joseph webb's blog

10. The Mimeograph Machine

2008-09-30T12:39:00.001-07:00

The intellectual radicalization of my graduate school years, which I described in the previous installment, was enormously complicated by the simultaneous three-year struggle with my religion, the personal faith with which I had grown up and seen develop in college. The two “sides” were related, of course; each would continue, over time, to inform and change the other. The period was the same—from late ’67 to late ’70. Through it all, I considered myself a committed Christian, though I was aware from that first year at the University that the nature of my Christian outlook was undergoing a profound and life-changing shift.

It was in the milieu of my university courses that I was confronted, full-force, with the reality of the Vietnam War and my own growing angst at how unjust and unnecessary it was. At first it created merely confusion for me, so I decided to undertake a reading program of my own, apart from my classes, in whatever spare time I could make. I would read as widely as I could, I decided, about war, and I would read from those whom I took to be informed Christians writing about what was going on in the world.

I bought books, more than I should have. What I couldn’t afford to buy, I sought from the university’s libraries. Mostly Christian books—radical Christian books. As it turned out, three writers ended up catching my attention in a big way, and toward the end of that first year of graduate school, by about the end of ‘67, my own Christian—i.e., political/theological—reading was underway. During that spring and summer of ’68, seldom an afternoon would go by that I did not gather up three of four of my books and cross the street to Hess Park where I would prop myself up at a big tree and read and think. I was almost overwhelmed by the war and its horror by then—that went back even to my editorial writing and Democratic National Convention days in Decatur and Chicago. I watched the news carefully and read the New York Times as often as I could buy it. I was deeply moved in ’67 by the enormous anger-producing antiwar march on Washington DC.

I was needing help, though, with how to think about war, period. It was not a subject that I had ever really been introduced to; and now it was affecting me to the point where it was all I could do to keep focused on my graduate studies, where I was hearing about it, too. I learned at one level to keep the two intellectual areas separate in my mind; at another level, though, everything was starting to meld together.

By the end of 1968, three writers were working on me mightily. The first was probably the most famous American pacifist of the twentieth century. Little known actually, he was a Protestant preacher, a clergyman, then in his 80s. He had been a conscientious objector in both World Wars I and II, and now was advocating not just conscientious objection to the war in Vietnam, but all-out opposition to it; and he was doing so on the basis of a unique and powerful Christian outlook—an intensely appealing outlook to me. His name was A. J. Muste, and the book I stumbled onto—Nat Hentoff in the Village Voice had referred to him in one issue and I went looking—the book I stumbled onto was a thick black tome titled, simply, The Essays of A. J. Muste.

I ordered the book and found myself utterly transformed by what I read. His essays were profoundly Christian, drawing on ways I had never read before about the words, the life, and even the death of Jesus Christ. Muste was original, as far as I could tell. He was not doctrinaire, not angry, not legalistic, though he was startlingly biblical. By that time I had read a number of books about Christian pacifism, but none has really convinced me, none had moved me; in fact, some had repelled me. But when I read all of Muste’s essays, I couldn’t believe their effect on me. I had underlined sections on virtually every page with a heavy black pen. I read the entire book again, but this time I underlined in red, sometimes the same words as before, sometimes not. I would come back a few weeks later, sitting under the same tree in the park, and read the book a third, and later a fourth time, each time using different colors of ink. I became, as I have remained all my life, an unrepentant pacifist.

The second book that took me that year from the summer into the fall was a hardback from the library written by the well-known Catholic and antiwar radical, Daniel Berrigan. It turned out to be another book that I could not get enough of, and when the paperback version of it came out in late 1968 I bought and marked it up as thoroughly and as often as I had my book of Muste essays. While Berrigan was regularly in the news media as a result of his audacious and dramatic anti-war activities, he had also written a number of thoughtful activist-theology books. I read the ones I could get hold of, but the book that captured and changed me was They Call Us Dead Men: Reflections on Life and Conscience.

For me, the pull of the book was that it was about the relationship between lifestyle—not dramatic actions but lifestyle—and the communication of radical faith in society. Berrigan wrote about the urgency of a life of voluntary poverty modeled after Christ. “It remains true,” Berrigan wrote then, “that material well-being is always an ambiguous blessing for the Church. . .The affluent are generally inclined to resist social change with all the force at their command. No personal need presses on them to bring about change; and so long as their lives are stable and comfortable, conditions in society, even when most deplorable, remain for them largely an abstraction. If their hearts remain closed before the sufferings of others, they often see the lot of most men only as a personal threat to their well-being.” (18)

Of the renewal of the church, Berrigan wrote that “an understanding of the world under its sign of poverty is so important a question that to renew the sense of poverty within the church is almost equivalent to a renewal of its whole fabric of life.” (20) His words and ideas brought to the forefront of my consciousness notions that had only lurked until then in the back of my awareness.

Berrigan’s passionate book about renewal of the Church’s voice in the world. I read it and reread it, as I had Muste’s essays. Here was a Christian view of economics and lifestyle—of Christian communication as “lifestyle”—that, in my mind, dovetailed amazingly with the economics, politics and even the Marxist theory that I was exploring in my classes and seminars. Here was a radical challenge that was transforming my sense of Christian faith itself. My own faith was being radicalized, and I found myself being challenged to be a wholly different kind of Christian that I had been before—not so much a better one, but certainly a different one. Faith was not so much about other worldly things as it was about living in this world. It was not as much about what one believed as it was about how one lived. The shift for me was life-changing in about every conceivable way.

While I did not overtly realize it then or even for many years that followed, eventually I understood that it was Berrigan’s emphasis on a Christian lifestyle of poverty, undertaken, as he said, in solidarity with poverty-ridden peoples around the world, that imprinted a life-long pattern within me. Throughout my adult life, to the great dismay, even anger, of my wife and others around me, I refused to purchase property or a house of any kind of my own, even when we clearly could have done so, was because of the imprint of the Berrigan book upon me. As I write this I realize that only a year ago, at age 65, did I finally buy a small property, with a small house and a couple of other other buildings, in North Carolina.

While I can now make those clear connections in retrospect, in retrospect also I am trying hard not to second-guess myself for those far-back impulses and decisions. I did—honestly I thought at the time—determine to try to live out the “voluntary poverty” argued so passionately for by Berrigan. I did determine, as much as possible, to try to live without possessions, owning nothing that, in my mind, would send “wrong messages” or that would unduly align me with place or social class that I did not want to be associated with. Through many of those years, though, I remained unduly oblivious to the subtle effects of such a decision on my wife and son and others who would come into my life.

The third book that shaped life for me from my late 20s on—the book that, in many ways, pulled a lot of pieces together for me—was by the great Catholic scholar and mystic Thomas Merton. The book that came into my hands was titled, Faith and Violence: Christian Teaching and Christian Practice. Like both of the other books, this one too was a collection of his essays. I found this book in the university bookstore shortly after it appeared in 1968. Like the others, I read and re-read, marking it up multiple times, even wearing out one copy and buying another.

The thrust and power of the book is summed up in the heading of his first section of essays: “Toward a Theology of Resistance.” That word “resistance” was the key that made this book so different in many ways from the other two. As I reread sections of this book now, four decades later, they still ring with the emotional and radical resonance that they summoned up for me back then. This is the book that kicked my life off in a direction that would motivate me for all the decades to follow—it still motivates my fundamental outlook as well as the passions that I am still driven by.

The book was not just about the need for a full-fledged opposition to the war in Vietnam. Nor was it just about a lifestyle of identification with the oppressed of the world. It was those things, but it was primarily about an all-out resistance to the forces of institutional evil which were embodied, during that era at least, in the policies of the American government in the world, policies which, remarkably, still seem to motivate the core American ideology. The theme of Merton’s book, which once I kept taped on the top of my little study desk, is struck on the opening page of the opening chapter about his “theology of resistance”—with these words:

“The population of the affluent world is nourished on a steady diet of brutal mythology and hallucination, kept at a constant pitch of high tension by a life that is intrinsically violent in that it forces a large part of the population to submit to an existence which is humanly intolerable. Hence murder, mugging, rape, crime, corruption. But it must be remembered that the crime that breaks out of the ghetto is only the fruit of a greater and more pervasive violence: the injustice which forces people to live in the ghetto in the first place. The problem of violence, then, is not the problem of a few rioters and rebels, but the problem of a whole social structure that it outwardly ordered and respectable, but inwardly ridden by psychopathic obsessions and delusions.” (3)

Then, quoting Pope John XXIII’s Pacem in Terris a couple of paragraphs later, Merton says that “the problem of violence together must be traced to its root: not the small-time murderers but the massively organized bands of murderers whose operations are global.” (4) So his book, Merton says, “is concerned with the dignity and rights of man against the encroachments and brutality of massive power structures which threaten either to enslave him or destroy him, which exploiting him in their conflicts with one another.”

While times, dates, and global conflicts have shifted, Merton’s words still ring remarkable provocative and prophetic to me. I don’t know that I ever deliberately decided that I would take Merton’s words as the north star of my own outlook, my worldview—but as the words sank in over several readings and much meditation, and as they came to fit so easily with what I was studying in my graduate seminars, I certainly did do that. Over the next several years, I would continue to pick up this book to read his “Blessed Are the Meek” essay, his brilliant pieces on non-violent resistence (published ironically, about the time of Martin Luther King’s murder), on “Peace and Protest,” “An Enemy of the State,” “Religion and Race in the United States,” and his extraordinary essay, “The Hot Summer of Sixty-Seven.”

The theological world of my adulthood was largely created through my captivating digesting of Merton’s concluding theological essays: “Violence and the Death of God,” since J. J. Althizer’s book on the death of God came out in those years;” “Honest to God,” Merton’s deeply important meditation on the John A. T. Robinson’s book by that title, which also appeared about that time; “The Unbelief of Believers,” and “Apologies to an Unbeliever,” as well as his work on “Godless Christianity,” based on the then recently published writings of Dietrich Bonhoeffer.

What all of this meant, at a fairly basic level, was that just as I was being radicalized, both politically and economically, by my university studies, I was being just as radicalized, if not more so, by the other, less formal, studies under my tree in Hess Park. I was not actually losing my faith—or at least I adamantly did not think I was—but I was sure losing my religious innocence.

As an undergraduate at Lincoln Christian College, with a proud church heritage of what can be described as Enlightenment conservatism, I had been taught that it was alright to think for oneself, that there was no higher-up religious authorities to which one had to answer, and that I was free to use my own intellect to understand the Bible and my role in the congregational environment of which I was a part. I assumed and later treasured the independence of religious thought that such a position held out to me within the church I had grown up in. Now, I was using it—and doing so with a measure of confidence.

But there was another dimension of life that I put into operation then, one that would have significant long-range consequences for my future. Under the influence of the “resistance” writings of Merton I was also determined that I had no choice but to try—as a Christian in a particular, if rather small, national community of “Christian Church” Christians—to try to speak out as loudly and as forcefully within that “community” as I could. But, to do that I would have to make my voice heard among my own church’s informal, but easily identifiable, leaders.

With that goal, on a Saturday morning in the Spring of ’69 I went to an office machines store in Champaign where for $90 I purchased a used (but “in good shape”) mimeograph machine. It was way before computers and even a couple of years before public access to xerox machines. In fact, good high-grade mimeographs were the machines of choice for “running off” large numbers of copies of printed material. One typed on a stencil, with each typed key punching the shape of the letter through the famous blue stencil sheets. Since I am writing this to include my students who have no idea what I am talking about, the typed stencil was rolled onto the big round drum of the mimeograph machine. My machine was old so the back side of the drum was actually open, the place where thick ink was poured into it and then rubbed around the inside of the drum with a brush. It was messy—really messy—but it let me make a hundred of so mimeo copies with each stencil.

