3. Moving, Moving, Moving

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.