Like countless men at mid twentieth century, dad went to war. His job as Postmaster of a small Illinois town delayed it somewhat, but he was drafted, spent most of his time in the Philippines and was gone for the better part of two and a half years. While he was away, his second baby was born—John—I had a little brother. Mother worked to make ends meet, kept a white hot love affair going by long distance, and, largely with the help of Bessie, her new mother-in-law, put the two new boys through the first paces. When dad returned, things settled back into the routines: dad went back to the Post Office, the young family reacquainted, and, as in a thousand other places across the country, dad and mother began to think about the future.
Something, though, was different about dad when he came home. A lot of people noticed it. His outlook had changed. He had become religious, really religious, something he had not really been before. He had not been involved in any combat-related trauma, the kind that can prompt a religious “conversion,” but his interest in religion had changed. It was like while he was overseas, he had gotten a view of what he wanted to do in life—and it was tied to religion, to the Church. His Mormon family ties were broken, but he was being drawn into mother’s Christian Church in Johnston City.
This was not lost on the preacher of that Christian Church, a short, aging man known as R. E. Walston. He was by all accounts an excellent, even eloquent preacher, a bit of a scholar, and fond of teaching. He was interested, too, is recruiting promising young men in his church into the ministry as a profession. He invited a couple of them to preach sermons in the church and, to assist them, Mr. Walston would meet with them in his home to teach them the mechanics of preparing and delivering a sermon. John Webb was one of those young men who took old Mr. Walston up on his invitation.
Dad quickly discovered, as did Mr. Walston (Christian Church preachers never refer to themselves as Reverend), that he had a knack for making good outlines, even for writing out his thoughts. Most of all, he discovered that he found an absolute excitement, as he would describe it later, for standing tall and speaking to people. After each of the young men had preached, the group would gather for a critique session; and John emerged as the best of the group. Even though dad has no education for it beyond Mr. Walston’s careful, and very important instructions, the old preacher began pressing dad to leave the Post Office and enter the ministry.
It didn’t take long for Dad to make the decision. From early on mother was in favor of his doing that. Everything, in fact, seemed to line up for it. Even though Christian Churches are congregationally independent, there are networks of education and communication, and Mr. Walston was in those networks. He knew of a new preacher training school that had formed near the end of the war (1944) in central Illinois; it was not a college as such, but it was a four-year school for preachers. It was named Lincoln Bible Institute (LBI) so-called because it was located in Lincoln, Illinois.
Mr. Walston wanted dad to enroll, but that would mean leaving Southern Illinois and finding work farther north. Dad had progressed enough as a preacher, though, that Walston believed he could find a vacant church pulpit that might hire him. The search began, not for a vacant pulpit—there were a lot of those—but for a church with enough people to hire him and pay him a living wage for a young family, a place that would also help him get through school.
Finally, they located such a Christian Church. The problem was that it was located in a modest sized place called Tampico, Illinois. It was not in central Illinois, though, which was roughly two hundred miles north of Johnston City. It was another two hundred miles north of central Illinois. It was due west of Chicago, or more than four hundred miles north of “home” in Southern Illinois.
But the people of the Tampico church liked Dad, liked the way he preached, liked how he looked, liked his young family, and they were determined to have him. (Years later Tampico would become a relatively famous town as the place where future President Ronald Reagan lived and worked as a young man in the days before World War II.)
Word spread throughout Johnston City that their now thirty-ish Postmaster was leaving to enter the Christian ministry. The news was very hard on the immediate families of dad and mother when they realized that they were taking their two little boys and moving to what seemed like the other end of the world. It was more than a day’s drive just to get from Southern to Northern Illinois.
For the relatively non-religious Morris and Bessie, it was the end of their life with their two little grandboys, their first. Morris was furious, telling his oldest son John that he was absolutely crazy for giving up one of the best and most secure jobs in the world at the Post Office, a job he could count on to raise his boys properly, and taking those boys hundreds of miles away for some no count church job with no security whatsoever. For Morris, his oldest son had lost his mind—and his way. But try as he might he could not talk him out of it. Morris would die a year or so after they left, and some family members would say later that that move so far away ended Morris’ life before its time. Bessie would live into her 90s, and be reunited permanently with dad’s family.
What Morris was fighting, though, was not just dad’s compelling interest in being a preacher, which itself would have been enough to make the move take place. He was also fighting, as he well knew, against the fact that his daughter-in-law also wanted to move. She liked the idea of being the wife of a preacher instead of the Postmaster. She had other motives, though, and most of them had to do with finding a new start in life, away from the Mormon side of John’s family.
The move took place in 1947. When the family arrived in Tampico, Joe (writing these notes), was five years old and John, his brother, was three; twenty-two months separated the boys. Tampico was challenging from the beginning. It was a fairly large church that placed considerable demands upon a new, young, inexperienced preacher. And winters came early and lasted a long time in Northern Illinois; these were Chicago winters, not Southern Illinois winters.
None of these things, though, was as severe as the single problem that lay ahead of them beginning in 1948. The reason for moving north, for giving up the Postmaster’s job, for finding a good church that could support a family, could not be lost. It was to enable the young preacher to get a preacher’s education. That was a big part of the deal with the Tampico church. But the bible institute was now a full two hundred miles south from Tampico—in Lincoln, located on famous Route 66, almost exactly midway between Chicago and St. Louis.
In Tampico the family could only afford one car; in fact, the idea of having more than one car in the years after was the war was unheard of. Dad and mother had a decent car, but dad was getting ready to start school at Lincoln Bible Institute, two hundred miles away, attending school four days every week for the school year. He could not disappear with the car for five days a week, leaving mother and their two boys without transportation. It just wouldn’t work. There was only one thing to do. Dad would leave Tampico every Monday morning, after preaching twice the day before, and would hitchhike the two hundred miles south for classes Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday, and then hitchhike the two hundred miles north to home on Saturday, ready for services on Sunday.
As outlandish and even impossible as that sounds now, that became the routine of life in Tampico. The church had agreed to it, and dad and mother both accepted it as necessary to the decision they had made about leaving Southern Illinois to get their new life underway. As a son looking back now on the two years we lived in Tampico, I cannot even imagine the kind of hardship they both endured, in differing ways, during that time. If either complained, I knew nothing of it then, not did I ever once hear either of them look back with anything but fondness for the lifelong friends they made during those two years, or even for the experience that they had undergone together.
