6. Love and the Global Crisis

Surprisingly to me, there was not much dating of those new college girls when I arrived on campus, and what there was never turned very serious. It was mostly because college turned out, right from the beginning, to be very busy. I studied more than I had in high school, for one thing, both for my classes and with things I found interesting, on my own. I did realize that it was time for some serious learning, and I was at least going to try. More than that, though, I was still working mornings and afternoons at the radio station—and midway through my freshman year, just as 1960 turned into 1961, I had not sought it, but I ended up with a weekend church job. Now I had two jobs, the radio station during the week, and a position as minister of youth at a substantial church an hour’s drive from Lincoln.

The little town where the church was had an odd Indian name, Moweaqua. It was located fifteen miles south of Decatur on Route 51, a famous road that ran due north and south through most of the length of Illinois. Moweaqua was usually a quick lunch stop for anyone heading south in the days before the freeways intersected the state.

As college began I found myself in a singing group, a quartet. We were invited to Moweaqua one Sunday in December for perform for worship services. While we were there, I was asked if I would be interested in their youth minister position, and almost without thinking I said that I was. I was hired almost immediately. It meant a change of cars for the 50-mile trip back and forth each Friday and Sunday night, from the old 1954 Ford of high school to a “new” 1955 Ford. Weekends for dating, for all practical purposes, were gone.

Still, at 18—I did not turn 19 until February 1961—I was in charge of a fairly large group of kids, including a number who were in high school. Most of the high schoolers were not more than a year or two or three younger than I was. At first it was awkward, to be honest, among the high schoolers, particularly since I was expected to be not just an activities planner and youth meeting and worship leader, but also a “counselor” of sorts.

Right from the start of those youth ministry years, I had an excellent mentor whom I came to respect very much, the church’s senior minister, Robert Phillips. When he hired me, though, he was aware of the “age” problem between me and the older young people in the church, and he made sure that I knew the cardinal rule that I would have to abide by: no dating of any youth group member in the Moweaqua church. I understood it, accepted it, and played by the rule. It did make for harmonious and effective church work in my two and a half years there.

All told, between school and two jobs, particularly that weekend job out of town, it meant that I dated very little, and nothing that became either sustained or serious. I found myself attracted to Shirley and then to Lois, two of my new freshman class members, but there was no time, and they were not that interested. I began to worry that at age 19 and then into 20, love, if I can put it that way, was passing me by; and, frankly, I did not want it to. I had been taught well that sex was only a possibility after marriage, and if I could not find a way to even date, anything related to marriage looked a very long time off.

This all came home to me in a truly shocking fashion in October 1961, in the first weeks of my college sophomore year. I had not been particularly news oriented, though like the rest of the world, I participated in a kind of youthful elation at the election of John Kennedy as President earlier that year. For the most part, though, my life was my life, still living at home in our little house on the college campus, occupied with school and two jobs and keeping my car running and wishing I had a serious girl friend.

Then, abruptly, came the news that October of the Cuban Missile Crisis. The world, it really seemed, was headed for war, nuclear war. It really did appear that way, and as one week turned into two, the tension, even there amid the tall corn fields of Illinois, became almost unbearable. Kennedy and Khrushchev, the Russian leader, were trading threats of nuclear attack. The Russians were delivering missiles to Cuba and President Kennedy told them to turn the ships back or else. It was a terrifying game of chicken. It was hard to get away from the black and white television and its reports of nuclear bombs. It was one day of tension and then it was over. There was plenty of time to contemplate the world, at least from my young point of view, coming to an end.

For me, the “contemplation” profoundly unnerving, and it took an odd turn in those few days, a turn that would push my life with almost shocking quickness in an unexpected direction. During those crisis days I realized that if the world ended in a nuclear war, I would die without ever having had sex, without having had an opportunity to know what married life was like, without even knowing what being with a naked woman was like, without ever having done whatever it took to have a child, without any of those wonderful and completely out of reach things out there that I was spending an inordinate of time thinking about before the crisis.

The crisis of that famous “13 days in October” ended, of course, the Russian ships turning around without delivering their missiles to Cuba. For me, though, life did not slip back to normal. I had thoroughly internalized and absorbed the crisis, mentally and emotionally. It might have been a world event, far removed from me, but, because of television, it was not removed from me at all. I was not the same. Apart from school and my jobs, I had a new mission. If the would could have been rocked with nuclear weapons once, it could happen again, and who knew when that might be. I had thought hard about what I would have missed on this earth if it had all ended, and now, given a second chance, I was not about to miss those wonderful things that had crowded around in my head tormenting me. It was time, I knew very clearly, to kick my life up into another gear. I may have been young, but I needed a woman and I started looking in earnest. I had things to do.