With my prized mimeograph machine, I gathered a hundred or so addresses of people throughout my church denomination, influential ministers, editors, Christian college presidents and professors, people whose names I knew and who I wanted to try to influence with my emerging Christian outlook and ideas. I was, after all, a fairly well trained and experienced editorial writer, so I knew how to craft a three page essay—an “editorial”—and make it really stick to the wall, so to speak. I would write about the controversial topics of the day: about the war and the need for vigorous protests against it, about Americanism and the evils of misguided patriotism; and about religious subjects, too, about dying churches and horrid preaching, and the failures of Christian lifestyle. The list of the pieces I wrote grew to be quite long, all copied on my mimeograph machine, folded, carefully addressed by hand and mailed.

While a few people responded with some glee about what I had written, the majority did not. Actually, I was deliberately sending the pieces to people that I knew would not see things as I did, to put it mildly. Overall, the reaction over the next couple of months to what I called my “open letters” was angry and stern. Some of the harshest of the responses went to my dad, then the Academic Dean at Lincoln Christian College, my undergraduate school. Dad was clearly embarrassed by what I was doing, though he never tried to discourage my “open letter” writing. I did, however, make a significant number of intense enemies with my letters, something that would haunt me in a big way over time. I should have expected it, of course, yet I was still naïve enough to think that it might be otherwise.

It was also during this time that I started to hunt for a teaching post with my soon-to-be-minted Ph.D. degree. My degree would be in communication—and, despite my quantum shift of mind and heart theologically I still held an intense hope that I would be able to find a good Christian college or seminary that would value my education and love to have me on its faculty. I prepared a good, solid resume and send out more than 50 copies of it, seeking that special religious environment that would want me to work on preaching and ministerial issues. I was ready.

Never mind that my resumes went out amidst the spate of critical “open letters,” or that during that last year my hair had grown long and I was actively involved in the antiwar movement—I was still a Christian at heart and I still wanted to connect my growing expertise in communication to the Church’s failures of communication, in both its life and in the pulpit. None of that drive in me had vanished or even weakened as a result of the changes that had gradually turned me into a very different person.

My resumes, with cover letters intact, went into the mail in late October of ’69. By mid-spring of ’70, I had not only not been turned down anywhere—I had not received a single reply or response from anywhere I had applied. There was just silence. I placed a couple of phone calls to older friends around the country who had reacted positively to my “open letters.” Only then, at their good-natured if candid prodding, did I realize that there would be nothing anywhere for me in that Christian “world.” I was, as one of them memorably put it to me over the phone, “radioactive.” Better move on to something else, he advised.

It was a bitter blow, actually, one that I should have seen coming but didn’t. Instinctively, I began quickly to think job, just get a job, just find a teaching job someplace. It is not , I reluctantly told myself, going to be anything like what you want or think you have prepared for—but you have to find work. I scoured the Gregory Hall bulletin boards, which was loaded with teaching job notices for the following year. The winter had been long and very cold, with a lot of snow. I found a California notice on the board and jotted down the information. I redid my resume package and letter, added a couple of letters that my profs had graciously and hurridly written, and fired it off to Cal State Northridge. By April I was invited to fly cross country for the first time in my life for an interview, and by May was answer came. I had the job, and, as it turned out, it was a good one.

Strangely, I also had a deep anger burning within me that would last for years and years. It was an anger with the Church and everything about it, with my church, with any Church. What I had gone through intellectually, emotionally, and even spiritually, I thought, the whole Church needed to go through. The world had changed, and the Church had to change with it—or else fall more out of step with everyone than it was. I actually resented my new job, as good as it was, but it was a resentment that I would have to figure out a way to live with—something that I knew, even then, would not be easy. The power of that anger was already kicking in.

9. Radicalization

2008-09-14T11:40:00.001-07:00

It took a couple of years for me to fully grasp just how thoroughly my mind, my worldview, my weltenschauung, changed during my three years in graduate school at the University of Illinois. I was not alone, of course. It was the nature of those years that, itself, changed countless thousands of us across the country. I need to tell the story of those three years, though—from late 1967 to late 1970—in two installments, since it had two distinct sides, one deeply intellectual and the other still compellingly religious. The two were related, of course, with each impacting the other every step of the way. Ironically, as important as my intellectual change and development were, the religious side, in countless ways, continued to be decisive, at least as far as my goals and ambitions were concerned. But nothing would happen as I had hoped it would.

The time frame around my life then is easy. As a commuter student, albeit a full-time one, I finished my master’s degree in journalism through 1967 and ’68 and started immediately, that summer, on my doctoral work, still working full-time and driving back and forth to Champaign-Urbana. In the summer of ’69, however, after my first year as a Ph.D. student, to my surprise I was invited to become a full-time Instructor in the School of Journalism; and despite how much I enjoyed the editorial work at Lindsay-Schaub, I jumped at the chance.

In August of ‘69 Linda, Joe and I moved, finally, to Champaign-Urbana for what would be the final year of my Ph.D. coursework. I would also teach a full load of undergraduate reporting and editing courses—still, amazingly, never having taken such a course in either of those areas myself. I got the assigned books, combined what was in them with what I knew from my Lindsay-Schaub experiences, and my teaching career was underway.

We rented a small second story apartment just to the west of the football stadium across the street from the block square Hess Park, still within walking distance of Gregory Hall, the communications building on campus. We didn’t have much and the money was thin, and I would work weekend nights on the editorial desk of the Champaign-Urbana Courier, the Lindsay-Schaub newspaper in Champaign. We would make it for a year and then try to figure out where to go from there.

When I was not teaching, I was in class; and what remarkable classes—seminars—they were. They were like nothing I had ever been part of before. I was working in mostly small groups led by a collection of the smartest, best educated, most critically thinking and acting professors I could imagine. Without exception, they were deeply engaged in contemporary issues of all kinds, ranging well beyond the communication boundaries of the college’s core discipline.

What I also became keenly aware of during my first year of work was that this “communications” area that I was entering was a unique hybrid of numerous traditional academic disciplines. Almost every faculty member had come out of one of those other disciplines, bringing a highly developed specialization to the development of this still relatively new field of work. For example, they came out of economics, political science, sociology, anthropology, literary scholarship, psychology and social psychology, computer science—and the list can go on. I felt very lucky to be there; it didn’t take long to discover why the Illinois’ College of Communications was ranked second in leading educational journals of the time in intellectual standing—second in the country to Columbia University.

It was special there because of the people, almost all of whom I remember clearly and cherish to this day. My detailed course notes from lectures and reading during those years are now worn and frayed, but they are still in the same file folders they were in when I first wrote them down. There is not a page in them that I have not drawn on many, many times either for my own lectures over the years or in writing articles or my books.

My adjunct area of study would be sociology, I decided early. Prof. Norman Denzin was young then, not much older than I. But he was already well-known as scholar in symbolic interactionist sociology and he taught it masterfully. His lectures whetted my appetite for more, and it would become one of the intellectual areas that I would live with, write about, and draw on for teaching throughout my career. Denzin had studied at Iowa, one of the two great centers for interactionist theory and research—the other was the University of Chicago—and he would himself become one of the major contributors to the literature of symbolic interactionism as his career progressed. The classic textbook of readings on the subject—Manis and Meltzer’s, Symbolic Interaction, with articles going back to the early 20th century, would continue to be re-issued, but the new editions would come to be supplemented with new research articles by only Norman Denzin.

Inspired, and even encouraged by Denzin, I would begin a lifelong program of reading in sociology, from the classics of the field to the voluminous literature in the sociology of knowledge and the sociology of religion. What I came to realize was that there was no way to become a so-called “communications” scholar without knowing as fully as possible its roots in, and development through, sociology.

Prof. James Carey, widely recognized as one of the most brilliant cultural thinkers and critics of the second half of the century, picked up in his seminars where Denzin left off. Carey, with his eclectic mind and his intense speaking style, was the finest lecturer I have ever heard. Intellectually and culturally, he was the Renaissance man of that faculty. Later in life he became Dean of the Communications faculty, before finally retiring to teach religion and communication at Columbia University. It was from Carey that I learned to read, understand, and deeply value the work of Kenneth Burke, the famous literary critic and communication philosopher. Inspired by Carey’s colorful and probling lectures on Burke, I read everything I could find by Burke—from Counter-Statement to Permanence and Change, to Rhetoric of Religion, to Philosophy of Literary Forms, to various collections of his seminal essays to his “Motives” trilogy of books.

While I became intrigued in Denzin’s classes with the social-psychological symbolic theories of George Herbert Mead, Robert Park, W. I. Thomas and later Herbert Blumer and Erving Goffman, it was in reading Burke and Burke’s protégé Hugh Dalziel Duncan that all of the pieces of the sociological symbolic perspective came together for me. As a part of the preliminary work for my doctoral dissertation, I even managed to put the theoretical ideas of Mead and Burke together in a unique way to create an “original” concept for communication theory, what I called the concept of the “hub symbol.”

I have written it out in several places, most fully and clearly as the basis for my 1998 book, Preaching and the Challenge of Pluralism. I am proud of the fact that my “hub symbol” theory, about which I have lectured for years, was picked up and used in 2005 as the basis for a book by Andrew Wisdom, a young Jesuit scholar from Aquinas Institute of Theology in St. Louis, a student of my friend Greg Heille. Wisdom’s book won the Catholic Book Association’s Best Liturgy Book award for that year. Read his book to see what he does with the notion of “hub symbols.”

At Illinois, I also studied under Thomas Guback, a brilliant young Marxist scholar. It was Guback who opened up the world of economics and political theory to me, the other side of what has dominated my intellectual life. For Guback, Marxism was not an ideology, not a heavy-handed set of ideas connected to Communism. For him, Marxist theory was a way to delve deeply and critically into the inner workings of American capitalism, into the relationships between capitalist ideology and the Western capitalist countries.

For him, Marxism did not have all of the right answers, but it was a powerful framework and methodology, a way to focus on the questions that were the most relevant, and then to uncover the workings by which those in power could get what they wanted from the system. Guback’s were the most eye-opening seminars of my entire graduate career.

Just as I had poured through all of Burke in those seminars with Carey, prompted by Guback, I also poured through the length and breadth of Karl Marx’s writings. I read The German Ideology, a short but rich book on the connection between economics and culture, and I was hooked. From there I thoroughly read all three volumes of the American edition of Capital (Das Capital), several volumes of Marx’s collected essays, including the collection on religion, and even read the large set of his theoretical papers and notes called the Grundrisse. While I remain aware, as Guback was quick to point out, that Marx missed the boat at several places in his analyses of capitalism, what still amazes is the degree to which he was absolutely dead on. It was startling, since it was not at all what I had expected.

But there was more than just Guback. In one of my last seminars, I still count myself fortunate to have studied with another great scholar, less a formal Marxist than Guback but one who turned Marxist concepts into widely-influential, and highly critical, studies of American influence in the world via mass communication. His name was Herbert I. Schiller. In his powerful lectures as well as his writings, Schiller shows how one uses critical theory to do specific kinds of research, how to gather information in order to demonstrate that Marx knew surprisingly well, more than a hundred years earlier, what he was talking about.

Schiller left Illinois for the University of California at San Diego that following year after I had his seminar. There he became celebrated as one of America’s great critical global scholars. His most famous books are Mass Communication and American Empire and The Mind Managers. Like several of the professors, including Carey, whom I salute in these paragraphs, Schiller has died within the past decade.

