Happy Birthday, Carol

Happy 82nd birthday to my sister Carol who died in 1996 at 58. We still miss you. Photo is 1989 with her daughter and son. Last year we got to meet her great granddaughter who visited us at Lakeside with her grandparents. What a treat. Carol was the only one of my family with any fashion flair, and loved beautiful clothes, bright colors, stylish purses, shoes and jewelry. As an enterprising teen, she sold Avon products, and was one of the "number please" voices back when our home phone was 59-L. Although her primary career was in nursing with a degree from Goshen College, she did own a dress shop in Bradenton, FL, for large size women.
 
Never a snowflake, after high school graduation in 1955 Carol went into Brethren Volunteer Service and did incredible tasks for one so young, like doing church plant surveys in Denver, helping with clean up after flooding in Pennsylvania, teaching Sunday School and leading worship in Kentucky where she road horseback to services because there were no passable roads, and being a "healthy volunteer patient" aka guinea pig at NIH in Maryland. I wonder if she is one of the results cited in this article.  https://clinicalcenter.nih.gov/about/news/newsletter/2007/oct07/newsletter.html  
She was a survivor of childhood bulbar polio in 1949 and struggled with many health issues, but cared for many as a home health nurse in her last years.

Happy Birthday, Carol

Happy 81st birthday to my sister Carol who died in 1996 at 58. We still miss you. Photo is 1989 with her daughter and son. Recently we got to meet her great granddaughter who visited us at Lakeside with her grandparents. What a treat. Carol was the only one of my family with any fashion flair, and loved beautiful clothes, bright colors, stylish purses, shoes and jewelry. As an enterprising teen, she sold Avon products. Although her primary career was in nursing with a degree from Goshen College, she did own a dress shop in Bradenton, FL.

 

Never a snowflake, after high school graduation in 1955 Carol went into Brethren Volunteer Service and did incredible tasks for one so young, like doing church plant surveys in Denver, helping with clean up after flooding in Pennsylvania, teaching Sunday School and leading worship in Kentucky where she road horseback to services because there were no passable roads, and being a "healthy volunteer patient" aka guinea pig at NIH in Maryland. I wonder if she is one of the results cited in this article.  https://clinicalcenter.nih.gov/about/news/newsletter/2007/oct07/newsletter.html  

She was a survivor of childhood bulbar polio and struggled with many health issues, but cared for many as a home health nurse in her last years.

Leaning on the Everlasting Arms

I wrote this blog last summer, but I published it in my other, other blog, and don’t think I put it in this one—at least I can’t find it.  Hymns bring back many memories.  This one reminds me of my sister, Carol.
We sang that old hymn at the dockside service at Lakeside last Sunday, Sept. 4.  Published in 1887, it tells of the assurance of God's steadfast care and guidance in tough times, and offers the peace of a relationship with him.  I grew up in the Church of the Brethren where I don't recall we sang anything that had a beat--and then in 1974 became a Lutheran and they missed out on those twangy camp songs too, being mostly ethnic Scandinavians (in our synod).  The first time I heard it was in Flat Creek, Kentucky in 1956 where my sister Carol was a volunteer church worker through Brethren Volunteer Service.  Because she was only 19 at the time, and I was her "little" sister, I was stunned at the level of spiritual and social responsibility she had.  Like riding horseback into the mountains to provide Sunday school in areas that had no passable roads; working in the garden and taking care of chickens (and plucking them) for food for the staff (I think there were 5 people living in a little house); helping the local women with sewing and. . . leading hymns like this one.  In that area of the country it was sung like a dirge and a capella--not peppy and clappy the way we did it at dockside with an electronic organ. Carol went to be with the Lord in 1996, but every time I hear "Leaning, leaning, safe and secure from all alarms; leaning, leaning, leaning on the everlasting arms," I think of that amazing, fearless teen-ager.  Now I keep track of her 5 grandchildren (4 teens) on Facebook, Will, Jenny, Rachel, Catie and Chris.

Carol's BVS unit 1955. Wearing white blouse, looking between two women in the second row. She also helped flood victims in Pennsylvania, canvassed a neighborhood in Denver for a church plant, and was a "guinea pig" for the NIH. In 1957 she entered Goshen College in Indiana where she got her RN

A Note from my brother-in-law:

In 1940, my parents sent me to work on a farm of a distant relative-by-marriage. At that time we lived in uptown Mnhattan, New York but the dream was to leave the city at some point and start a chicken farm. I ended up near a little village on the Eastern Shore of Maryland called Trappe and worked hard and long for Graham Price and his wife Adeline and two daughters that whole summer. I didn't learn much about chickens but Graham had 7 acres of tomatoes and I learned the rigors of that crop many times over.
Graham belonged to a group I had never heard of called Pilgrim Holiness; we went to church every Sunday morning and every Wednesday evening at a little town called Oxford, which was almost on the Chesapeake Bay.