Mother’s loneliness was abated somewhat by the demands of two growing and challenging boys. I remember my first physical injuries there that required serious medical response. I remember doing things for the first time that got me into trouble, things such as selling used church bulletins to amused neighbors for a dime apiece—dimes that when dad arrived had to be humiliatingly carried back door to door.
Dad’s challenges then are mind-boggling to me even now as I think about them. On several occasions years later, he talked about his harrowing experiences of hitchhiking, including days when it was so cold as he sought rides that his hands and feet bordered on frostbite. But, as he liked to point out, he was never once late for a Tuesday morning class at school in Lincoln, nor did he ever miss a Sunday morning sermon because of not making it back home.
In time, the advantage he had was being in Lincoln for school during the week. The building that Lincoln Bible Institute occupied was very close to the downtown area, and not far around the corner and up the street was Lincoln Christian Church, where the school’s chapel services and some classes were held. He not only got to know the area fairly well, but he also became known among the Christian Churches around Lincoln. So as his second year of the hitchhiking was coming to a close, he was contacted by a church in a small town near Lincoln, a strong church financially if not particularly large. It needed a new preacher.
In between his second and third years of school, he accepted an invitation to become the minister of the Christian Church in Emden, Illinois, a German community of four hundred just fifteen miles outside of Lincoln. It was not as easy as it might appear for them to leave Tampico; it had been for both dad and mother the place of beginning, and it would for all of his life hold a special place in his heart. He would talk of Tampico often. But Emden would be like the sun coming up, finally, on their new life together and in the church. It too had a parsonage next door to the church.
We two boys were now growing up. When we arrived in Emden I was eight and John was six. This was where, for all practical purposes, we started to school, and where we would spend out first elementary years. While dad and mother would simply add to their collection of church friends, this is where two growing boys would make their own first great friends with church people. It is where on a farm Herb Rogers would teach me how to drive his great Ford tractor. It is where John and I both would dutifully spend years studying piano with Manie Smallwood, the talented organist in the Emden Christian Church. It is where John would famously try out some cherry bomb firecrackers while he was home alone one Sunday afternoon, blowing one of my new cleat-soled shoes to smithereens. It is where my fourth grade teacher, Mrs. Jeckel, would be in church with us on Sunday morning. It is where I would get to know personally the principle of our grade school, Mr. Vail Cordell, whose conversations with a young boy would stay with me all my life.
For mother and dad, there was no more hitchhiking, no more long days and weeks apart. Lincoln was a twenty minute car ride away. They got to know each other again, and to realize, I see in retrospect, that they had made the right decision. On top of that, when Lincoln Bible Institute needed a new cook, dad put his mother, still in Southern Illinois, in touch with them—and Bessie moved from living alone in Southern Illinois to Lincoln. She joined the staff of the school, moving in with a woman who would become her best friend and companion for years. Bessie—Grannie, never Grandmother, always Grannie, a name she liked—became part of our lives again.
There would be another big move a couple of years later, a year or so after dad graduated from LBI. For us two boys this time, it was a very difficult move since it was the first one we actually were deeply displaced by. It was 1952. A large church, also not far from Lincoln, came open, as they say, and a lot of people in it knew that dad had become an impressive preacher, and in character very well thought of around the school in Lincoln. It was the Christian Church in Mt. Pulaski, Illinois, about ten miles south of Lincoln. It was not only a town three or four times the size of Emden, but a church also about three times the size of the little Emden church. The salary it could offer was also about three to four times the size of what Emden was able to pay a preacher with a growing family.
The Mt. Pulaski Christian Church was well-known in the area, a large beautiful building just off the Square in a town famous for its Abraham Lincoln law visits in the years before he was President. For the first time, I remember being captivated by dad’s elegance as he spoke from a high pulpit surrounded by pews curved into an great semi-circle, almost all of the seats filled every Sunday. It was the first time that I felt the same pull to that kind of public address, to that very public role, to that pulpit, that had captured him back in Johnston City.
Then an unexpected thing took place that would change everything once again, necessitating still another move. Dad was invited to become a part-time teacher at Lincoln Bible Institute, the school from which he had just graduated. He would continue with the Mt. Pulaski church, but would drive the ten miles back and forth to teach classes in what was rapidly becoming a full-blown religious college. I distinctly remember the elation that dad expressed at the invitation to become a teacher, a “professor,” as well as a preacher. In retrospect, he associated it with old Mr. Walston back in Johnston City with his scholarly bearing, his interest in teaching young preachers. To no small extent, dad was about to really follow the steps of his own mentor, finally.
Before things would change and we would move yet again again, though, the most memorable thing in our family of four, if I may put it that way, took place in Mt. Pulaski. In 1954, to everyone’s surprise (including, it turned out, dad and mother) John and I had a little sister. Joy Sue was born, ten years after John. Then, they said, so that she not grow up without a close sibling, two years later, in 1956, James was born. Our family of four had suddenly become a family of six.
That was the year, too, that I graduated from the eighth grade in Mt. Pulaski, ready for high school. Elementary school, even though divided between Emden and Mt. Pulaski, had given me a circle of friends, many of whom I remember well even today, wishing I knew where many of them are now.
Then came dad’s announcement that we were moving again that summer. Not just anywhere. We were moving from Mt. Pulaski into Lincoln. I protested vehemently, to no avail, of course. Dad was going to become a full-time teacher and soon academic dean of what was being turned from Lincoln Bible Institute into Lincoln Christian College. The college had a new campus on the outskirts of town and was getting ready to move. But, instead of my going with all my friends to Mt. Pulaski High School, a small town high school, I was going to have to start as a freshman at Lincoln Community High School; it was, from where I sat, the “big city” high school.
It was not what I wanted to do. It is fair to say, however, that, from the perspective of even a few years after that, the move to Lincoln was the best thing that had happened to me. In retrospect, it was there that I would start to chisel out my own life, and there that I would meet the friends that I would hang onto into these older days of mine.But I still remember well the terror of that summer’s move.