Not long after I finished graduate school I wrote and published a long and detailed analysis of Marxism, with particular attention to the role of religion, as Marx understood it, in capitalist society. Marx’s oft-quoted line about religion being the “opium of the people” does little more than deflect attention from his painfully insightful analysis of religion, even Christianity, in the capitalist world.

Even since then, too, in teaching my own senior and graduate seminars in communication theory—which I have done countless times, even to this past year—I have lectured on Marxism, explaining Marx’s still very useful insights into the continuing dynamics of how almost all media in capitalist countries, now including computers, are controlled and manipulated by a small number of very large private, profit-driven companies, owned by a handful of very wealthy individuals.

I was greatly affected as well by a seminar with one of the great lions of media critical theory from the first half of the twentieth century, Harry J. Skornia. His books focused on criticism of radio during the 1930s and 40s, and then on the control of television as it came to prominence during the late 40s and through the 1950s. From him I learned media history, which to this day I teach twice a year to freshmen and sophomore students—but I learned it not just as a recitation of names, dates, and events, but as a set of potent currents driven by political and economic forces. There were the details, of course, but the stories were all larger than the details. Strangely, looking back, I can see that in large part I was influenced to teach history by storytelling from the remarkable stories of old Professor Skornia, whose books I still enjoy reading.

I learned the great contours in the history of Western philosophy from Jay Jensen, the head of the Journalism program and the one who engineered my admission to the College in the first place. Jensen knew journalism, but he was a well-educated philosopher, and that was his first love. The small group of us in his seminar talked him out of a copy of his 600 page doctoral dissertation on journalism in the history of western Philosophy from the Greeks to the present. We divided it up and made copies of the entire thing for all of us. We pressed him to take us through it, long chapter at a time, which he did. I still have that dissertation, well-marked, neatly tied up in a worn but hefty brown accordion folder.

From Jensen, I—we—learned about the great sweep, of all things, of the Reformation, the Enlightenment, the Renaissance, about Romanticism and the revolutions of Marx, of Freud, of Darwin, and about the philosophical collapse of “modernism” and the rise of what he was already calling “postmodernism” in the Twentieth Century. I learned the ins and outs of Libertarian, or Liberal, thought, the philosophical system of Jefferson, the Declaration of Independence and the First Amendment.

I must also mention having studied with a professor named Martin Fishbein, a strange and brilliant scientist who taught a seminar on Attitude Change, a subject that was very difficult for me but that has been profoundly important to almost all of my teaching since then. He talked far over my head, a scientific language that I struggled to keep up with and learn, but eventually I did. The fact is that I only fully came to terms with it all during intense preparations for my doctoral prelim exams, when I read and re-read Fishbein’s own seminal essays.

He had been a student of Charles Osgood, the old developer of what is still popularly known in research circles as the “semantic differential” and Fishbein had already built his own reputation as a critic and reviser of Osgood’s differential. I did not realize until much later how much I learned from Fishbein, though now seldom a semester goes by that I do not either teach or use Fishbein’s remarkable AB semantic differential in class or my own work.

This reflection, and appreciation, of my three years in graduate school at the University of Illinois, has a point; an important one, really.

This three-year period was, as one may already gather, the major turning point in my life. I have left out of all this so far the events of 1967, most notably, the giant antiwar march in Washington DC (described in detail by Norman Mailer in The Armies of the Night), and the events of 1968, including the murders of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy, the dramatic and secret escalation of the war in Vietnam, and finally the bloody riots of the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. As all these events unfolded, university campuses across the country were beginning to boil, vigorously boil. The campuses were the hotbeds of growing resistance to the war. Every month during 1969 and into 1970, things grew progressively uglier; and the universities were the focus since that’s where the great majority of draft age men were.

By the time I left Lindsay-Schaub and moved Linda and Joe to Champaign-Urbana in the summer of ‘69, antiwar demonstrations had become weekly occurrences on campus at Illinois. The war and those who carried it out, the structure of a government on war footing, an administration that was mercilessly killing faraway Asians by the thousands with sophisticated weaponry, including napalm—these were the subtext of every class and every class and seminar on campus, including the ones that I participated in day after day.

The war was always in front of us, every night on TV, and anger, student anger, was turning into a palpable fury. These brilliant professors were agonizing over what to think and what to do, even as they tried with all of their might to stay as close to the “assigned subject” as possible. What literally happened—as those my age who were also in university grad schools can attest—is that the forces of intelligence in those seminars were turned increasingly toward the causes of war, THE war, and how informed citizens like us could and should use everything within us, legal or illegal, to bring the war to an end.

We became radicalized, plain and simple. I became radicalized. Profoundly so. I would have another set of influences pushing me in that same direction that I will talk about later. But to be where I was at that time, to study with the remarkable people that I studied with, to listen and to read and to learn, to be challenged about taking responsibility, meant that one was going to change. We became achingly anti-war, changing not just our outlooks, but our physical looks as well. We wanted to protest in every conceivable way that we could.

Nobody planned it, not even the professors. We were focusing our thinking and reading and learning around specific subjects, but those subjects inevitably had profound implications for battling against the forces of war and for finding some way, peaceful or not, for bringing peace here and in Southeast Asia.

I consciously consciously morphed into an intellectual radical, a critic of everything my country was doing and had done, at various times and in various place, for a lot of years. It was a gradual thing, though, remarkably, it all came to a head on April 4, 1970, near the end of my last full semester at Champaign-Urbana. It’s explosion came with the murders of the four students at Kent State University. That’s when all hell brought loose on the Illinois’ campus. I was one of dozens of those arrested then, actually arrested twice in that week. But as the summer of ’70 came on, things quieted down somewhat, and, even while taking my last, somewhat anticlimactic doctoral seminar, I was actively job hunting. It didn’t take long to locate one and by mid-summer I had flown to Los Angeles for an interview and been hired.

Life was about to change, big-time. I was ready to leave the Midwest, the Great Heartland, to see what the Land of Promise out west might hold. I was not the same person at the end of those three years at Illinois that I had been when I began. Not by a long shot. There was, though, another enormous part of those three years in Champaign-Urbana for me, which is the story, over the same time frame, that I must tell next. The religious story must still be told. And then we shall head for California.

8. The Newspaper Education

2008-08-27T19:06:00.000-07:00

Nothing has served me better throughout life—and in my teaching career—than my three years as an editorial writer with Lindsay-Schaub Newspapers in Decatur. I had two stints at it, the first one from early 1967 through the summer of 1969, and then another year from the spring of 1972 through the summer of 1973. During those first two years, those in the late 60s, I commuted a day or so a week to Champaign-Urbana going to graduate school, but the third year was unique, due both to my year-long assignment and to the strange circumstances that resulted in my return to Lindsay-Schaub.

Looking back, I realize that my editorial writing years at Lindsay-Schaub provided the crash “undergraduate” education than I had missed in my ministerial schooling. It was at Lindsay-Schaub that I not only learned to write, but more importantly it is where I was forced to think, really think. Think or die. So I learned, finally, to think. It was also where I first formed the cynical leanings that would grow into an alienating frustration and radicalism.

Lindsay-Schaub Newspapers was a uniquely Illinois institution, a family-owned organization, the largest newspaper company in the state outside of Chicago. Its six daily newspapers overlapped geographically with the state’s great public institutions of higher education at Champaign-Urbana, Carbondale and Edwardsville. In Springfield, the state capitol, forty miles from Decatur, Lindsay-Schaub Newspapers was well-known and highly respected. Both the Lindsay and the Schaub families were liberal to progressive in outlook and both families took the business of covering downstate Illinois very seriously. Their conception of finding and cultivating their best reporters into a central six to seven person editorial writing staff, with each member assigned to a statewide beat, was both efficient and highly creative.

One editorial writer from the early 1960s, one who preceded me on the staff by a couple of years, was a man named Ivan Doig who went on to become a celebrated American novelist, still writing to this day. Look him up on the internet. One of Doig’s first books after he left Lindsay-Schaub and finished graduate school was a splendid memoir titled, This House of Sky, published in 1980. In it, Doig writes of his experiences as a Lindsay-Schaub editorial writer, describing the company as a “newspaper chain [that] held a reputation for working its newcomers thoroughly but fairly; giving them a bit of leeway to show talent, then losing them to bigger publications.”

Doig says that Lindsay-Schaub management “saw itself in a sober, enlightened stance of responsibility—and after a few weeks I found that I could write four editorials a day, deft and unoffending skitters across Algeria-the Pentagon-civil rights-and-whatnot-other-issues of 1963 and early 1964, and still have time to do page layout, Sunday feature pieces, and study Dave Felts [then the editorial pages editor] for lessons in Downstate elegance.”

Even though I was appointed an editorial writer in ’67 by Felts’ successor, Ralph Johnson, the atmosphere of calm discipline and elegant creativity that Doig describes is exactly what I experienced on the editorial writing staff. Doig also points out in his memoir that while he was at Lindsay-Schaub “jobs came open to me in New York and Washington”—just as they did later for me—jobs, he says, that “I mulled briefly and would not take the step.” Doig had other ambitions, just as I did, but his gratitude toward and affection for Lindsay-Schaub mirrors my own.

Remarkably, just as Doig describes, from the 1950s through the 70s numerous Lindsay-Schaub editorial writers moved on after a couple of years to other highly successful journalism careers. I knew that even when I was there. In the mid-1950s Julius Duscha went from the Lindsay-Schaub editorial writing staff to become a prestigious Nieman Fellow in journalism at Harvard, after which he became an editorial writer for the Washington Post, later teaching at Stanford University. Doig stands out as one of those from the early 1960s. Paul Ingrassia, with Lindsay-Schaub from ’73 to ’76, the years immediately after I left, went from there to become head of the Wall Street Journal’s Detroit Bureau, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for his coverage of the General Motors labor wars. In the late 1970s, Mary Galligan moved from the Lindsay-Schaub editorial writing staff to become an editorial writer for the Chicago Sun-Times, among other notable things.

My closest friend and colleague during my Lindsay-Schaub years, John Zakarian, went from being both a Lindsay-Schaub editorial writer and editor of the editorial pages to being named a Harvard University Nieman Fellow. After that, he became an editorial writer for a number of years for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch before being appointed editor of the Hartford Courant, the largest newspaper in Connecticut.

Some of the Lindsay-Schaub editorial writers went on, as I did, to journalism teaching careers. Robert Reid, for example, who was first an editorial writer and then, by the time I arrived for my second stint in 1972 was editor of the editorial pages, left in 1979 to become a professor of journalism at the University of Illinois. And John Erickson, also an editorial writer during the early ‘70s, left after finishing his Ph.D. at Illinois to join the journalism faculty at the University of Iowa.

I say all this to indicate that despite my lack of journalism experience or education I found myself, virtually by accident, in a splendid place at Lindsay-Schaub, surrounding by smart, talented, rising journalism professionals—and I knew I would have to dig like crazy to make it there. It was in many ways, even from the perspective of these years, the time of my life. Not a day in my career in journalism or theological education have I not drawn directly on something gleaned from those editorial writing years.