One Sunday morning they sang a hymn that I - a baptized and confirmed United Lutheran Church in America boy - had never heard called What a Fellowship. And when they would sing the refrain: Leaning, leaning, safe and secure from all alarms, the ladies would lift their arms and swing them back and forth in the air. I remember I couldn't wait to get back to the farm that day to write my mom and dad and tell them of the experience.

And yet, now in the Brethren Hymnal Supplement, hymn number 1081 is What a Fellowship and it is a hymn we sing frequently. In fact, I have arranged it as an anthem for soprano/alto chorus with optional congregational participation. And even more interesting is the fact that the text was by Anthony Johnson Showalter, a very distant relative of Vernon (and Jean) Showalter who go to the Mount Morris Church of the Brethren.

Everything comes around.
Nel

Monday Memories

Brethren Volunteer Service, pt.1
Brethren Volunteer Service was started in 1948 training young people and adults in groups to help in a variety of community projects in many countries. Service might be in a hospital, a small struggling church, Appalachia, a migrant camp, blighted urban area, nursing home, or school. Both my sisters had served, so I signed up for a summer unit in 1957 and left for California right after high school graduation, traveling to Fresno by myself on the Greyhound Bus. This memory is not about all the strange people I met on the bus, but rather I want to post some photos because my album has fallen apart after almost 50 years. I've adjusted the posting time so you can scroll down, instead of up. There are 3 parts, otherwise it would take too long to load.

I was assigned to a community center that served Black agricultural workers. The community looked rural and had tidy little houses; the house in which the volunteers lived looked much the same as the rest of the community. We had 4 rooms, no air conditioning. The director of the project and his family lived next door in a slightly better house. All the land for the center and the two houses had been donated by a Hoff family who were members of the Church of the Brethren.
121 West North Ave., Fresno 6, California, front of the volunteers' residence
Back of our house on W. North Ave. There was a large garden, but I don't think we took care of it. Laundry is on the line--wringer washer, no dryer. Addition to the back was the laundry room and tool shed. Addition on the side was two bedrooms, one for four women, one for four or five men. With 9 people living in a tiny house we had to be scrupulously neat; beds made up first thing; dishes washed and put away after meals; no clutter at all.
Our BVS group, but I don't remember all the names. Judy Haldeman, Imogene Traughber, in front, Rufus Wagner, Terry Thoreen, back. The other three guys are Don Jordan, next a relative of the director, Clare Stein (can't remember his name) and possibly Tim Guest. We had a "housemother" a few years older than me whose name was Barbara, but she isn't in the photo. From the clothing, we must have been at church. I was the photographer using my little Brownie Hawkeye. Only 3 of us were summer workers--the rest had been through regular training in Maryland.

Check the two previous posts for pt. 2 and pt. 3, rather than scrolling up.

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Brethren Volunteer Service
Church of the Brethren
Fresno, California
community centers
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Monday Memories

Brethren Volunteer Service, pt.2
To make this load faster, I'm dividing the photos into 3 entries. Go up one for the first part.

Generally, the girls did all the shopping, cooking, cleaning and laundry for the whole unit; the guys took care of the grounds, maintenance and vehicles. We all had playground duty; taught classes to the children; did surveys in the community about needs. On Friday nights there were movies for the community, and candy was sold at the center. There were sports teams coached by our volunteer staff, and the children were in leagues and transported around the area to play. Also ping pong tournaments. The BVSers worked hard and played even harder. We took some interesting trips to the California parks and mountains, agricultural areas, miniature golf, and to Sacramento in the center's van. For someone from a tiny town in Illinois, there was a lot to see and do. But I was only 17 and had never been away from home except for camp; so I think I would have been more useful had I been older.

Making ice cream; Barbara standing on the pail and Rufus churning. I believe this block building was built by the BVS-ers who came before us by a year or two.
Enjoying the ice cream. This looks like we were in the director's house and one of his small children is in the foreground. I think I see a Bible or two, so maybe we had a lesson before the treat?
We didn't have a TV, but we had a record player and we sang. The fan in the living room window was connected to a hose which helped cool the house with running water.
My Bible class. We had made potato head puppets (I learned this from my mother) and put on a play we wrote. I believe they performed for the community and parents, because usually they wore play clothes when they came to the community center (built by the volunteers).

Brethren Volunteer Service, Church of the Brethren, Fresno, California, community centers,
volunteerism, Monday Memories

Monday Memories

Brethren Volunteer Service, pt. 3
Here's a few more photos. Scroll up for pt. 2 and pt. 1 and the explanation of what you're seeing. I reversed them.