From the long view in retrospect, without planning or even meaning to do so, I look back on my own adulthood as what can only be described as a nomadic life, a life of making a decision to move from here to someplace else every four, five, six or more years. I didn’t have to, but it seemed somehow normal or natural to do so. My other siblings, John, Joy, Jim, did not move about nearly as much as I did, and most of my friends certainly did not either.
But—I wonder—was my nomadic life in higher education, setting goals that required being in a new place with a new assignment every few years, somehow set in motion by those early years of my family’s moving around, from Tampico to Emden to Mt. Pulaski to Lincoln? It surely cannot be a rule, but do we develop ways of experiencing things when we are very young that set patterns which we almost spontaneously adopt for our own lives?
I still wonder.
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
2. A Haunting Religious Legacy
My father was the oldest of four boys and a girl, all born in the years before the Great Depression, my father’s birth year being 1916. He was 13, just ready to begin high school, in 1929. His parents had a small but fairly successful dairy farm amid the coal fields of Southern Illinois, just south of Johnston City. The small community was known as Prosperity, not far from places like Dogwalk and Chocolate, names of other nondescript collections of working people.
His father, my grandfather, was Morris Webb, a stocky, cigar-smoking, hard-working man, who had married Bessie Hood, a young woman from the same area. Both grew up in substantial families, with deep roots in that region known as Little Egypt, so called because the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers at the bottom of Illinois resembled the familiar Y-shaped delta fingers of the Nile River in Egypt. It is unclear where Morris was born, but Bessie was born in Creal Springs, another of those small mining towns south of Carbondale.
From the middle to the end of the nineteenth century, both the Webbs and the Hoods had become attracted to Mormonism, the religious group founded in the East by Joseph Smith. Led by Smith, the Mormons had moved west in the opening years of the nineteenth century, settling in Western Central Illinois along the Mississippi River. They founded a town they called Nauvoo. During its early years there, the Mormon religion spread, extending itself south into Missouri and even west across the Mississippi into Iowa. It also picked up adherents throughout Illinois, particularly down into Southern Illinois. Virtually everywhere it was, it stirred opposition, often accompanied by violence.
In the 1840s, a band of Mormon haters from Missouri stormed north into Nauvoo where they kidnapped and assassinated Joseph Smith. With that, Brigham Young stepped into the leadership of the Mormons, and immediately put into motion a plan to move the Mormons once again, at least those in the Nauvoo region, west again. Even as plans were made to move, non-Mormon settlers in Iowa and Missouri were attacking Mormons in their states, causing hundreds who did not want to move west to scatter, seeking new places to live. One of those areas, as it turned out, that offered a relatively safe environment for Mormon settlers was Little Egypt.
Among those Mormons who moved into Southern Illinois in the 1860s and 70s to stay were members of the Webb and Hood families. Those who stayed behind would take Joseph Smith's son as their new leader, while Brigham Young would lead most of the Mormons on to Utah. Those who stayed behind became part of the "reorganized" Latter Day Saints, but remained Mormons nonetheless. In 2000, even in Southern Illinois, the Reorganized Latter Day Saints would rename themselves the "Community of Christ."
Morris and Bessie, though, were not particularly religious people, though, not really devoted to Mormonism or anything else. But hey did have dozens of relatives, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, among others, who were. Morris's father, my great-grandfather, a man named Columbus Webb, was a faithful follower of Joseph Smith and was said to have had five wives, even in Southern Illinois.
Ironically, the Reorganized Latter Day Saints was able to survive in states like Illinois by giving up polygamy. Morris's sister, Pearl, my father's aunt, was a devout Mormon, as were his sisters Glenna and Aggie. The Webb cemetery, sitting today on the grounds of a Community of Christ (Mormon) church, is carefully tended to this day in Southern Illinois. Creal Springs, Bessie's home town, is only a few miles north of the Webb cemetery. In short, Mormonism ran in the blood of my great-grandparents and grandparents. In fact, members of that extended Webb-Hood family held numerous positions of leadership in the Reorganized Mormon Church.
Not surprisingly, some of those family members kept their eyes open for young ones among them who might have promising futures in the faith. One who is said to have caught their eye, in fact, was Morris and Bessie’s first child, the one who carried his father’s name and became John Morris Webb, my father. He was quiet and hard-working like his father, but he grew tall and athletic very quickly. It was not lost on his extended Mormon family that he was also very good-looking with an unmistakable charisma about him, something clearly visible in early photographs of him.
His entrance into puberty and high school coincided with the country’s 1929 economic crash. Even with the farm, Morris’s family, like most families, fell onto very hard times. Morris had to find a way to make more money than the farm could produce. By 1930 he managed to land a job as a prison guard at the Menard State Penitentiary, about 40 miles away. It meant that keeping up the work of the dairy farm would fall to 14-year-old John, my father. The family had an old Model T truck that John used on the farm and for early morning milk deliveries, but Morris hitched a ride to Menard on Monday morning and back home on Friday night. For John it meant starting the day with the milking and delivering chores, going to high school, and then picking up the milking chores again after school. That, along with maintaining good grades, would be the pattern of his high school years at nearby Johnston City High School.
What became obvious even before he graduated from high school, at least to some in his Mormon family, was that his tall good looks and his charismatic smile made him a natural around people. Early on, he developed a commanding, if quiet, presence. The talk in the family—talk that was not paid much attention by Morris or Bessie--was that John had the makings of an excellent Mormon bishop. It was actually more than talk. There were discussions, which he knew about and would later tell me about, that there were Mormon family members who were willing to help him get whatever education and training he needed to become a leader in their Church. He was actually quite taken with the idea.
He did like people, and he liked the idea of being in public. His leadership qualities became obvious to those around him, and it did not take long after high school for those qualities to land him the kind of job that put him squarely in the middle of the little town of Johnston City. About 1935, Morris missed a couple of payments on the farm, and with an unpaid mortgage of $200 the bank foreclosed, forcing Morris and his family to move into Johnston City. Very quickly, John landed a job at the Post Office, and within two years was appointed the Postmaster of the town, a respectable public post no matter how one looked at it.
