My childhood was probably different than most any other kid because when you were the preacher’s kid everybody was watching you no matter what you did. Good, bad or indifferent, they would know.

It had some perks too. I mean, you were treated sort of special at times. At times I didn’t care for it. At Christmas you always got the largest part in the Christmas play because they figured you already knew it and I always hated it because you had to memorize all these verses and it wasn’t my thing.

I would try to get Dad to get me out of it and he would say, “You gotta do this,” and somehow we’d get through it. I mean, how many kids get to use “a church” as a playhouse, kind of? Not that I – like I learned to play the organ by ear because the organ was there and I would play by ear and play on it and stuff. Not pound or anything, just play.

Ringing the bell, I always thought that was the greatest thing because they had these big bells with ropes and if you’re small you could ride the rope. So if you had to toll the bell when somebody died and there wasn’t anybody around I would get to toll the bell. I was sad that somebody died, but if they happened to be 87 years old, that was almost like going to an amusement park riding that rope! (Laughter) I mean, it’s kinda silly but….Like midnight on New Year’s Eve they would ring it and things like that. So, if there wasn’t somebody to ring the bell you got to do that.

You also had to, in the little churches to make sure - you were going to have to help clean and sweep. You didn’t always get the good jobs either. I mean, there was always the garbage jobs because the little churches didn’t have custodians and stuff like that.

The minister was almost expected to do almost everything. Dad didn’t have a secretary for about the first four churches and so therefore he printed his own bulletins and newsletters and stuff, so you could figure that on Friday and Saturday you were going to be folding bulletins in half and putting newsletters together and things like that.

But, the first parish – well, the first place we went was in Northern Michigan. Like I said, he had three churches. Very desolate area. One TV channel, so you watched TV or you didn’t! You had no options! There were no arguments.
Didn’t matter! That was it! And if it went out you watched nothing. Like I said, we were 50 miles from any sort of town with a doctor or a hospital.

Once in a while the group would get together…say the men of the church would get together. One church had a cemetery behind it so that had to be kept up. Sometimes on a Saturday afternoon the men would get together and say, “Okay, let’s mow the lawns and clean everything up and make it look nice,” and that sort of thing.

There was one time a guy was mowing and he ran over a piece of wire and the wire shot straight into his arm. It was kind of like, what do we do now? I mean, obviously they had to get him some place but there weren’t any ambulances. So, Dad loaded him in the car.

There weren’t any medical supplies or anything like that. Mom had – I don’t’ remember for sure. I’m going to say it was blackberry brandy, on hand, and gave the guy blackberry brandy. Yeah, I think it was brandy, to get to somewhere, to help the pain. The first place Dad stopped was a veterinarian and he could look at it and say the guy, you know, was doing okay and that sort of thing and then got him on to the hospital. Ironically, they never could get the wire out and to the best of my knowledge he’s still got it in him. They decided that they would do more damage and it seemed to heal. I don’t know.