My assignment in those first months of 1967 was to cover the Illinois Board of Higher Education which was based in Chicago. It was an important topic for our newspapers since we had the U of I at Urbana, SIU at Carbondale and SIU-Edwardsville at Edwardsville on the Illinois side of the Mississippi River, not far from St. Louis. Researching and writing about state higher education issues, I learned about complicated budgets and financial reports. I had to learn how to read those reports, try to make sense of them, and write about them. The board meetings were expansive and often hard to follow, so for the first time I was spending considerable time interviewing state officials, business leaders, and high ranking university administrators. Even though it did not come easy, I had to figure out how to read between the lines of what people said when they talked to news reporters. I was still learning the finer points of good interviewing.

By the summer of that year, though, my higher education beat with its monthly week-long trips to Chicago were turned over to my colleague Tom Gregory, and I was assigned to join Zakarian in covering the 1967 session of the Illinois General Assembly. It was my first immersion—my first brush ever, really—with politics. Again, I was thrown in head-first.

Zakarian and I had side by side desks in one corner of the state capitol press room and, daily, while he ran down and interviewed various lawmakers whose work we followed, I checked numerous state offices for press releases, bills being introduced, and generally keeping up with the progress of important pieces of legislation. Gradually, we both spent more and more time following the debates and votes on the House and Senate floors. That’s when I began to learn just how politics and government overlapped and how cynical the overlap was.

I learned “the system,” up-close, and in Illinois that system could be appallingly crooked. At one point, I got hold of some expense accounts for two legislators in our area and, just as we had been tipped off to, we had some real money shenanigans on our hands to analyze and write about. Scandals, big and little, seemed to be everywhere we turned, as political junkies know about Illinois. Remarkably, it still seems to be true in Illinois politics. The biggest scandal about that time in 1967 focused on Otto Kerner, whose second term as governor was nearing an end. He actually resigned before the term ended, but not long after that he was charged with taking bribes while governor, convicted, and sentenced to several years in federal prison. Strangely, I had what one of his staff members said was the last interview that Kerner gave with a reporter in his office before his term ended abruptly.

There were some noble souls as well in the state legislature, ones I really enjoyed getting to know, and ones from whom I learned a great deal. Most unforgettable, for me, was Edward Madigan from Lincoln, my own home town. Everyone knew Ed as a straight shooter. Like me, he was a graduate of Lincoln High School, a couple years older than I, but on a number of occasions he helped me with particularly complicated stories I was working on. He never wanted credit; we liked our common hometown bond. It was Edward Madigan who years later would be appointed U.S. Secretary of Agriculture by President Ronald Reagan.

The job covering the Illinois General Assembly, though, meant living four days a week in a Springfield hotel, working long days, and being away from Linda and our three-year-old son Joe, who remained in Decatur. It was the first full-scale challenge to our relatively new marriage, something that, because of the dazzle of my unusual work, I did not even realize until much later. She never complained about my being away, any more than she complained about all the moving around we had done. In retrospect, though, it was easy to see the damage between us that my absence created.

When the legislative session of 1967 ended, I began my effort to be admitted to the University of Illinois, commuting to school a day and a half or so a week, while trying to stay right on top of my editorial work. As I indicated in an earlier piece, despite a couple of last minute setbacks, I started working on my master’s degree. That would take a year, and then the following year after that, still with Lindsay-Schaub, I would begin course work on my doctorate in communications, a matter that I will describe later.

The year 1968 was an election year, and the entire Lindsay-Schaub editorial writing staff focused on some statewide aspect of election year politics. It was the year that the Democratic national convention was going to be in Mayor Richard Daley’s Chicago, so the election was bound to be a uniquely Illinois-grounded event. My most intriguing assignment that spring and early summer was to follow the campaigning of the aging United States Senator from Illinois Everett Dirkson, who, at 72, was running again for re-election. There was not much media interest in his campaign in Illinois, since he never had much of a challenge, having served in the Senate for almost thirty years.

For two weeks at one stretch, though, I whistle-stopped with him on his small airplane as it hopped from small city to small city through central and southern Illinois, the places where our papers were. For several of those days, I was the only reporter on the plane with him, and even though he had a cot in the back on which he napped a great deal, there was still plenty of time to just talk to him. He liked to talk about Washington, about life in the nation’s capitol and he liked to reflect on people he knew and things he had accomplished. He wanted to talk about the deaths of Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy that spring and early summer, but he mostly rambled and there were few coherent notes to take. He was tired, you could tell, and when he died a year later, it was not a surprise.

As a Lindsay-Schaub editorial writer, I was following the news closely, if in a somewhat detached way, probably for the first time in my life. I was deeply disturbed by the war in Vietnam, not yet a full-fledged anti-war radical, but clearly moving in that direction. I was horrified by the murder of King on April 4th and turned profoundly angry at the assassination of Kennedy on June 5th. I did my work as I was supposed to do, keeping things pretty much to myself. But something was shifting deep inside me—I knew that.

Then, to my surprise, I was assigned, along with two other editorial writers, to cover the Democratic Convention in Chicago for our papers. My Lindsay-Schaub “education” was about to go down a lot of new paths and turn in a lot of unexpected directions. I was assigned to try to keep track of the Illinois delegation to the convention, many of whom, I discovered, were frightened at what they were walking into in Chicago. I had followed carefully the preparations and the build-up for the convention, and we all knew that hell was threatening to break loose there. How bad it would be we didn’t know, but there were countless signs of the violence that was on the horizon.

Lyndon Johnson, not Richard Nixon, was now the villain of the war in Vietnam, and Johnson had announced that spring that he was not running for re-election. That was good, but, in Robert Kennedy’s absence, Hubert Humphrey, Johnson’s vice president, was going to Chicago as the nominee, and, unlike Kennedy, he was “Johnson’s man.” So the antiwar movement had Humphrey—along with thee entire convention—targeted as early as the spring. Antiwar leaders like David Dellinger, Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, Abby Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, we knew, had marshaled as many as a hundred different antiwar groups for the assault on Chicago in July.

Mayor Daly had lit the spark—which was still burning—during the riots that followed the King assassination in April when he gave his Chicago police a “shoot to kill” order against not just rioters but against all demonstrators who threatened violent activity. And in the weeks before the convention, we in the downstate press watched in horror and amazement as Daly continued to taunt the antiwar activists who now ere making preparations to lead an “assault” on Chicago.

The violence began on Sunday, August 25th, the day before the convention opened. We three from Lindsay-Schaub Newspapers arrived at our hotel that Sunday afternoon, and were stunned at the enormity of the crowds that were already milling through the streets. They were there—thousands upon thousands of demonstrators, as well as at the thousands of Chicago police, army troops, National Guard troops, and clearly marked federal agents from the FBI, CIA, and Secret Service. That night, and for the next two nights as the convention tried to get underway, there were sporadic clashes with angry, bottle-throwing antiwar demonstrators challenged by lines of police and clusters of army troops in fatigues.

Finally, on Wednesday night, the clashes grew into a kind of armed warfare, with tear gas clouds everywhere and police clubs flying. Demonstrators by the thousands tried to march up Michigan Avenue to the convention hall, threatening to try to get in. Hubert Humphrey, the nominee, was to speak. The police and troops had orders to do whatever was necessary to keep the demonstrations from getting anywhere near where the convention was going on. The violence that erupted continued most of the night with hundreds of demonstrators injured. It was what one newspaper called the Battle of Michigan Avenue.

Those of us who were covering the convention tried very hard to concentrate on what was going on inside the hall, but that became more and more difficult as the proceedings inside bogged down, particularly on Wednesday and into Thursday. The world outside the hall had become bloody. It had also become the “story” of the convention. Late that Wednesday night I wandered here and there amongst the throngs, horrified at what I watched, but trying to stay the newspaper reporter. In the early morning hours, the three of us from Lindsay-Schaub met in our hotel lobby to begin to compare experiences and stories, and figure out what we would write the next day for our downstate papers.

We all tried to write about what we had seen, both in the convention hall and in the streets outside. Not much of it made sense, though the story, in retrospect, did get told, not just in the Chicago papers and over television, but in our own little downstate news pages. The images, the horrific sights and nauseating sounds, the anger that I felt over the war in Vietnam as that week wore on, my building pull of empathy for the demonstrators during that once-in-a-lifetime week in Chicago in late August of 1968 have never fully away. My view of the world and everything in it was swiftly turning in a direction that I could never have anticipated.

That winter of ’68 and early ’69 brought a new assignment for me at Lindsay-Schaub, a welcome relief from what the summer had been. The new Governor, Richard Ogilvie, had appointed what was called a blue ribbon panel of state revenue experts to study the state’s financial situation. What was building in the legislature, amplified by the governor’s panel, was a move to enact, for virtually the first time, an Illinois state income tax. I was assigned to concentrate precisely on those revenue issues, covering the blue ribbon panel’s meetings, all of which would be in Chicago, and to travel to a half dozen Midwestern states to study their income tax programs.

Almost immediately, we—I—had trouble penetrating the secrecy that the chairman of the blue ribbon panel threw around his revenue committee; my bosses at Lindsay-Schaub, though, determined that we were going to try, since we editorialized strongly for what is called “open government.” We inadvertently found out that the blue ribbon panel was going to meet at a Chicago hotel and I was quickly dispatched to Chicago to cover the meeting, which we believed should have been open to the press. What the meeting started around a very large rectangle of tangles as a downtown Chicago hotel, I had quietly taken my seat near the back of the room. I was the only reporter in the room.

No sooner had he called things to order, though, than the chairman spotted me in the back and wanted to know who I was. When I said that I was with Lindsay-Schaub Newspapers he told he that I had to leave—it was a “closed” meeting. I replied that my papers believed that it was a governmental meeting, and that I intended to stay. After trying to harass me out of the meeting and a delay of more than an hour, the chairman, a retired Northwestern University finance professor named Simeon Leland, called in a group of Chicago police officers and had me picked up by four of them and bodily carried from the room. Outside, in the hallway, I sat for the day until the meeting broke up—one person inside the room quietly brought me a sandwich at noon—and, by early evening, because of a few members who shared our “journalistic” point of view, we got our story and I flew back to Decatur. Reporters were invited to all of the meetings after that.

With my new assignment, I had to immerse myself in taxes, tax policy, and how state legislatures come up with tax policies and implement them. I went to Des Moines to learn about Iowa’s income tax, to Jefferson City to see what I could find out about Missouri’s income tax, and to other states adjacent to Illinois. That spring I wrote a series of lengthy editorial page articles summing up how state income taxes were working in our neighboring states, how their tax policies were alike and how they differed. I was now Lindsay-Schaub’s go-to editorial guy for state income taxes, and as the Illinois General Assembly convened its 1969 session it appeared headed toward enactment of a new state income tax. I wrote numerous editorials about it, supported by research into every conceivable aspect of it that we could think of.

The vote on the passage of an income tax bill in both the Senate and the House came down to very last night of the ’69 session, even down to midnight before the legislative session, in legal parlance, had to “die.” In those last hours, the speeches rolled, and finally the vote; and Illinois had an income tax that Lindsay-Schaub Newspapers, more than any other papers in the state, had editorially advocated.

I was there and recorded the events of that strangely historic night. In an editorial page piece the following Sunday, July 6, 1969, I began my long reflective story like this:

“As I sat in the press gallery of the Illinois House last week listening to the final stages of the income tax debate, the words of a former Illinois legislator kept coming to mind. Perhaps slightly irreverent for that particular occasion, they went something like this: ‘The world will little note nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here.’

“Almost everyone sensed that this was the case. Usually glib legislators read nervously from yellow legal pads before casting their votes; reporters tried to scratch down as many speeches verbatim as possible, providing themselves with their own unique souvenir for the years ahead; spectators, who usually mill in and out of the galleries, occupied seats for hours on end.