It was during this time at the Post Office that Dad met the high school girl almost ten years younger than he was, a beauty named Edith June Goddard. She was growing up in another small town south of Johnston City, a mining community called Spillertown, not far from Prosperity. She had three sisters and a younger brother, she being the middle one of the five. All of the girls were attractive, but none as much as Edith and her sister Delores. For years Southern Illinois was an important coal mining region of the Midwest, and most of Edith’s male relatives, including her dad, worked in the mines. Her father died while she was still a child. Her mother, Esther Goddard, raised the children alone and lived into old age.
The Goddards were more religious than the Webbs or the Hoods, but they were Protestant through and through. In fact, they knew well about the Mormons of Southern Illinois (and the Mormons in general), and, like many good Protestants, wanted nothing to do with them. At first, the Goddards, with Edith in the lead, made their way each Sunday into Johnston City to the Methodist Church. Edith had decided early on that the boy she was looking for would be a church-going boy. So her church motives were mixed, to say the least. Through various friendships, Edith came to prefer to local independent Christian Church, a largely non-denominational church that was much less formal and stodgy than the Methodists. Edith had met John, though, and since there was relatively little to do for dating in towns like Johnston City in those days before the War, Edith suggested that she and John could “date” by meeting at church—“her” church, which by then had become the Christian Church.
John was more than interested, and, not going to any church on his own, took her up on her offer. They met at church, with occasional trips into Marion, the larger town not far away, and a romance quickly became promising between the tiny beauty from Spillertown with a mind of her own and the tall, good-looking older fellow who happened to be the Postmaster of Johnston City. They talked of marriage, and soon plans were being made, even though it would mean that Edith would not finish high school. John was reaching his mid-20s as 1940 drew near.
Edith, though, had one demand. Not a request of him, but a demand. And, in making it, she made clear that if he could not or would not comply, she would not marry him. It was as serious as anything could get, as both of them came to tell the story. He had to renounce once and for all not just the Mormonism that he had grown up around, but every one of his Mormon relatives. Mormonism had to disappear from his life and relationships, even if it involved uncles, aunts, cousins, or whoever, which it did. She would not, she let him know, have her children growing up around anything or anyone Mormon. Beyond that, she expected that their family be faithful Christians and church goers—of the Protestant variety.
John was smitten and ready to marry Edith, so he agreed to her demand. No small number of his family members, all Mormon, decried his decision, and vowed that they would never see him again either. John would not forget, though, that a number of those relatives had told him that he had what it took to be a Church leader and, long before Edith, he had secretly found that idea very compelling, even though he had no idea at that point how those Mormon words would actually play themselves out in his life. But the decision to give up Mormonism, and even his Mormon family, in order to marry Edith was easy. They eloped to Cape Gireaudeau, Missouri, for their wedding and brief honeymoon, and then it was back home to Johnston City and work at the Post Office.
The future was cloudy, to say the least. The war was on the horizon. Within months, they were expecting their first child, who was born on February 11, 1942, two months after Pearl Harbor. It was a child, the one now writing these notes, who would not only carry the Webb name forward, but, like his father and his father before him, would be given the name Morris, a name he would grow into very proudly.
My dad kept that religious promise to my mother, the one she had extracted from him as a condition of marriage. At least mostly he did. On at least three occasions during his lifetime (he died at age 66 in 1982), twice when I was in high school and once after I became an adult, he talked with me about his Mormon relatives and what he remembered about who they were and what he had heard from them. To my surprise, he said that he was quite interested in Mormonism when he was young; but he had no difficulty at all in turning his back on it. He wasn’t sure why, except that he saw the future he wanted in Edith, my mother. By the same token, his interest in Mormon leadership, which he said he secretly harbored when he was in high school, is what carried him into his life in church leadership in the years after he and mother were married.
He did on number of occasions over the years see some of his Mormon family members, something he said that Edith knew about. As it turned out, he knew a good deal more about the Mormon faith than I would have guessed, something that none of his Christian friends, his Christian students or church members, ever knew or, I am sure, ever suspected.Even before I was in high school, I learned about the Mormon side of the family from one of my uncles, one of Dad’s brothers whom we often saw and whose kids were among our favorite cousins. That led me to ask Dad about it one morning a year or two later. Dad was open and candid with me, as he was about so many things.
What he wanted me to know more than anything else, he said, was that John, my younger brother, and I had a lot more uncles, aunts, and cousins, mostly second and third removed from us, that we had never met and probably never would. We had, in short, a very large family that we were consciously kept away from. I remember being shocked at hearing that, not because of religious issues but just because of family issues and ties.
He wasn’t even sure where they were any more, since he assumed that most of them had probably left Southern Illinois. He did know that a few of them had become active Mormons, and that he would most likely have become one too if he had not met my mother. He said that there were a number of things about Mormonism that he had liked when he was young, but had never really taken it very seriously since neither his own mother or father cared much about it. Ironically, in the years after he and my mother married and he entered the Christian ministry, both of his parents became members of the same Christian Church into which my mother had led him.
Dad had three brothers and a sister, my three uncles and an aunt. Even in the growing up years, I knew them, their families and kids fairly well. My first cousins. One of the brothers, the youngest, my uncle Charles, followed dad’s footsteps, almost in synch, into the Christian ministry, same school, same ordination, identical church work. Another brother, uncle Gerald, became an active member, a deacon as I recall, of a large Baptist church in Marion, the town near Johnston City. The other two, though, I never understood religiously. Uncle Glen was always a kind of outsider to John and Charles and even Gerald religiously. I suspected Uncle Glen, who died many years ago, of being a Mormon, along with his family. It was that suspicion that led me to ask Dad about his brother Glen and Mormonism when I became an adult. Dad’s response was vague, even though he said that Glen probably stayed closer to the Southern Illinois family roots than anyone else in the immediate family.
Then there was Aunt Cynthia, so much like the boys and yet with a wonderful brash streak that none of the reserved boys had. When my wife Linda and I and our son Joe packed up and moved to California the first time in 1970, where I had my first teaching job at California State University at Northridge, we were invited to stay for a time, until we could find a place to live, with Aunt Cynthia, Uncle Harry, and Rob, our cousin. They had moved to California from Southern Illinois several years earlier when Uncle Harry landed at job at Burroughs, in the aerospace industry.
One morning at breakfast, it was just me and Aunt Cyn, as she liked to be called, and as we talked I asked her about the Mormonism in her own background. To my surprise, she launched into a long and very excited discussion of what a great religion it was, citing this and that which no other religion offered, mostly family-type things. She said she didn’t know much about the specifics of its theology but she knew enough to know that it was a very great good in the world.