In the next several months, I did look—in virtually the only place I had available to me on a regular basis. No one knew what I had gone through with that missile crisis, and no one knew I was looking—I told not a soul. But every weekend I found myself standing among, working with, contemplating a fairly large number of young women in my high school youth group at the Moweaqua Christian Church. I knew that I was not much older than they were.

I also knew—in fact, had known for quite a while—that one of them stood out. She had a steady boy friend of sorts, meaning that the two of them fought often. I knew that because she had let me know it. We had talked about what she should do about it. Still, Linda and Bill were an item in the group. She was beautiful, she had poise, her smile was infectious, she liked everything about the church, and she could sing; she was not a leader in the group, as such, but she was clearly was strong in her faith and in her sense of being a helping person. I had seen that up close and often.

But I had promised that, in my role as youth minister, I would date no one in the group, nor would I treat anyone any differently from any other; and I certainly, I had said, would not be inappropriate in any way. I held tightly to that and never once violated it. But I was watching Linda, who was three years younger than I was, and at that time in late 1961 beginning her sophomore year in high school. I kept everything to myself.

Over the next year, I did my work normally, but increasingly Linda, the high schooler from Moweaqua, was on my mind. In the summers I spent extra days in Moweaqua working on activities with various age groups in the church. It was sometime during the late summer of 62 that I more or less made a decision in my mind. I would have to think hard and pray hard about it, but I determined somehow to get out of my agreement with the church so that I could talk seriously with Linda. Then I changed that, thinking such a plan would be inappropriate. But as the new school year began, with me at the start of my junior year in college and Linda beginning her senior year in high school, I decided what I was going to do.

On Halloween night, 1962—almost exactly one year after those frightful thirteen days of the Cuban Missile Crisis—I was at the church alone, and I called her on the telephone and asked if she could come over to the church; I needed to talk with her. I arranged the desk lamp so that it would be sort of shining in her eyes. She arrived, and haltingly, very nervously, I began. I told her about the agreement I had with the church, and that I knew we hadn’t talked about it or anything, but surely she knew how much I liked her; and would she be interested in marrying me? I knew that I loved her, I said, had for a long time, and I thought we would do very well together. I was planning to go into the ministry, and I needed someone just like her. I believed she was the right one.

Of course it was awkward—I was 20 and she was 17—at that moment. She had no clue that that was coming. I had taken her completely by surprise. She wanted to make sure that I was sure about what I had said, since I had used the “marriage” word, she said. We talked some more, and an hour or so later, knowing she had to go home, she said “yes, she would.” I told her that since I had caught her off-guard and since we had never kissed or even held hands, I said she should think it over and let me know in a few days. She said that would not be necessary.

So I suggested that we go back to her house, which wasn’t far away, and see her mom and dad. When we told them that we were going to get married, her mother teared up—Linda was the youngest of their four daughters, so this was not new to her—but her dad, rugged factory worker that he was, only grinned his wide grin and never took his eye off the television set. He only had one eye, having lost the other years earlier in an industrial accident. He finally laughed and said, “If you want her hand, you have to take the rest of her, too.”

The next day I talked with the senior minister and two of the church leaders, told them what Linda and I had decided and asked, politely, if I could be released from my “no dating” agreement, which they laughingly agreed looked somewhat necessary under the circumstances. That Saturday night, I took Linda to Decatur on our first date.

We were going to get married, even though we agreed it would have to wait until after she graduated from high school. Nothing about my graduating from college, just that she needed to be out of high school. Actually, we had to wait until then so that she would turn 18, which she did on the first of January 1963. We would date on weekends in a discrete fashion, but other than that life would go on for the most part just as it had. I called her often during the week, and we began to plan. My family seemed to take everything in stride. It was not much of a topic of conversation, actually. We set a date for the following summer.

The school year passed quickly, and that next summer, on a very hot June Saturday in mid-1963, we were married in the Moweaqua Christian Church, the Moweaqua minister and my dad together officiating. Linda had graduated from the high school two weeks earlier, and I had just finished my junior year in college. I still had another year of school ahead of me. It never occurred to me how hard that was going to be. I was then 21 and she was 18. We were both virgins. Life changed, as I guess it usually does, when we had to start out on our own. It marked the first time in my life that I was actually leaving home, moving out of the house where I had lived through high school and three years of college. Obviously Linda was leaving home for the first time, too.

In the weeks before the wedding, I resigned as youth minister and was hired as the minister of a small congregation about 40 miles away, just south of Springfield, the state capitol. After a couple of days of strange, uncomfortable motels down toward St. Louis, Linda and I decided to head back to Loami, our new place with its dilapidated parsonage. I remembered how powerfully I had been motivated by sex in my rush to get married. It seemed like the right thing to do, and I was convinced that Linda was the right person. We learned sex together, and it was everything, I think even now, that young love was supposed to be, whether by night or day.