“It was anything but an ordinary session. Fifty years from now when someone is asked, as I was recently, to analyze Illinois’ revenue structure and history, the legislative session of 1969 will be as much a pivotal point as I consider the 1931 legislative session, the only previous Illinois General Assembly to approve a state income tax. That tax was declared unconstitutional the following year.

“Two years ago, after my first legislative session, I wrote that my central impression was that rationality in the law-making process was fairly well buried beneath an avalanche of special interests and emotional oratory.

“That assessment, which is by no means a terribly unique one, remains unchanged. But it is against this background that the dramatic difference of this legislative session seems to be evident.

“Many of the legislators, faced with the critical income tax issue, were virtually forced to think about questions they had never considered before, questions that can be stated a dozen different ways, but boil down to a very simple one: Should they lead or follow?

“No legislator who stated that he had received hundreds of letters against the income tax was joking. Once, who was typical, said that is mail was running 1,000 to 1 against his voting for an income tax. The public pressure, as least as far as it was reflected in the mail of the legislators—and many of their letters contained a ‘We’ll get you if you vote for this’ tone—was strongly against the tax.”

But pass it they courageously did on that historic night.

I would work another year as a Lindsay-Schaub editorial writer, from mid 1971 through mid 1972, and for the entire year I was assigned to studying, reporting and developing a full-scale editorial policy, including writing editorials, about public utility regulation in Illinois—both for the state’s electric utilities and for Illinois Bell, the state’s telephone utility. Those are materials, for the most part, that I have saved, materials that to this day I use in countless ways in my communication policy lectures and writings.

Back then, communities up and down the state of Illinois faced enormous utility rate increases, and, as it had many times before, Lindsay-Schaub Newspapers devoted both resources and manpower to serious investigative and editorial leadership. It was a remarkable time and place in which to be a young journalist—a finally educated young journalist. I was 30 years old when I finally left Lindsay-Schaub for a teaching career.

7. The Hard Road to Grad School

2008-08-23T10:28:00.000-07:00

In my last year of college, after having read a number of books about the decline of the Protestant Church, I made a decision about my own future vis-à-vis the Church. I would not, as I had always planned to do, go straight into a seminary to prepare for what had already become my compelling ambition: to teach in a church-oriented college or seminary. Instead, I decided, I would go to graduate school and study communications and mass media. What the Church, and seminaries, truly needed, I had come to believe, was to become as effective as possible at communicating to themselves and their “messages” and to the world.

Protestant denominations and churches were in serious decline—there was no question about that. It was well documented. And what I had found in my reading was a general sense that the decline was not because of a failure of theology as such, as diverse as theologies were, but because of a failure of connection, of “relevance,” a failure in being able to relate to and touch people, a failure of communication, both in the pulpit and in the use of new media, with a rapidly changing world.

Even when many of my friends from college were going off to seminary, I would pass on it in favor of getting into a first-rate communications graduate program, get my doctorate, and take that kind of communicative expertise into the seminary world where Protestant preachers—or preachers even within the kinds of undergraduate schools I had attended—were educated. Preachers had to learn about communication and media, and develop real skills in those areas, I believed, if they were to lead their churches out of their downward slumps. That seemed a given to me. That’s what I was going to work on.

So, no sooner had Linda and I moved from Loami to Broadwell and I had both graduated from Lincoln Christian College and been ordained to the ministry at Lincoln Christian Church, my home church, than I applied for graduate school at the University of Illinois’ College of Communication. That was where I really wanted to go to grad school. I filled out all the forms, got all the necessary materials and letters together, and naively sent them off to Urbana-Champaign.

I quickly got a letter back from the graduate admissions office rejecting my application out of hand. The reason given was that I did not have a legitimate undergraduate degree, since my little religious school did not have the appropriate accreditation. I was, of course, disappointed and angry. I made a telephone call to the person whose name was on the letter. The conversation was friendly but firm. There was no way, I was told, that I could ever be admitted to graduate school at Illinois—at least not without having a communications-related undergraduate degree with good academic standing from a legitimate college, as he emphasized the latter words. When I had that, I should reapply.

I realized, given how my life had started, that that was an impossibility. Undergraduate school was already behind me. Then he said something that I would never get out of my mind. He said that the only way that someone without an accredited degree could ever be admitted to graduate school at the University of Illinois was to have such a strong professional reputation that the faculty would deem them ready for graduate status. But, he was quick to add, that was very rare—and, given my youth and background, it was simply out of the question in my case.

I did not know what to do. What I thought would be my goal was now simply gone. By this time the summer of ’64 was slipping away. Linda and I had a new baby, I was the minister of a small church on Route 66 between Lincoln and Springfield—and my hope of starting graduate school that Fall had evaporated. I was deeply discouraged. There did not seem to be much to work for beyond that.

Then, the first week of August that summer, a strange thing happened out of the blue. My dad liked to work at the Logan County Fair during his summers—the week long fair in Lincoln, just a few miles up 66 from Broadwell—and knowing we needed whatever extra money I could make, he got me an afternoon job taking tickets at the fair’s grandstand. About the third day that I was in my place taking tickets for people going into the harness races, a man that I knew only vaguely from around Lincoln came through and abruptly spoke to me.

“You’re Joe Webb, aren’t you?” I said that I was.

He said, “Do you know me? I’m Ken Goodrich, the editor of the Courier.” I nodded. “I’ve know you from the high school plays and your radio stuff,” he said. “Come and see me next week if you are interested in working at the Courier.” And with that he was gone. He had a distinctive shock of snow white hair and walked with a large bucking limp left behind by polio in his youth. He got along well, though, despite his awkwardness, and never used a cane.

I was startled and wondered if he was serious. The Courier was the daily newspaper in Lincoln. I knew the Courier. It was small paper, but it was my hometown paper and I knew exactly the corner of the downtown square where its elegant building had stood for years. It was all I could do to wait until the following Monday to call him. When I did, he invited me to come in for an interview. I had not done anything on the radio for more than two years, having quit in my sophomore year of college to devote more time to school and the youth ministry work in Moweaqua.

When I went to see Mr. Goodrich he put me at a large desk and asked me to write a couple of paragraphs from information he gave me. He liked what I did, even though he and I both knew that I had never had a journalism class in my life. Beyond some sports stories for the high school newspaper staff, I had really never written much of anything. On the spot, Mr. Goodrich hired me as a full-time reporter, said he didn’t care if I worked at the church on weekends, and offered to pay me $75 a week.

So, as September started, instead of being in graduate school as I had planned, I was the new staffer at the Lincoln Daily Courier. The newsroom had five large desks, two in the middle of the room that were pushed side by side together. Mr. Goodrich occupied one and I was given the one that abutted his. There was the sports editor’s desk along the wall to my left, occupied by Bill Martine, and in front of his was the photographer’s desk. To the front of us was a desk for the receptionist and one for Mabel, the society editor.

Mr. Goodrich, abrupt and gruff about everything he did and said, was an old-school journalist, not a good writer but a meticulous and demanding editor. He liked me and had decided to teach me how to be not just a reporter but, as he liked to put it, a journalist. And within those first couple of months, I knew that this was not only something I could do, but something that I liked doing very much. I liked preaching and my little church—but every morning when I went to work at the Courier, I could hear the words of that admissions person at the University of Illinois saying that if one were a first-rate professional that might, maybe, be grounds for admission to graduate school there.

All of a sudden, actually, I was on a mission. The door had been opened, and I began to work harder than I had ever worked in my life. Strangely, I knew that it was not my vision of someday teaching communications in a seminary that was changing. It was that I was driven by a desire to reach a level as a journalist that would get me some day into grad school at the University of Illinois, get my Ph.D. and make my way into church-related higher education. For whatever reason, I had been given an opening and I was determined to take advantage of it however I could.

A couple of months later, by early 1965, as I was turning 23, Mr. Goodrich wanted me in live in Lincoln to be more accessible and made arrangements for Linda and me and our new baby Joe to move to a small apartment above the back of the Courier building in downtown Lincoln. So I left the Broadwell church to really become a “full-time” reporter, though I was still being paid $75.00 a week. The intensity of the work, though, meant that I was picking things up about as fast as was possible. I made rounds at the Courthouse twice every day, gathering the news and writing it up. In the afternoons I worked on feature stories and profiles of local people, both of which I enjoyed very much. I liked my spot next to Ken Goodrich and my by-line became known around town.

After a year or so, I thought I was ready to try again on graduate school, but instead of deciding to try the University of Illinois, I though I might have a better shot at Southern Illinois University, down in Carbondale. And, most importantly, I knew that I might be able to get work, since I was now “experienced,” at the daily newspaper in Carbondale, the Southern Illinoisan. I learned that it was owned by a newspaper company in Decatur, just a half hour drive from Lincoln. The company was Lindsay-Schaub Newspapers and it owned several daily newspapers covering the state. If I could get on at the Carbondale paper, I thought, then I would be in a good position to go to grad school in communications at SIU.

I applied to Lindsay-Schaub in early 1966, asking for assignment at the Southern Illinoisan. I was interviewed in Decatur and sent to Carbondale to interview. But Howard Hay, the personnel manager in Decatur told me that if things did not go well in Carbondale to come back because he had some good openings right there in Decatur. I went to Carbondale, was interviewed and was flat-out rejected in no uncertain terms by the editor who ran the Southern Illinois. He was not impressed with either my education or my experience. It was back home to Lincoln and the Courier, pretty well crushed again.

I remembered, though, what Howard Hay had said, and I called and went to see him again. This time I was sent two floors down from his fourth floor office to the newsroom of the Decatur Herald. Before I left I was hired as a reporter for the Herald. I was moving to the city paper.

My resignation and two week notice of leaving the Courier and moving to the Herald in Decatur caught me off-guard. They were a disaster. Ken Goodrich was furious that after all he had done for me, giving me my start in journalism and “grooming me,” as he liked to say it, I was leaving. During my last two weeks, I continued my reporting duties as usual in Lincoln, but, even though I sat desk to desk beside him every day for those two weeks, he never spoke a single word to me. He wrote me a few notes, mostly short, hand-scrawled angry ones, but he never said a word, not even on the day I finished and we moved to an apartment in Decatur. It was one of the bitterest experiences I can remember from those years. I owned him everything in Lincoln as well as for what would become my future, but it ended as badly as anything could end.

Being a reporter for the Herald took me from small-town to city journalism. I was a general assignment reporter, working hard, learning more than I ever knew about reporting and writing, and then, three months after I started there, abruptly the paper’s well-known city hall reporter resigned to take a high paying hospital job. It was the paper’s plum reporting job. For reasons that I still do not fathom, even with a newsroom full of seasoned general assignment reporters, I was appointed to Norm Puhek’s city hall assignment. I found myself covering city council meetings, interviewing the mayor and city manager, investigating and writing about the city budget and taxes and so forth. For someone as inexperienced as I was, it was a crash course. I relished every minute of it.

But even that was not going to last very long.

The Decatur Herald newsroom was on the second floor of the four-story Lindsay-Schaub Newspaper building in downtown Decatur. Above the Herald, on the third floor were the offices of the six-member editorial writing staff not just for the Decatur Herald, but for all six of the company’s daily newspapers, scattered through the State. Two papers in Decatur, the Herald in the morning and the Review in the afternoon, the one in Carbondale, one in East St. Louis, one in Edwardsville and one in Champaign-Urbana, where the University of Illinois was. While I did not know any of the editorial writers on the third floor—that world seemed far removed from mine—I was aware that the short balding man who every afternoon picked up a package of mail from our second floor boxes was the company’s editor of all of the group’s editorial pages.