Then she said that she was not a particularly religious person, but in her heart she was a Mormon. She explained, too, that over the years she had stayed very close to many of those Mormon relatives of hers—and Dad’s and her brothers’—back in Illinois. Then she told me that one family of her cousins had moved to California from Southern Illinois not long after they did and were living just up in the next canyon. She saw them, she said, as often as possible. They were still active Mormons. Before we left California the first time a few years later, she took me to meet them and spend a couple of hours.
What I never did tell dad, or anyone else for that matter, was that in the weeks after he had told me at breakfast about the Mormonism in his family background, I became intensely interested in it. What I had more or less “overheard” here and there at family get-togethers that had made no sense to me, now made sense, and I wanted to know more. Not more about it in my own family background, but more about Mormonism itself. Secretly, I checked books out of both the school library, which didn’t have many, and the Lincoln Public Library, which was across the street from our church. It did have quite a few. I read and learned about Mormonism.
I reacted, I can now see in retrospect, with both a revulsion and a curious attraction. I was dumbfounded by the Joseph Smith stories and the Jesus in America stories. I was absolutely fascinated by the collective lifestyle stories, the history and dynamics of polygamy, and the secret rites of religious membership and passage. I did learn that my Southern Illinois Mormon kin were parted ways with the Salt Lake City Mormons, but it didn't make much sense to me at the time. What I saw were that Mormons were maverick people, or at least that is how I came to perceive them, and I am convinced, in retrospect, that the attraction I found in that dimension of them impacted how I came to live my own life. In a sense, I felt a strong pull to identify with them, even though I had no intention of, and actually no way to, become a Mormon, not even of the "reformed" kind.
The other thing that left its mark on me, as it still seems to to this day, is my sense of how very close I actually came to being born into and living my life as a Mormon. Or at least I was forced then, in high school, to acknowledge something that profoundly changed my outlook, my intellectual view of the world, as it were. It was the first time I realized flat-out that if my father had indeed become a leader in, or even a part of, the Mormon faith, I too would have undoubtedly lived my life as a Mormon. I realized, too, for the first time, that by a stroke of something, my father was separated from his Mormon roots by my mother, and hence I was born into and reared, not as a Mormon, but as a member of the particular faith and church orientation that I have embraced in one way or another all my life.
Even at the age I am now I find myself wondering what life would have been like had I found myself in circumstances of embracing the Mormonism on that side of my genealogy. Or what would have happened if mother had not been so assertive about “her” religion when she and dad married? What if he had told her that to marry him she would have to join him in making his Mormon relatives happy? Do the lives we live really hang on such shifts of this or that? Ironically, much, much later in life, only in recent days, in fact, do I look back with help and realize that I unwittingly did things in life that seem to reflect the pull and the strange legacy of my relationship with Mormonism.
His father, my grandfather, was Morris Webb, a stocky, cigar-smoking, hard-working man, who had married Bessie Hood, a young woman from the same area. Both grew up in substantial families, with deep roots in that region known as Little Egypt, so called because the confluence of the Ohio and Mississippi Rivers at the bottom of Illinois resembled the familiar Y-shaped delta fingers of the Nile River in Egypt. It is unclear where Morris was born, but Bessie was born in Creal Springs, another of those small mining towns south of Carbondale.
From the middle to the end of the nineteenth century, both the Webbs and the Hoods had become attracted to Mormonism, the religious group founded in the East by Joseph Smith. Led by Smith, the Mormons had moved west in the opening years of the nineteenth century, settling in Western Central Illinois along the Mississippi River. They founded a town they called Nauvoo. During its early years there, the Mormon religion spread, extending itself south into Missouri and even west across the Mississippi into Iowa. It also picked up adherents throughout Illinois, particularly down into Southern Illinois. Virtually everywhere it was, it stirred opposition, often accompanied by violence.
In the 1840s, a band of Mormon haters from Missouri stormed north into Nauvoo where they kidnapped and assassinated Joseph Smith. With that, Brigham Young stepped into the leadership of the Mormons, and immediately put into motion a plan to move the Mormons once again, at least those in the Nauvoo region, west again. Even as plans were made to move, non-Mormon settlers in Iowa and Missouri were attacking Mormons in their states, causing hundreds who did not want to move west to scatter, seeking new places to live. One of those areas, as it turned out, that offered a relatively safe environment for Mormon settlers was Little Egypt.
Among those Mormons who moved into Southern Illinois in the 1860s and 70s to stay were members of the Webb and Hood families. Those who stayed behind would take Joseph Smith's son as their new leader, while Brigham Young would lead most of the Mormons on to Utah. Those who stayed behind became part of the "reorganized" Latter Day Saints, but remained Mormons nonetheless. In 2000, even in Southern Illinois, the Reorganized Latter Day Saints would rename themselves the "Community of Christ."
Morris and Bessie, though, were not particularly religious people, though, not really devoted to Mormonism or anything else. But hey did have dozens of relatives, brothers, sisters, aunts, uncles, among others, who were. Morris's father, my great-grandfather, a man named Columbus Webb, was a faithful follower of Joseph Smith and was said to have had five wives, even in Southern Illinois.
Ironically, the Reorganized Latter Day Saints was able to survive in states like Illinois by giving up polygamy. Morris's sister, Pearl, my father's aunt, was a devout Mormon, as were his sisters Glenna and Aggie. The Webb cemetery, sitting today on the grounds of a Community of Christ (Mormon) church, is carefully tended to this day in Southern Illinois. Creal Springs, Bessie's home town, is only a few miles north of the Webb cemetery. In short, Mormonism ran in the blood of my great-grandparents and grandparents. In fact, members of that extended Webb-Hood family held numerous positions of leadership in the Reorganized Mormon Church.
Not surprisingly, some of those family members kept their eyes open for young ones among them who might have promising futures in the faith. One who is said to have caught their eye, in fact, was Morris and Bessie’s first child, the one who carried his father’s name and became John Morris Webb, my father. He was quiet and hard-working like his father, but he grew tall and athletic very quickly. It was not lost on his extended Mormon family that he was also very good-looking with an unmistakable charisma about him, something clearly visible in early photographs of him.