The kitchen was really pretty nice, and we had great meals--many of the Cal-Mex type things I'd never had before. Lots of beans, rice and onions, smothered in cheese, seconds on bread and milk. We had one tiny bathroom off the kitchen and 9 people living in the house. We must have had assigned times. I think the women got up first. Someone would turn on Mahalia Jackson gospel and blast everyone out of bed in the a.m.

I doubt that we could all sit down at the same time in the living room, and I'm certainly taking up more than my share here, so perhaps some were out this evening at a ball game with the kids.

It must have been my day to cook because I have on an apron--the same one Genie is wearing in the above photo. I'm showing off my new shoes bought in Fresno. Our pay was $7.50/month (or was it a week?), which actually goes pretty far if your board and room is taken care of (or it did 50 years ago), so I probably saved mine and bought new high heels. And yes, that is a sun tan because we were outside much of the day.

Please check out pt. 1 (above) for the beginning of the story.

Brethren Volunteer Service
Church of the Brethren
Fresno, California
community centers
volunteerism
Monday Memories

914 Leaning on the Everlasting Arms

This hymn in 4/4 time with 4 flats is almost 120 years old. Written by Elisha A. Hoffman based on a passage in Deuteronomy 33:27, it can be slow and nasal, or toe tapping, hand clapping and sprightly, “what a blessedness, what a peace is mine, leaning on the everlasting arms.” I came across it today because it was the March 16 selection in the book “Amazing Grace; 366 Inspiring Hymn Stories for Daily Devotions” (Kregel, 1990).

I don’t recall ever hearing this hymn in my home church in Mt. Morris, Illinois--we rarely sang anything with a strong beat, a waltz tune, or revivalist vigor--and you could almost do a slow jitterbug to this one. So I will forever associate it with a tiny church in Flat Creek, Kentucky, (near Manchester) where my sister Carol served with Brethren Volunteer Service (BVS) in the summer of 1956. The only service I attended in the little church included this hymn, “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms,” but they sang it like a mournful dirge. The small, poor congregation, who leaned not only on God but each other, the nasal harmony, and the heat of that summer have always stayed with me reminding me of Carol when I hear it.

The Church of the Brethren is a small, Anabaptist denomination founded in 1708 in Germany, and is often linked with the Quakers and Mennonites because of its pacifism and service. After WWII the church started a volunteer service program in 1948 with one or two year service opportunities preceded by a training program. Initially, it attracted mostly young people, but in the 60s began drawing more older and retired adults. Click here for history and service information about BVS.

My parents, brother and I had traveled to Flat Creek to visit Carol in the mountains where she lived with another volunteer and a “house mother” who sort of acted as a chaperone and helped with the domestic duties and a garden while the young women taught Sunday School and Bible School, provided recreational programs for the children and programming for adults. The mission also had a minister, but I’m not sure where he lived or if he may have served several churches. We went in July, so we may have driven down to be with her on her birthday.

I don’t know what the area looks like today, but getting there by automobile was quite a challenge in 1956. The unpaved roads seemed to be teetering on the edge, and if you met someone coming the other way. . . well, someone would have to give. The houses on the hillsides seemed to be built on stilts and cars and trucks on blocks shared the yards with chickens and dogs. To get to one of the little mission churches they served (may have been a home rather than a church building), Carol rode there on horseback. Since she’d never shown any interest in my horse, I found the sight of my older sister riding bareback almost more amazing than anything else I saw that week. I also encountered young girls my age who were already married, and some with babies--I was 15. We grew up in rural Illinois, but rural Kentucky in the mountains in the 1950s could have been another country--even the language didn’t sound like anything I’d heard.

We talk about kids growing up fast today because of the media influences, but after Mother's death in 2000 I brought home and re-read her letters to my parents she’d written that year and was just stunned by what the church expected of those very young men and women, many away from home for the first time, and most without even college or work experience. Today’s young adults of that age are in a time warp trapped in fantasy, make-believe and gaming compared to those teens of the mid-50s who were experiencing real life.

Training Unit photo. BVS unit 28

The training period was 8 or 9 weeks in New Windsor, Maryland, on the site of a former Brethren college. While she was still in her training, there was terrible flooding in Pennsylvania, and these kids were pulled from classes to go out and help clean up the disaster, which included finding a dead baby (mentioned in one of her letters). She served as a community surveyor in a suburb of Denver while living in the basement of the pastor’s house (and I believe babysitting was part of that job, too). She was also a guinea pig at the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland before being sent to Kentucky. After Carol’s year in BVS she enrolled at Goshen College in Indiana and became an RN. Some years later she earned a master’s degree. She died of a diabetic stroke in 1996.

Looking back at her life that year and her subsequent years of ill health, I think Carol truly must have been “leaning on the everlasting arms.”