We would live in that parsonage at the outer edge of the little town for the rest of the summer. But the house was in such bad shape—and with a cold Illinois winter coming on—I pressed the church board to let us move into the tiny but cozy apartment that was upstairs above an annex to the sanctuary. The board understood and gave us permission, and we made the move in time to be in before school started for my senior year. Linda would be staying home while I drove the 60 miles round trip a day to Lincoln to finish college. A friend of my dad in Lincoln helped us buy our first new car, a 1963 Chevrolet Corvair, one of those strange-looking vehicles with the engine in the rear. The church was paying us $70 a week and providing us a place to live.

It was in early November of ’63 that I arrived home from school at my usual two o’clock in the afternoon to have Linda say that she had a doctor’s appointment that afternoon. We headed to a small nearby town, despite the fact that she did not want to tell me what I wrong. I was frightened. All that she would tell me was that she did not feel good. On our way home, she asked that we pull over. When we did, sitting in the car together, she told me that she was pregnant. I think we cried, out of happiness, I am sure, but, for me at least, with a mixture of surprise and bewilderment. Not bad bewilderment, but with a sense of what do we do now and how do we add this to all that was going on. We were just settling in, married four months, without little money, and me trying to finish my senior year in college. I was happy, but perplexed.

The following month brought another strange blow. I had been at school and had driven home on that cool late November day, stopping at the Post Office about two o’clock to pick our mail as I always did. As I walked in the Postmaster asked if I had heard the news. I said no, I had no radio in my car and I hadn’t been home yet. He said that the President had been shot and killed. President Kennedy. I was stunned, as he obviously was, too. I hurried home to find Linda huddled up in front of our black and white television. There the story was story unfolding. It was Friday, and, like countless other people, we stayed in front of the TV set for much of the weekend, though church seemed to go on as usual on Sunday.

I was one of those young people who had believed that Kennedy’s presidency signaled a remarkable new era not just for the country, but for my generation. It had been somehow symbolic for me, in fact, that Kennedy had been elected President in 1960, the year I graduated from high school. I had, to be sure, been traumatized by the Cuban Missile Crisis, now two years in the past. But that story had a happy ending, with Kennedy not only showing strength but seeming to know just how hard to push Khrushchev back to the Soviet Union. Kennedy’s image seemed strangely enhanced by his courageous decisiveness. Now, he was gone. Just like that. Assassinated. It was incomprehensible. But what did it mean? Life was thrown completely out of whack.

Strangely, not more than two weeks later, in that mid-December of ’63 winter hit with a vengeance, a season, in fact, for the record books. Once the snow started, it did not let up until Spring. I had to leave early for the long drive to Lincoln, often remembering dad’s stories of winter hitchhiking from Northern Illinois down to Lincoln—except I wasn’t hitchhiking, though some days that might have been easier. There was one ten-day stretch when I did not get to school at all, since the snow literally buried our little blue Corvair on the street in front of our apartment under six feet of snow.

When the winter ended and the snow was finally gone, an unexpected thing happened. I was visited one afternoon in my little church office just under our upstairs church apartment, not long after I had returned home from school. I was asked by representatives from another little church—this one only 15 and not 60 miles from Lincoln—would I move to the little town of Broadwell and become their minister? Ironically, like my dad in his young years moving here and there to get as close as possible to Lincoln, I was now doing that, too. The money would be better, and the idea that I would be close enough to Lincoln to start graduate school there without so much driving was welcome news. So we were moving again, after less than a year in Loami, this time to Broadwell.

The Loami Church was upset with us for not staying with them. Still, in the Spring of ’64 we got situated in the Broadwell parsonage just as I was getting ready to graduate from college at Lincoln. My graduation coincided with my ordination to the ministry in my “home” church in Lincoln, and both events were symbolized, in a sense, by the trading of the Corvair for a very special new car. Through a church member in Broadwell I was introduced to the newest car on the market that Spring. It was one of the very first ’64 Ford Mustangs, like all of those first ones white with red interior, and I was able to buy it for $1,999.

In Broadwell, we made the plans for our new baby to be born in a familiar place, the Abraham Lincoln Memorial Hospital in Lincoln; the doctor who would deliver him would be the father of one of my high school classmates, a doctor whose family lived only a few doors away from us in Mt. Pulaski. Joseph Morris II would be born on a very hot July day, almost exactly eleven months after Linda and I were married. He was late by a couple of weeks, causing some concern for a time. But nothing, as it turned out, went wrong. He grew healthy and strong and beautiful, surviving all of the moves and all the turmoil that were still ahead of us.