His entrance into puberty and high school coincided with the country’s 1929 economic crash. Even with the farm, Morris’s family, like most families, fell onto very hard times. Morris had to find a way to make more money than the farm could produce. By 1930 he managed to land a job as a prison guard at the Menard State Penitentiary, about 40 miles away. It meant that keeping up the work of the dairy farm would fall to 14-year-old John, my father. The family had an old Model T truck that John used on the farm and for early morning milk deliveries, but Morris hitched a ride to Menard on Monday morning and back home on Friday night. For John it meant starting the day with the milking and delivering chores, going to high school, and then picking up the milking chores again after school. That, along with maintaining good grades, would be the pattern of his high school years at nearby Johnston City High School.
What became obvious even before he graduated from high school, at least to some in his Mormon family, was that his tall good looks and his charismatic smile made him a natural around people. Early on, he developed a commanding, if quiet, presence. The talk in the family—talk that was not paid much attention by Morris or Bessie--was that John had the makings of an excellent Mormon bishop. It was actually more than talk. There were discussions, which he knew about and would later tell me about, that there were Mormon family members who were willing to help him get whatever education and training he needed to become a leader in their Church. He was actually quite taken with the idea.
He did like people, and he liked the idea of being in public. His leadership qualities became obvious to those around him, and it did not take long after high school for those qualities to land him the kind of job that put him squarely in the middle of the little town of Johnston City. About 1935, Morris missed a couple of payments on the farm, and with an unpaid mortgage of $200 the bank foreclosed, forcing Morris and his family to move into Johnston City. Very quickly, John landed a job at the Post Office, and within two years was appointed the Postmaster of the town, a respectable public post no matter how one looked at it.
It was during this time at the Post Office that Dad met the high school girl almost ten years younger than he was, a beauty named Edith June Goddard. She was growing up in another small town south of Johnston City, a mining community called Spillertown, not far from Prosperity. She had three sisters and a younger brother, she being the middle one of the five. All of the girls were attractive, but none as much as Edith and her sister Delores. For years Southern Illinois was an important coal mining region of the Midwest, and most of Edith’s male relatives, including her dad, worked in the mines. Her father died while she was still a child. Her mother, Esther Goddard, raised the children alone and lived into old age.
The Goddards were more religious than the Webbs or the Hoods, but they were Protestant through and through. In fact, they knew well about the Mormons of Southern Illinois (and the Mormons in general), and, like many good Protestants, wanted nothing to do with them. At first, the Goddards, with Edith in the lead, made their way each Sunday into Johnston City to the Methodist Church. Edith had decided early on that the boy she was looking for would be a church-going boy. So her church motives were mixed, to say the least. Through various friendships, Edith came to prefer to local independent Christian Church, a largely non-denominational church that was much less formal and stodgy than the Methodists. Edith had met John, though, and since there was relatively little to do for dating in towns like Johnston City in those days before the War, Edith suggested that she and John could “date” by meeting at church—“her” church, which by then had become the Christian Church.
John was more than interested, and, not going to any church on his own, took her up on her offer. They met at church, with occasional trips into Marion, the larger town not far away, and a romance quickly became promising between the tiny beauty from Spillertown with a mind of her own and the tall, good-looking older fellow who happened to be the Postmaster of Johnston City. They talked of marriage, and soon plans were being made, even though it would mean that Edith would not finish high school. John was reaching his mid-20s as 1940 drew near.
Edith, though, had one demand. Not a request of him, but a demand. And, in making it, she made clear that if he could not or would not comply, she would not marry him. It was as serious as anything could get, as both of them came to tell the story. He had to renounce once and for all not just the Mormonism that he had grown up around, but every one of his Mormon relatives. Mormonism had to disappear from his life and relationships, even if it involved uncles, aunts, cousins, or whoever, which it did. She would not, she let him know, have her children growing up around anything or anyone Mormon. Beyond that, she expected that their family be faithful Christians and church goers—of the Protestant variety.
John was smitten and ready to marry Edith, so he agreed to her demand. No small number of his family members, all Mormon, decried his decision, and vowed that they would never see him again either. John would not forget, though, that a number of those relatives had told him that he had what it took to be a Church leader and, long before Edith, he had secretly found that idea very compelling, even though he had no idea at that point how those Mormon words would actually play themselves out in his life. But the decision to give up Mormonism, and even his Mormon family, in order to marry Edith was easy. They eloped to Cape Gireaudeau, Missouri, for their wedding and brief honeymoon, and then it was back home to Johnston City and work at the Post Office.
The future was cloudy, to say the least. The war was on the horizon. Within months, they were expecting their first child, who was born on February 11, 1942, two months after Pearl Harbor. It was a child, the one now writing these notes, who would not only carry the Webb name forward, but, like his father and his father before him, would be given the name Morris, a name he would grow into very proudly.
My dad kept that religious promise to my mother, the one she had extracted from him as a condition of marriage. At least mostly he did. On at least three occasions during his lifetime (he died at age 66 in 1982), twice when I was in high school and once after I became an adult, he talked with me about his Mormon relatives and what he remembered about who they were and what he had heard from them. To my surprise, he said that he was quite interested in Mormonism when he was young; but he had no difficulty at all in turning his back on it. He wasn’t sure why, except that he saw the future he wanted in Edith, my mother. By the same token, his interest in Mormon leadership, which he said he secretly harbored when he was in high school, is what carried him into his life in church leadership in the years after he and mother were married.
He did on number of occasions over the years see some of his Mormon family members, something he said that Edith knew about. As it turned out, he knew a good deal more about the Mormon faith than I would have guessed, something that none of his Christian friends, his Christian students or church members, ever knew or, I am sure, ever suspected.Even before I was in high school, I learned about the Mormon side of the family from one of my uncles, one of Dad’s brothers whom we often saw and whose kids were among our favorite cousins. That led me to ask Dad about it one morning a year or two later. Dad was open and candid with me, as he was about so many things.
What he wanted me to know more than anything else, he said, was that John, my younger brother, and I had a lot more uncles, aunts, and cousins, mostly second and third removed from us, that we had never met and probably never would. We had, in short, a very large family that we were consciously kept away from. I remember being shocked at hearing that, not because of religious issues but just because of family issues and ties.
