my third-grade (or was it fourth grade?) teacher, Mrs. Sharp asking me several times to stand before the class and read the scriptures (it seems that I had come into possession of a pamphlet of the gospel of John that I would take to school with me). In today’s politically correct milieu that most likely would not be acceptable behavior for a public school teacher. Probably I was able to read publicly better than most for my age because the church folks where we went to church encouraged the young boys to get in front of the congregation and read and sing and so on, as a kind of training. I probably took to that like a duck to water, as it must have fed my little ego. Funny, I don’t remember the girls in that church to be so encouraged.

In about 1946-7 my dad decided to buy a farm. He had returned from his part in WWII and, I imagine, had access to the government sponsored loan programs that enabled and encouraged such things in those days. Let the reader understand that, as a child, I certainly did not know about nor was I privy to the intricacies of family finance at the time. I’m looking back with adult knowledge at this point. Kids of that time period were expected to eat at the second table when there was company and to be seen, but not heard too much. Anyway, I learned to plow, slop hogs, milk cows and do all sorts of farm things, as well as attend a rural one-room school. All good training for what was ahead.

Daddy had begun to preach in Dallas even before he was drafted in the Army. He was evidently convinced that the Church of Christ was the only acceptable and right way of thinking and so we all went to church three time a week at least. Dad has always even to this day at 95 years old, maintained a preaching position with some church. Most of the time he had to support his family by some sort of work beyond what the churches he served could offer. We went from the farm, in 1951, to west Texas and back to Dallas in about three years, whereupon I had almost finished high school and when the family decided to move again, I stayed on with a family friend and finished my senior year.

Since I was going to be a Church of Christ preacher, I enrolled in Abilene Christian College in the fall of 1955. I would be the first in my family to darken the door of a college. Needless to say, I was very ignorant of the whole process of higher education. I do not recall having any sessions with guidance counselors or any preachers for that matter. I do not recall being involved in any sort of advising, such as I have had to do with students as a college professor later in life. But the ministry idea had somehow settled in my mind when I first got to Abilene. I may come back to this point in a later chapter, but for now, let me say that I really think that when reality dawned upon me when I had to face some facts about going to classes and reading things I probably would rather not, the clarity of my decision began to fade. In hindsight, it appears that my spiritual aspirations were momentarily pushed aside by other more pressing concerns, namely how to manage to eat and find a place to sleep out of the weather. I think that is called growing up.

And so ends the “short” version of my personal history, pre-Carolyn. I have said all this to bring you to this point, a sort of this-is-who-I-was at the time. Enter from stage-right: Sue Broadus (not Susie and not Carolyn at that point). She had come to Mecca for her own reasons and I, of course for mine. We can call this fate or karma or God’s will, according to our world-view. It may have been pure coincidence, but is there really such a thing? However, here are two individuals, two persons in the same environment. The chemistry, the charged atmosphere, the attraction of opposites, I do not know what it was or is. But I choose to call it love, a love that has grown roots, deep roots, a love that calls for solid commitment, for as long as there is breath to sustain it.