One day in late January of 1967, he appeared next to my typewriter on the second floor and introduced himself as Ralph Johnson, editor of the editorial pages. He asked if I could “come upstairs” with him. In his very nice cubicle on the third floor, he told me he had been following my work on the Herald, and liked it very much. And even though they had a rule about not appointing an editorial writer who did not have a master’s degree, he thought I could be the exception to the rule—would I be willing to move upstairs and become an editorial writer for the Linsay-Schaub group?

I was stunned, to say the least. I had been at the Herald for less than a year. The next week I moved from the second to the third floor, with my own private cubicle, one with windows looking down on Main Street through the city of Decatur. I would still be a “reporter” for part of the time, except that now I would cover statewide stories; in fact, my first assignment would be to cover higher education in the state of Illinois, which meant, for one thing, going to the state’s Board of Higher Education meetings once a month in Chicago. I would then be responsible for writing editorials about higher education, as well as other subjects of my own choosing.

It took me a while to realize it, but everything I wrote then was to be published not in one newspaper, but, under a Lindsay-Schaub editorial writer byline, in all six of the company’s newspapers. That meant that my byline and everything I did would be published on the editorial pages of the Champaign-Urbana Courier, one of two daily newspapers that was read across the sprawling campus of the University of Illinois. Oddly, it also meant that everything I wrote would also appear on the editorial pages of the Southern Illinoisan, in Carbondale, the paper whose editor a year and some earlier had flatly said that I was not a good enough reporter to be hired for his newspaper. Perversely, I will never forget the first time that the six editors of the company’s dailies had to come to Decatur for a meeting with us six editorial writers—and I got to sit across from that editor at the big conference table.

Strange, looking back, how that all would have made a wonderful life-long career, one that turned many of those early colleagues of mine into successful journalists and even influential editorial writers. Even though I relished the work and learned enormously from it—as I will discuss in my next installment—through it all I still kept my eye on my goal to getting into the University of Illinois’ College of Communications, doing as much graduate work as I could, and then trying to work my way into a church-related teaching career.

I have no idea, even after all these years, why that did not change with my early newspaper success, why I was not pulled, given the extraordinary responsibilities and opportunities I had, toward a full-fledged newspaper career. The opportunity for that was certainly there, but that just did not take hold within me. This does not mean that I did not enjoy newspaper work, particularly working for the editorial rather than the news pages—I did. But teaching seemed to be in my DNA in a way that I cannot explain. The challenge for me, the real challenge that I was anxious to take up, was in some way tied up with both the church and with higher education, with the academic world and not the newspaper world. And I still saw my newspaper work, challenging and rewarding though it was, as a way to get into graduate school.

After a year and a half as an editorial writer for Lindsay-Schaub, I thought it might be time—again—to try for admission to Illinois. It was mid-summer of 1967. I had been in the “working world,” away from school, for three years, having graduated from Lincoln in 1964.

I decided to try to be admitted by dealing first not with the admissions people but with the administrators of the College of Communications itself. I wrote to Dr. Jay Jensen, head of the Illinois’ journalism program. I told him who I was, sketched in as innocuous a way as possible my background educationally and in newspaper work, and asked if he would be interested in having me as a student. The response was immediate and overwhelmingly positive, not only from him but from a couple of other journalism school faculty members. They all, they said, knew my work well, having read it in the Courier for a year and half, and they would welcome me into the program. Bingo! Get all of the paperwork done, Dr. Jensen said, get the materials together, and they would love to see me in September.

I was excited as I did that. I talked with Ralph Johnson, my editorial boss at Lindsay-Schaub, who supported my desire to get a master’s degree and agreed to create a schedule for me that would let me commute from Decatur to Champaign-Urbana, an hour’s drive away, for a day or two a week. I could go to school and keep my editorial writing job.

Another odd thing, though, happened shortly after that. We were all at work in our cubicles one day in early August when a man who said he was with the Associated Press in New York appeared on our third floor. He wanted to see two of us, if he could, Coleman Mobley, my colleague who wrote about the arts for our editorial pages, and me. We want with him into our little conference room and closed the door. He said he kept track of journalists at places like ours, and, after following Coleman’s work and mine, he wanted to know if we would both move to New York to work at the AP headquarters. Coleman’s answer was immediate. He was from Washington DC, had his master’s from George Washington University, and was more than ready to head back east for the big time.

I was caught in an enormous dilemma. I said I would think about it, since I was now on the verge of entering the University of Illinois. A week later, I called the AP man and said it wasn’t something I could do. I had other plans and goals. Countless times over the years I have wondered what life would have been had I accepted that offer and moved my family to New York and a life in the big-time world of newspaper journalism there. A few weeks later, Coleman was gone, and even though I heard from him a few times in the months that followed, our paths never crossed again.

I was going to graduate school at the University of Illinois. But even in the last two weeks before I was to start commuting to Champaign-Urbana to work on my master’s degree, things came unraveled. When my application file and materials reached the admissions office of the university’s graduate school, I still had no properly accredited undergraduate degree. So the letter came a day later that I would not be admitted to graduate school. Here we would go again.

This time, though, I did not call someone at the graduate admissions office as I had done a few years earlier. Instead, I called Dr. Jensen in the College of Communications, explained what I had received, and told him that it looked like I would not be showing up for school, as I had hoped. He said he would get back to me. For the next full week, now only four days before school was to start, I heard nothing. Then came another letter, again from the graduate admissions office. I qualified for admission under the special “professional” exemptions available to individual graduate Colleges on campus. For one semester I would be on “probation” to ensure that my grades would be acceptable—but I was in. The following week, on Monday, I registered and began classes at the University of Illinois on the following day. I was still an editorial writer, as difficult as that was going to be, but I was a graduate student, too.

6. Love and the Global Crisis

2008-08-15T17:31:00.000-07:00

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.

5. Unplanned College Lessons

2008-08-10T17:41:00.000-07:00

College was much more a continuation of high school than I wish it had been. I was not only “staying in town” for college, in Lincoln, but I was living at home and I was literally continuing, without interruption, my work at the radio station. The biggest break I made that summer of 1960—ironically, the one that I thought would symbolize that I was now to be a hootin’ tootin’ “college man”—was a break that I regretted for several years after that.

I parted company, painfully, at least for me, with a high school girlfriend that I had grown very fond of over more than two years, someone who meant a great deal to me. She was smart and very attractive and funny and stunningly talented, and she seemed to like me a lot. What idiots we men can be! The only problem in my youthfully dumb way of looking at the world that summer was that she was still in high school for another year and I needed to get ready to meet the new college girls.

College for me was not a “liberal arts” education, something else I would come to regret in many ways in later years. That does not mean I did not get a decent education. For what it was, I think I did. But it was not, by any means, a normal education, not even a normal ministerial education. I have wondered over the years how life might have been different if I had attended a good traditional liberal arts institution. Money was a problem; we had relatively little, as I understood. My father was the Dean of the college in Lincoln, which meant that I could attend it tuition-free. From my point of view, though I was embarrassed that I could not go away to college, I really did not have a choice. A thousand times later in life I wished that I could have headed east to get a strong Ivy League style undergraduate education.

Yet my life was clearly formed by my unusual small town college experience, and in the long perspective I have learned to look back grateful at the unusual and unexpected things I did learn from my four years in that little religious school. As it turned out, I traded a broad-based liberal education for several indispensable orientations that have motivated almost everything I have done in life.

My four years at Lincoln Christian College in the early 1960s were a cross between a low level seminary education, minus the theology, and a “trade” school on how to function as a modest leader of a small church. For most Protestant denominations, the educational plan consisted of a four-year liberal arts undergraduate degree followed by three years of graduate seminary education. Those last three graduate years amounted to the “professional” clergy training, intended to prepare one to take up a position of leadership within the denominational or church structure. It my church, though, it was different.

Lincoln Christian College, as I indicated in my father’s story, emerged from Lincoln Bible Institute (LBI) to serve a significant number of loosely-related independent congregations, called simply “Christian Churches.” In the years before and during World War II countless Christian Churches throughout Illinois were dying out for lack of a minister, a leader. The churches in the small towns of the Midwest were simply disappearing. The idea to start a school to train young ministers to serve the dying churches was devised by Earl C. Hargrove, the minister of fairly large and strong Lincoln Christian Church. The school was launched in 1944.

In high school, as I have indicated, I, too, was drawn toward church ministry; so it turned out to be natural, in that sense, that I would attend the school in Lincoln to prepare for a leadership role in the Christian Church, as I knew it. Of course, I had no idea what lay ahead or how my plans for some leadership role in “my” church would unfold. But I liked my college. I was surrounded by some really bright kids who were as committed to church leadership futures as I was. What I found was not a church or Bible School atmosphere, but a real college atmosphere. And the fact was that Lincoln Christian College had, by that time, attracted some fairly impressive faculty members, a few, in fact, who had received advanced degrees from impressive seminaries.

What did I learn and what did I carry away with me from that college?—questions that I have asked myself time and again over the years as life kept taking unexpected twists and turns. I think, in retrospect, I can sum it all up by saying that I learned three overarching things, all of them somewhat unconventional and certainly unexpected.

First, I learned the Bible—I really learned it—and enough about the Bible, to become impressed with it, and to become a very good student of it. Schools like mine were often pejoratively referred to as “bible colleges,” which, realistically, they were, even though to this day I hate that designation. As a growing child, I had been to church camps and spent hours upon hours in Sunday School and so-called Vacation Bible Schools, so I knew a lot of the old Bible stories, both from the Old Testament and from the life of Jesus. But in college, we had to learn the “content” of the Bible—and in a way that even sophisticated seminarians (as I was later to discover) seldom know it. Over the years, that sense of “really learning what is in the Bible” has proved far more important in my work than I realized it would be at the time. I even harbor a pride in knowing the Bible, in knowing its stories, its language, its organization, and even its details.

In addition, I learned a great deal about the Bible, also far more than I realized I was picking up at the time. There were good courses in biblical backgrounds, in Greek, the language of the New Testament, and introductions to numerous specific books of the Bible. But the Christian Churches, while not fundamentalist are relatively conservative, so this “background” stuff was not generally pushed nearly as far as it could have been.

We were not really supposed to be exposed in college to the so-called a “higher criticisms” of Biblical study, meaning studies of the “problems” with biblical documents and texts. Those issues were considered much too “dangerous” by most at the college, including my father the Dean. As it turned out, though, I had a couple of young professors who, with a fresh theological Ph.D. from a Vanderbilt or some other great seminary, were more than willing to make us aware on the sly of what the biblical “critics” were saying about the Bible’s origins and controversies. It was then, for the first time, that I became very aware of just how intensely I was attracted to thurnings, to ideas, to situations, that seemed dangerous and potentially destructive. It was an awareness that would return often in my life. I was clearly drawn to living "on the edge," not physically but intellectually and situationally.

It was intriguing stuff, all under the table really, and while a couple of those young professors (as it turned out) did not last very long at Lincoln Christian College, their influence on some of us in the early 1960s was not insignificant. They pointed us directions for intriguing and provocative reading, and some of us were more than ready for the challenge to find out as much as we could about what was going on out there in the larger theological world. It was those “aside” matters, cloaked in their aura of danger, that ended up stoking an interest in the biblical studies that I would return to so intensely in my middle years. Strangely, they began with great fellows like Prof. Phillips back in those not-so-innocuous college days.