He wasn’t even sure where they were any more, since he assumed that most of them had probably left Southern Illinois. He did know that a few of them had become active Mormons, and that he would most likely have become one too if he had not met my mother. He said that there were a number of things about Mormonism that he had liked when he was young, but had never really taken it very seriously since neither his own mother or father cared much about it. Ironically, in the years after he and my mother married and he entered the Christian ministry, both of his parents became members of the same Christian Church into which my mother had led him.
Dad had three brothers and a sister, my three uncles and an aunt. Even in the growing up years, I knew them, their families and kids fairly well. My first cousins. One of the brothers, the youngest, my uncle Charles, followed dad’s footsteps, almost in synch, into the Christian ministry, same school, same ordination, identical church work. Another brother, uncle Gerald, became an active member, a deacon as I recall, of a large Baptist church in Marion, the town near Johnston City. The other two, though, I never understood religiously. Uncle Glen was always a kind of outsider to John and Charles and even Gerald religiously. I suspected Uncle Glen, who died many years ago, of being a Mormon, along with his family. It was that suspicion that led me to ask Dad about his brother Glen and Mormonism when I became an adult. Dad’s response was vague, even though he said that Glen probably stayed closer to the Southern Illinois family roots than anyone else in the immediate family.
Then there was Aunt Cynthia, so much like the boys and yet with a wonderful brash streak that none of the reserved boys had. When my wife Linda and I and our son Joe packed up and moved to California the first time in 1970, where I had my first teaching job at California State University at Northridge, we were invited to stay for a time, until we could find a place to live, with Aunt Cynthia, Uncle Harry, and Rob, our cousin. They had moved to California from Southern Illinois several years earlier when Uncle Harry landed at job at Burroughs, in the aerospace industry.
One morning at breakfast, it was just me and Aunt Cyn, as she liked to be called, and as we talked I asked her about the Mormonism in her own background. To my surprise, she launched into a long and very excited discussion of what a great religion it was, citing this and that which no other religion offered, mostly family-type things. She said she didn’t know much about the specifics of its theology but she knew enough to know that it was a very great good in the world.
Then she said that she was not a particularly religious person, but in her heart she was a Mormon. She explained, too, that over the years she had stayed very close to many of those Mormon relatives of hers—and Dad’s and her brothers’—back in Illinois. Then she told me that one family of her cousins had moved to California from Southern Illinois not long after they did and were living just up in the next canyon. She saw them, she said, as often as possible. They were still active Mormons. Before we left California the first time a few years later, she took me to meet them and spend a couple of hours.
What I never did tell dad, or anyone else for that matter, was that in the weeks after he had told me at breakfast about the Mormonism in his family background, I became intensely interested in it. What I had more or less “overheard” here and there at family get-togethers that had made no sense to me, now made sense, and I wanted to know more. Not more about it in my own family background, but more about Mormonism itself. Secretly, I checked books out of both the school library, which didn’t have many, and the Lincoln Public Library, which was across the street from our church. It did have quite a few. I read and learned about Mormonism.
I reacted, I can now see in retrospect, with both a revulsion and a curious attraction. I was dumbfounded by the Joseph Smith stories and the Jesus in America stories. I was absolutely fascinated by the collective lifestyle stories, the history and dynamics of polygamy, and the secret rites of religious membership and passage. I did learn that my Southern Illinois Mormon kin were parted ways with the Salt Lake City Mormons, but it didn't make much sense to me at the time. What I saw were that Mormons were maverick people, or at least that is how I came to perceive them, and I am convinced, in retrospect, that the attraction I found in that dimension of them impacted how I came to live my own life. In a sense, I felt a strong pull to identify with them, even though I had no intention of, and actually no way to, become a Mormon, not even of the "reformed" kind.
The other thing that left its mark on me, as it still seems to to this day, is my sense of how very close I actually came to being born into and living my life as a Mormon. Or at least I was forced then, in high school, to acknowledge something that profoundly changed my outlook, my intellectual view of the world, as it were. It was the first time I realized flat-out that if my father had indeed become a leader in, or even a part of, the Mormon faith, I too would have undoubtedly lived my life as a Mormon. I realized, too, for the first time, that by a stroke of something, my father was separated from his Mormon roots by my mother, and hence I was born into and reared, not as a Mormon, but as a member of the particular faith and church orientation that I have embraced in one way or another all my life.
Even at the age I am now I find myself wondering what life would have been like had I found myself in circumstances of embracing the Mormonism on that side of my genealogy. Or what would have happened if mother had not been so assertive about “her” religion when she and dad married? What if he had told her that to marry him she would have to join him in making his Mormon relatives happy? Do the lives we live really hang on such shifts of this or that? Ironically, much, much later in life, only in recent days, in fact, do I look back with help and realize that I unwittingly did things in life that seem to reflect the pull and the strange legacy of my relationship with Mormonism.
1. Why a Memoir?
I have reached an age when it is time for me, as a writer, to look back, take stock, face a lot of life’s past troubles and episodes head-on, and try to understand who I was and why I consistently behaved in such angry, hurtful ways over the years. I am essentially a religious person who has lived a very secular intellectual and moral life—if I may summarize it that way. I have moved back and forth between the worlds of higher education and the Church (in its largest sense), between being a college professor and a clergy person, between a passion for studying secular communication theory and practice and a deep attraction to theology and the religious communicative act called preaching.
In a sense, I have lived what can be labeled a “postmodern” life, meaning a life in an almost constant state of chaos, constantly on the move, seemingly without anchors or clear cut ideals or goals. I hope in these writings to explain how, as best I can tell, all of that came about and how, in utter disjointedness, it has played itself out now into my 60s. I did not plan to live this way. In fact, all the way through college and into the late 1960s I was pointed in a specific religious direction and taught specific conservative religious things. In the early 1970s, though, everything about my life came unraveled. The chaos set in with a vengeance.
I fully understand that in setting out to write about one’s own awkwardly lived life—I don’t know if I should say “badly lived” life or not, though some whom I have hurt will say “yes” I should—I do understand that my life has no inherent importance or notability, so an interest in what I write will be low at best. One does this kind of reflecting, though, for oneself, to “sum up” what one has been given and how one has dealt with it. That is certainly my motivation here and I have no illusions about its lasting import.
