10. The Mimeograph Machine

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

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

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

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

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.