The second big thing I learned at that ministry college in the early ‘60s in Lincoln was that Protestant churches of all kinds, not just the group that I was involved in, were in trouble, deep trouble. I think the reading started in a church administration course, but I stumbled onto several books that had a profound effect on my awareness of the church, and awareness of the plight of almost all of the Protestant Church. For example, one of the books I devoured was The Comfortable Pew by Pierre Berton. It was not the only one, but these books together made a devastating case for the fact that Protestant mainline churches were dying, really disappearing. Large denominational church buildings, ornate buildings in the centers of great cities, buildings that once held hundreds of people were down to not more than a few dozen aging souls on a Sunday.

Part of it was people fleeing the cities for the suburbs. Part of it was that people had more crowded lives than in times past, so there was less time for church. Those weren’t it, though. Most of it was, as church scholarship of the 50s and 60s made crystal clear, that interesting, challenging, electrifying preaching of the past had itself disappeared. Vibrant preaching had died, the argument went; and where dynamic preaching disappeared, the churches shriveled up to nothing. The statistics were all there. To paraphrase the Elvis scholar, the people had left the building.

Apart from my classes, it was the first time I went hunting for books like those to read. The idea that I found heavily documented and discussed—that Protestant Churches had lost their “relevance,” their ability to “communicate.” The churches were empty shells, and preachers, what there were of them, had grown listless and passion-less. If once there had been fire in the pulpit, it had largely died out. Reading this material conjured up my recollections of and deep interest in having listened intently to my father’s magisterial preaching back in my youthful days in Mt. Pulaski. Because of what I remembered, I had grown to really like something about preaching, its elegance, its sense of power and control, the rapt ways in which people seemed to hang on it. In high school at Lincoln, I had heard the same thing again in the sermons of Leon Appel, that church’s remarkable preacher. And yet now in college I found myself reading about churches dying because of the decline of preaching. It was a powerful theme in the 1950s and early 60s, and, on my own, I was becoming immersed in it, digesting it, and thinking about its meaning for my own life.

There was also another dimension to it for me at the time. I realized that I was learning and thinking—for the first time—completely on my own, if I can say it that way. I had picked up something outside of a class that captured me, and I was, for the first time, reading intensely and thinking for myself just because I wanted to. That may sound strange, but it was a kind of new world at the time. I remember sitting in restaurants and reading and thinking about those books with a kind of exhilaration. I was caught by the idea that, in the larger church world “outside” of what I knew, preaching was not working—and classy public speaking in church was something that I really was developing an interest in. And I was finding the same general argument in book after book at that time. I found myself carrying books with me—just to read in them when I had a few minutes.

I was a “radio person,” a media person—that was already a part of my young identity. Now I was reading about communication “problems” in the outside Protestant churches. It was about that time, too, that I took my introductory class in preaching at Lincoln, a required homiletics course—taught by, of all people, my dad. I was motivated in a course like I had never been motivated before. This was my first big bite into the process of “communicating” in front of people in a professional way. Like my dad, I was quickly hooked on its elegance and even on its potential power.

That was the idea that would grow within me through the rest of my undergraduate classes at Lincoln. It was the idea that would change my whole outlook, not just about myself, but about what I truly wanted to do once I got ready to move out into the big wide world. I started for the first time not to think in terms of just “my own church,” my Christian Church, and being a “minister” in it.

About my junior year at Lincoln, though, I started to think about finding a way to move out into that larger Protestant Christian world; and about something other than being “just” a minister to a single congregation of people. It was a very important time in my life, probably the most significant, and jarring, period of time that I had experienced up until then. In a real sense, during those middle months of my four year college experience I was being attracted in a powerful way not to the ministry, but to the world of scholarship, the world of thinking and problem-solving. When I finished college, all of that would play out in a way that I could not in any way foresee at the time.

There is one other important strain to what I learned in college at Lincoln, something that only amplified all of this in what came afterward for me.

I learned about that church, that so-called Christian Church, which mother and dad had attached themselves to literally at the beginning of their marriage. Put another way, I learned the history of this “denomination” into which my father had become a minister and to which, particularly during my high school years, I had become powerfully attached to as well. That was a part of my education at Lincoln Christian College, and even though I did not fully appreciate it until a few years later—not until graduate school—the seeds of its importance in my life were planted there in college.

The oddly-named Christian Church, with some designation in front of those two words—as though all “churches” are not Christian Churches—came into existence during the opening years of the Nineteenth Century. Its origin is invariably credited to the work of a charismatic father and son team, Thomas and Alexander Campbell, who came as a family from Scotland to the United States between 1800 and 1810. Thomas and following him his son, Alexander, were both clergymen, first in the Presbyterian Church, into which Thomas had been ordained while in Scotland, and, after leaving it, in the Baptist Church.

Once on the American frontier, though, both father and son, being confident independent souls, were profoundly unhappy with and frustrated by the denominational hierarchy as well as many of the traditional Protestant doctrines prevalent in both denominations. The Campbells, along with others who became their allies here and there, imbibed deeply—and quickly—of the independent spirit of the frontier. More than that, both were profoundly influenced by the Jeffersonian democracy of the new nation; they believed that it should not only govern the life of the new political world but the life of the Church on the frontier as well. In short, they wanted a church more firmly planted in the spirit of the Enlightenment than in Calvinism or any other creedal system tied to a great thinker of the past.

In spirit, the Campbells were individualists and egalitarians who, even as clergy, valued their independence and believed that God had given them strong mental faculties that enabled them to think for themselves about religious matters, rather than take orders from any other human beings. They cherished the Bible as God’s ultimate statement for humankind, and argued for the right of every person to read and interpret it for himself or herself. Based on that, they believed that the Bible contained the plan and model for what God intended the Church to be and be like.

In good Enlightenment fashion, they argued that humans were primarily good and not evil, and that when every good person read the Bible intelligently and honestly a consensus about its meaning would emerge. It was John Locke’s empiricism at its best. So they contended on the frontier for an end to any authoritarianism as well as an end to even classic Christian creedal statements, and championed a “return” to the Bible alone as a pattern for polity and doctrine. They argued for a “restoration” of the primitive church of the New Testament alone—contending, ironically, that when every denomination joined in that, it would lead to a new “unity” of the Church. They were the forebears of contemporary ecumenical movements. Their movement then came to be called the Restoration Movement.

It was an absolutely intriguing idea, despite being highly utopian—the frontier spawned such utopianism—and deeply flawed in countless ways, as I would later believe and contend, despite my returning to its churches again and again. What I really learned from that uniquely American religious story, though, was the utter independence of spirit and thought that propelled it. Just as I had been impressed with the independence of American Mormons during the same first half of the Nineteenth Century when I encountered it in my family during high school, now I was doubly impressed with the utter independence and even courageous intellectualism of the tradition in which I now found myself. Whatever else the great souls like Thomas and Alexander Campbell were, they thought for themselves, believed in the value and goodness of their own intellects, took little if anything from anyone else, trusted their own minds and hearts, and acted, whatever the consequences, on what they came to reason through and conclude on their own.

These were my own spiritual and intellectual ancestors in the life of the Church as I was beginning to devote myself to it. I would later come to write critically of a lot of things about their assumptions, their ideas, and even their conclusions. But I could do so—as I would say openly—only because I was a committed part of what I was critically evaluating.

I liked the Christian Church, its origins and its spirit, a Church that was strikingly at odds with much American Protestantism, out of which it had come. It rejected infant baptism, but so did the Baptists, though its reasons for doing so were not the Baptist ones. It advocated a weekly Communion Service or Eucharist, believing that the biblical evidence was that the earlier New Testament churches practiced it. It rejected church organizations and affiliations, not finding evidence of them in the New Testament. It created an egalitarianism between lay people and clergy, creating a kind of congregational democracy. I liked these things. I liked my church’s rejection of Calvinism’s original sin, and its embrace of Enlightenment rationalism and intellectualism in its approach to the Bible, despite the conservatism with which it was usually tempered. I would rebel against that conservatism.

The bottom line of this, for me at least, was that I learned I was in a church tradition that, in its history, valued independent thinking and acting. As far as I was concerned as college came to an end, that was the great new blessing that I was inheriting. I could be my own thinker, my own voice. I could evaluate things and draw my own conclusions, and do with within the context of an Enlightenment church tradition that had valued and nourished that from its very beginning. It was a marvelous heritage.

I would be, I determined, a devoted Christian; and in the commencement address I was selected to give when I graduated, I tried to say that. I also tried to say that, as a member of this great Christian Church tradition, I would value my independence and my ability to think and speak with my own voice and no one else’s. Whether and how I would do that, I had no idea at that point.

4. Cheating High School

2008-08-05T17:56:00.000-07:00

I have attended two of my high school class reunions in recent years, the thirty-fifth anniversary of our graduation in 1995, and the forty-fifth in 2005. If all goes well and I should live long enough, I expect to attend our fiftieth in 2010. I enjoyed them both, though I had sworn for years that I would never attend one. The reason was not that I did not value my class or my classmates or that I did not like such celebrations. It was because of some profoundly deep-seated embarrassments that accompanied high school graduation for me, embarrassments that it took me years to overcome. Like so many things that affect our lives, the reasons for my embarrassment may seem trivial to others, but to me at the time (and for some years after) they were not trivial at all; in fact, they became those implicit but potent goads toward actions that otherwise I probably would not have taken.

Let me go back to the beginning of high school. To start with, I simply did not want my family to move from Mt. Pulaski to Lincoln, all of ten miles or so, in that summer of 1956. I had just graduated from elementary school and was ready to go with my friends to Mt. Pulaski High School. Lincoln High School was, to me, the school in the “city,” all of 25,000 people, but compared to the couple of thousand in Mt. Pulaski, we were the little town. I had never lived in a city, and, frankly, the idea of it was intimidating.

To make matters worse, in an odd way I already knew some of the students in Lincoln, and they were intimidating to me as well. For two years at Mt. Pulaski Elementary School I had played on the heavyweight basketball team. We were not bad, but a couple of times each year, notably at tournament time, we ended up playing against Lincoln Central, the big elementary school in Lincoln. They were always bigger and better than we were and both years that I was on our team, we came in second to them in the county tournament. I got to know those guys—well, not know them exactly, but know who they were. Lincoln Central had Brackney and Goebel and Hoeffert and I don’t remember who else. And while we were all the same age, they were big and good. And my idea of Lincoln, and Lincoln High School, revolved around my perception of them.

The fact is that all I had known in an extracurricular way at Mt. Pulaski Elementary was sports—basketball and track mainly. And since I had grown fairly rapidly, I did OK, at least through eighth grade. But the minute I entered high school, everyone was larger, taller, faster, more highly skilled, and who knows what else than I was. Still, as a freshman at Lincoln High School, I tried out for sports, since it was all I knew to do.

It was a very different world, though, as I expected it to be, than I had known in Mt Pulaski; and everywhere I turned I simply could not make the grade. I tried in basketball and then in track and even for a couple of weeks in baseball. But I was simply not athletic enough. But it was still the single biggest thing I had experienced up until then in life. My failure athletically contributed greatly to how lost I was at the old downtown high school those first two years. I just didn’t fit in anywhere; or so it seemed to me. I had never been as miserable as I was during those two years.

Then, between my sophomore and junior years, halfway through high school, things began to change. In retrospect, I am convinced it was caused by the Big Move. The whole high school moved from the dilapidated old downtown building out to the edge of town into a brand spanking new place; not just a new building but a whole new campus, with athletic fields and parking lots, with music rooms and even a beautiful new theatre. I had never seen anything like it in my life. And now, or at least I felt, we all—the Lincoln kids and even the few like me who were trying to become Lincoln kids—were all on the same footing. None of us knew our way around; and we would figure this new place out together, in a sense. I remember being very aware of that.