At the same time, though, when things have not gone well in one’s life, or things have not gone as one had hoped, dreamed, or planned, leaving some record behind of “what happened and why” can sometimes be of some value to younger folk who are also setting out on or trying to live through their own plans and hopes and dreams. It is like “here is what I wanted in life, along with why I didn’t get it, as I had expected that I would.” Here I try to describe the circumstances and shifts in life that I could not control, along with the mistakes, angers, bad decisions, and regrets that I wish I could go back and fix.
Mine is a religious story, a deeply religious one, actually—though the nature of what I was taught through college ended up changing in ways no one, and particularly not me, could have foreseen. For a long stretch of time as an adult, I rebelled intensely against my religious upbringing, against even the ministerial profession that I was well prepared for. I returned to religion in time, never ever quite giving it all up, but I did so in a way both similar to yet profoundly different from where I had begun in my 20s. All my life I had wanted to write religious books, books for clergy, for the minister and theological professor I could not, as it turned out, ever be. But even that could not happen until relatively late in my life.
In short, I have led, as the old spy once put it, two lives, one a relatively public life and the other the “postmodern” life, that hidden life that kept me perpetually frustrated and lashing out. While intensely personal, that second life was not as private a life as I would like to think it was: a lot of people saw it and a lot of people were repelled by it; some got hurt by it. While I mean no comparison to St. Paul, I empathize with what he described in Romans 7 as a “sacred wretchedness.”
The more public life, that “other” one, is what is reflected on my resume, my “vita,” as we call it in higher education. It has some value, I suspect, and for the most part in that life I have been blessed. I did get to write my books, one of which has done remarkably well among clergy. The record of that is readily available on a web site of my writings, sermons, and other work—at http://www.webbspreachingwithoutnotes.com/. With all that material compiled, though, this memoir focuses on the “private” side, my “non-vita” life, on why and how my overt vita unfolded in such an odd and disjointed fashion.
In retrospect, this inner life of mine has a bizarre—I use the word “postmodern”—logic to it, even from the beginning, as I can now see in hindsight. I would like to think that, as I settle down these days in rural North Carolina, owning a little piece of property for the very first time in my life, that the anger I have lived with for almost half a century is finally abating. It is, I guess. But the minute I write that, I am vaguely aware that it probably is not.
For the most part, I will write these ten or so page reflections chronologically, memoir-like. I invite you to read and respond, if you are so inclined. Particularly do I invite you to read if you are a young or mid-life religious professional, a minister or would-be minister, who is struggling to comprehend, or even stay true to, the religious, intellectual, moral, or professional dimensions of what you are living through. Others have faced all or most of it before you. This is the story of one such person’s travail.
In a sense, I have lived what can be labeled a “postmodern” life, meaning a life in an almost constant state of chaos, constantly on the move, seemingly without anchors or clear cut ideals or goals. I hope in these writings to explain how, as best I can tell, all of that came about and how, in utter disjointedness, it has played itself out now into my 60s. I did not plan to live this way. In fact, all the way through college and into the late 1960s I was pointed in a specific religious direction and taught specific conservative religious things. In the early 1970s, though, everything about my life came unraveled. The chaos set in with a vengeance.
I fully understand that in setting out to write about one’s own awkwardly lived life—I don’t know if I should say “badly lived” life or not, though some whom I have hurt will say “yes” I should—I do understand that my life has no inherent importance or notability, so an interest in what I write will be low at best. One does this kind of reflecting, though, for oneself, to “sum up” what one has been given and how one has dealt with it. That is certainly my motivation here and I have no illusions about its lasting import.
At the same time, though, when things have not gone well in one’s life, or things have not gone as one had hoped, dreamed, or planned, leaving some record behind of “what happened and why” can sometimes be of some value to younger folk who are also setting out on or trying to live through their own plans and hopes and dreams. It is like “here is what I wanted in life, along with why I didn’t get it, as I had expected that I would.” Here I try to describe the circumstances and shifts in life that I could not control, along with the mistakes, angers, bad decisions, and regrets that I wish I could go back and fix.
Mine is a religious story, a deeply religious one, actually—though the nature of what I was taught through college ended up changing in ways no one, and particularly not me, could have foreseen. For a long stretch of time as an adult, I rebelled intensely against my religious upbringing, against even the ministerial profession that I was well prepared for. I returned to religion in time, never ever quite giving it all up, but I did so in a way both similar to yet profoundly different from where I had begun in my 20s. All my life I had wanted to write religious books, books for clergy, for the minister and theological professor I could not, as it turned out, ever be. But even that could not happen until relatively late in my life.
In short, I have led, as the old spy once put it, two lives, one a relatively public life and the other the “postmodern” life, that hidden life that kept me perpetually frustrated and lashing out. While intensely personal, that second life was not as private a life as I would like to think it was: a lot of people saw it and a lot of people were repelled by it; some got hurt by it. While I mean no comparison to St. Paul, I empathize with what he described in Romans 7 as a “sacred wretchedness.”
The more public life, that “other” one, is what is reflected on my resume, my “vita,” as we call it in higher education. It has some value, I suspect, and for the most part in that life I have been blessed. I did get to write my books, one of which has done remarkably well among clergy. The record of that is readily available on a web site of my writings, sermons, and other work—at http://www.webbspreachingwithoutnotes.com/. With all that material compiled, though, this memoir focuses on the “private” side, my “non-vita” life, on why and how my overt vita unfolded in such an odd and disjointed fashion.
In retrospect, this inner life of mine has a bizarre—I use the word “postmodern”—logic to it, even from the beginning, as I can now see in hindsight. I would like to think that, as I settle down these days in rural North Carolina, owning a little piece of property for the very first time in my life, that the anger I have lived with for almost half a century is finally abating. It is, I guess. But the minute I write that, I am vaguely aware that it probably is not.
For the most part, I will write these ten or so page reflections chronologically, memoir-like. I invite you to read and respond, if you are so inclined. Particularly do I invite you to read if you are a young or mid-life religious professional, a minister or would-be minister, who is struggling to comprehend, or even stay true to, the religious, intellectual, moral, or professional dimensions of what you are living through. Others have faced all or most of it before you. This is the story of one such person’s travail.
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