I had given up the idea of athletics of any kind as my freshman year came to a close the year before, and during my sophomore year, when I was fifteen, I landed a part-time job that was already starting to fill the void of “what could I do.” My dad told me it was time to get a job, and even though I tried to duck the idea, he kept on me about it. His idea, he made clear, was that I needed to get after school work and make my own spending money. It was then that he told me for the first time about how hard he had worked before and after school when he was in high school. He wasn’t trying for guilt, I don’t think, but it sure had that effect.

The last thing that I wanted to do, though, was bag groceries at Herb Alexander’s or Kroger’s, but beyond that I couldn’t think of much else I could do. I got an idea one afternoon, though, and, without telling anyone, I got on my bike after school and rode out to the edge of town, to the service road along Route 66. I headed for the Lincoln radio station, WPRC, located in a little stand-alone building with a modest tower next to the parking lot behind it. I went in. Two women sitting at desks looked up at me. Standing between their desks was an enormous man with a wrinkled face with a big shock of white hair; and, as it turned out, a very gruff voice.

“What do you want?” he barked at me.

“I would like to work at this radio station,” I said.

He laughed a moment, but then stopped and looked at me fairly seriously. He asked how I had gotten there—“did somebody bring you?”—he asked. No, I replied, I rode my bicycle. He thought for a moment, picked up some papers from a desk and told me to come with him. He pulled open a door and led me into a small hallway with two closed doors. “Take these papers and go in there,” he said, and he pointed to one of the doors. “Sit down and read them when I point to you.” He disappeared behind the other door. When I sat down behind the all the radio equipment in front of a microphone, he was now behind a window straight across from me in the next room. He fiddled with something and then pointed to me. I started to read in the best voice I could muster. After a bit, he waved me off and motioned to me to come out. I followed him back into the outer room where we had started.

Only then did he tell me who he was. He was Ray Knochel, the station’s owner. Then he asked if I could work before school and after school, whenever he needed me. The morning man, he said, who drove thirty miles in each day from Springfield, was Earle Layman, and for the first couple of weeks Layman would teach me the operation. After that, from six to eight in the morning I would be on my own. After school often became work time, too, as it turned out, and summers would be very close to a full-time job. I would come to love radio, and that radio station out on Route 66, and would keep my radio work for almost five full years, my last two and a half years of high school and another two and half years while I was in college—also in Lincoln.

As full as the radio work made my high school student life, it was not the only thing that would consume me in the last couple of years at Lincoln Community High School. In my junior year, having learned from radio that I really liked “performing,” I determined to try my hand at competitive public speaking and drama. Again, I found a niche that fit who I was, one that set me constantly in mind of my dad’s preaching “performances” in that elegant pulpit of his before a couple of hundred people at the Mt. Pulaski church. The pull of that was always at work in my mind during those years.

In my junior year, I would try out for plays and for the annual musicals. At one point early on, I asked the drama teacher when I tried out for a play what some good books would be for learning to act. And, with a flourish (as I recall) he had said “read Stanislavski,” though I am sure, looking back, that he was joking. I didn’t take it as a joke, but went to the library and found two books by Stanislavski and read them carefully, learning all about “method acting” and doing my level best to practice doing it.

It was not long after that that I landed the lead role of the Stage Manager in Thornton Wilder’s play, “Our Town.” Later, I would play the “brother” in Tennessee Williams’ “The Glass Menagerie;” I wanted the part of the “gentleman caller,” but Steve Miller got it. We would do a piece of Shakespeare for drama competition, and there would be a choice singing role in Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Pirates of Penzance.”

To complicate things during those last two years of high school, the activities of my church youth group, a large church with a large group of high schoolers, occupied more and more of my time, what there was of it. Ironically, many who had become my circle of high school friends were not the same ones that became important to me through the church. I was drawn to the church in ways that I did not fully appreciate until years later. For the first time in the church I had role models not too far removed from my own age, talented, exuberant youth ministers. Until then, I was only conscious of being attracted to the public life of my father; now, though, I was seeing a way to truly channel my interests in drama and music—including public speaking and radio—into something very specific ahead of me.

I realized about this time, during my junior year, that I didn’t miss athletics. I was finally busier than I had ever been. Through drama, through the plays, and even through the music department, I finally felt a part of Lincoln Community High School. It had taken a fairly long time to reach that point. But I no longer wished I was back in Mt. Pulaski, as I had those first two years and some. I realized that I was getting to do things that would not even have been possible in Mt. Pulaski.

It was sometime toward the end of my senior year, though, in a casual conversation with a teacher whom I had come to admire, that I realized what high school had become for me. I realized that very little of my high school time and energy had gone into academic or intellectual (not the word I would have used at the time) activities. In fact, it would have been shocking (as it still is to me now) to actually try to figure out how much honest-to-God studying I had done during my high school experience. The fact is that I had done very little. I was too busy with other things. I had consciously and deliberately stayed away from courses, apart from those that were required, that would have required serious study commitments to get through them. I had actually managed to get around almost all of the rigorous courses and demanding teachers.

I liked the so-called humanities courses, history, English, social studies, and, of course, the arts. But I got around the maths, the algebras, the sciences, things I should have stuck with but found too time-consuming and strenuous. I got through geometry, but during the very first algebra I exam, which I signed up for as a junior, I failed so miserably that Miss Joos agreed that I should drop the course, noting, though, with her firm red-ink pen, that the sketches of the classmates around me that I had drawn on the back of the exam sheet were “very promising” and I should probably drop algebra and take an art class.

In short, it began to dawn on me, even in that senior year but much more intensely later, that high school was not, for me, a compelling academic experience. If I am honest, it probably was not, for me, about academic growth or progress at all—at least not as it was intended to be. This is not to say I did not learn a lot along the way from a host of good teachers. I did become deeply interested in and well-introduced to history, music and drama, and to economics, the most difficult and rewarding subject that I stuck with. And I liked English grammar, composition, and literature, the subjects that challenged me the most as well as the ones that I most wanted to master in later years.

Still, high school for me turned out not to be about the courses I took or about my trying to challenge myself intellectually. Instead, high school for me became a time to work on developing an identity, not my mind. It was not about what I was going to know, but about who, or what, I was going to be.

Everything for me was about the activities that demanded my attention, my time, and my enthusiasm. I started the day at the radio station almost every single morning of those last two years of high school. I got up at four o’clock five days a week. My dad, who didn’t have to go to work on campus at Lincoln Christian College until after seven, also got up at four when I did, and while I got ready to go he went to the kitchen, turned on the lights, and cooked a good breakfast for himself and me; he knew that he could only insist that I eat breakfast if he did, too. It was scrambled eggs and toast one day, French toast another, pancakes another. For two solid years, he and I would talk, however briefly, as we ate that early-morning breakfast together. By my junior year when we lived across town from the radio station, I had my first car and would drive the ’54 Ford to the station at five, prepare and go on the air at six and would work until just before eight when Earle Laymen would arrive to take over. Then I would drive to school.

Many days, particularly as a week went on, I would be home from school by four thirty in the afternoon only to fall asleep involuntarily by six or seven o’clock to get up at four the next morning. Many evenings, particularly Fridays, when I wanted to go to a football or basketball game, it would not be possible. I would have fallen asleep before it was time to go.

I would make it to play or musical rehearsals, though—those were the great exceptions to my early evening nappings. I am convinced that my lifelong requirement of no more than five or so hours of sleep a night had its beginnings during those countless short nights of radio work and drama rehearsals. The weekends were devoted to church activities, not just Sundays, but even on most Saturdays at Lincoln Christian Church. There I clearly found something special, and few things—not even radio or school drama—would develop the hold over my attention and commitment that that church did. It was “home base” for my life during those high school years.

What I have laid the groundwork for here are the two embarrassments—in retrospect I still must call both of them that—that I would struggle with for several years into my adult life. The first was tied up with learning, right near the end of our senior year, that I had “won” the honor of being the “salutatorian” of our graduating class of almost 200. Ron Musick, clearly the purest intellect of our class, was the valedictorian, and I was “second,” salutatorian. As number one and number two academically in our class, we would be the speakers at our Commencement.

I was first startled, surprised. I not only had no idea that it was coming, but I had given no thought to even the idea of it. I thought that there had to be some mistake, and I told Mr. Hodges, the principle, so. He shrugged it off. Then I was disturbed. Really disturbed. And finally the embarrassment began setting in.

I only wanted to graduate. I had paid little attention, even, to what my grades were, to say nothing of my grade point average. I was not working on grades. I just wanted to do my best and get by as easily as possible, as strange as that sounds. What I knew very well, though, even then, was that there was no way whatever that I deserved to be the class salutatorian. I had not excelled academically. I had taken courses in which I had done OK, but not courses that were challenging or that required great efforts of study. I enjoyed the classes I took, but I had no sense of intellectual accomplishment. With good reason.

More than that, I was keenly aware that I was surrounded by a number of fellow students who had taken the truly demanding courses and courses of study, classmates who had worked long hours and excelled in their courses, students who clearly deserved to receive what I was being given.

I didn’t know who they were exactly. But I guessed that classmates like Tom Zimmerman and Gerry Dehner and George Janet and Bob Goebel, and, among the girls, Rhoda Holland and Sally Heinz and Jean Goldhammer and others—they had all amassed excellent academic records. And while, in a technical way my “grade point average” might have been higher, I had cheated high school, and, in a sense, cheated them—not cheated in high school, but cheated high school, something that I have mixed feelings about to this day. I had been there not to study hard and learn a lot, but, at least in those last two years, to try my wings in other ways. I was embarrassed at being given an academic honor that should, clearly, have gone to someone who deserved it a lot more than I did.

I loved the idea of getting to speak at graduation and I remember how hard I worked on my speech based on Rudyard Kipling’s poem, “If.” Speaking was what I loved to do—it had, in an oddly ironic way, been what my high school experience had been about. But it came about in what, to this day, causes me embarrassment, just as it kept me away for years from the high school classmates, some of whom I suspect knew very well that they deserved to be salutatorian far more than I did.

The second embarrassment of high school graduation is only tangentially related to that one. While I mean no disrespect to my parents, and particularly my father who at that time was Dean of Lincoln Christian College right there in Lincoln, I was faced with hearing the classmates that I respected most announce that after graduation they were going off to the University of Illinois or to Illinois State or Indiana State or Ball State or even Notre Dame, or, in a couple of cases, to Ivy League schools, prestigious places all. The list of my classmates’ colleges and universities was impressive.

I had decided to stay in Lincoln after high school and attend Lincoln Christian College, the local religious school. For better or worse, I found myself embarrassed by that, at least right there at graduation time. I did want to go off to a big-name university. But there was no money for that, and, despite the salutatorian designation, my overall academic record was neither broad enough nor strong enough to merit a good scholarship at a first-rate university. In an odd sort of way, though, I was going to attend the college I wanted to attend. I wanted to study for the ministry—the church had become central to my life.

Still, I was embarrassed. Looking back, I realize that I determined then that some day I would change that when I went to graduate school. I would go to a great university. I would prove myself an intellectual. I would overcome my embarrassment, but only in time.

3. Moving, Moving, Moving

2008-07-30T18:24:00.000-07:00

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.

2. A Haunting Religious Legacy

2008-07-30T18:09:00.000-07:00

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.

1. Why a Memoir?

2008-07-30T18:01:00.000-07:00

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.