From PK to Preacher

For several years I have thought that I would write down some of the interesting experiences that happened to me as a minister.

I have also been plagued with the problem of what to say to groups that ask me to speak to them from a more entertaining perspective than a sermon.  I am not a person to remember good jokes, not do I have a good wit, nor am I really interested in entertaining people.

And yet, even in my preparation of a sermon, I realize that if I am going to be heard, I must speak interestingly.  Many of the illustrations that I use in my sermons come from my personal life.  I have found that people are very interested in knowing and finding out more about me; my failures, my doubts, my frustration, my temptations, my joys, my trials, my sorrows and my hopes.

I was born on November 5, 1933 in Bolivar, Missouri.  My older brother, John, who was about 5 1/2 years older than me told my parents that he wanted a baby sister, and if a baby brother came, he was going to send him back.  When John was told that he had a baby brother and was allowed to see him, he said, “Mommy, I didn’t know he’d be so cute.”

While I was at Bolivar, I remember being very sick.  My mother told me that I had double pneumonia and when the doctor came to see me and checked me over, he told my mother that I would be gone by morning.  I can be very thankful for a mother who had faith enough in her God not to give up even when the doctor gave her no hope.  All night she worked over me, and early the next morning my fever broke.

In November of 1938 my father moved to Dunlap, Iowa.  Here was born a younger brother, David, who was to be a very close friend although he was nearly 5 years younger than I.  I was the 7th of 8 children with 4 sisters and 3 brothers.One of the happiest experiences of my early years were the summer vacation trips we would take to Phillipsburg, Missouri where my mother’s parents owned a 200 acre farm.  It was always a joy to spend a few days on the farm.  But the trip from Iowa with 10 people loaded into a car was always quite a strain.There were always so many things to do at grandpa’s.  Sometimes I would go out and crack nuts in the old tool shed beside the house.  Sometimes we would go for a walk through the woods and if we were brave, we could venture down the “old sink hole” which was a block long, half a block wide, and about 75 feet deep.

I can remember all kinds of weird stories about robbers, bandits and outlaws who supposedly hid out in this sinkhole.I also enjoyed gathering the eggs for grandma, reaching into a hen’s nest and picking up the warm eggs.  Sometimes the old hen would even peck me.

Many were the joys and happy experiences of my grandparent’s home.  Generally we would arrive late in the night and grandpa would come to the door.  He knew that we were coming and always seemed to be in good spirits even though we aroused him at 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning.  He would light the bright gas lantern in the living room, and another kerosene lantern to be carried to the other rooms, as mother would prepare enough beds for all of us.  Most of us slept upstairs in an unfinished attic.  This was always fun but a little scary.  The beds were straw ticks, not too comfortable but better than the floor.  A ceramic night pot was left by the stairway for anyone who needed a bathroom in the middle of the night.  I always had a hard time going to sleep that first night.  My mind was reeling with all the things I wanted to do the next morning.  I could hardly wait for morning to come, and then I would hear all those night noises, perhaps a screech owl which would really scare me, always a hoot owl, the buzzing of the crickets, sometimes the bawling of a cow, the barking of a dog, sometimes the smell of a skunk, and if we were real quiet we could hear the croaking of the frogs down in the pond about 1 1/2 blocks south of the house.

Indeed the rooster crow would wake me almost every morning.  This is no sign that I got up then.  Quite often I would turn over on my back and look at all the things that grandma had hung up in the attic to get out of her way downstairs.  Before too long we would hear mother’s voice calling up the stairway.  “Time to get up.  Yoo hoo,” she would say, “Time to get up.”  She always called about 5 minutes before she really expected us to do much moving.  The next time she would come to the stairway and say, “Art, John, Leona, Doris, Frank, David – get up, breakfast is on the table.  We would all buzz around getting our clothes on so that we could get downstairs.

Sometimes we would eat in the kitchen, but generally we would eat in the dining room where there was a large table capable of seating all twelve of us.  Grandma’s filled like a banquet table.  There was a huge platter of eggs and side pork or bacon, delicious homemade bread, hot cereal with brown sugar, always some kind of fruit dish, and quite often Grandma had a large dish of molasses cookies.  We were never allowed to eat cookies at home for breakfast, but we could have one after breakfast if we wanted one, and we all wanted one.  The thing that I liked about Grandma’s cookies besides the taste was the size.  Her cookies were always twice as big as anybody else’s cookies.

I was always fascinated by the absence of salt and pepper shakers on the table. Instead, in front of nearly every plate there was a little glass pinch bowl.  I always wondered why they would let me stick my dirty, little greasy fingers in one of them.  Oh yes, I always washed my hands, but generally it was a matter of getting them wet and rubbing the dirt off on the towel.Oh yes, I forgot that at breakfast, Grandpa would always read from the Bible or the Upper Room and then would generally turn to my father and say, “Lester, would you return grace.”

After breakfast, I would generally jump up from the table and try to slip outside the door before my mother called me, but I rarely made it.  Generally, as I was halfway out the back door I heard her call, “Frank, oh Frank, come here, I’ve got a little job for you.”  Sometimes it would be helping to clean off the table, sometimes it would be to gather some wood out at the old wood pile and bring in and stack beside the wood stove, sometimes it would be to fill the water pails at the well, and sometimes I had to help wash or dry the dishes.  If I got right down to work, I was generally done in 15 or 20 minutes at the most.

Once outside, there seemed like an infinite number of exciting things to do.  Sometimes we would make princesses out of the hollyhocks growing along the path to the outhouse, or sometimes we would try to catch chickens.  We always had fun with the many cats that seemed to be around the house and buildings.  Grandma kept them to keep down her varmint population.  It seemed like every year there was a litter of little kitchens about the time we went down to the grandparents.  We used to chase them and play hide and seek with them around the foundation on one side of the house.  We always liked to get up on the seat of the horse-drawn equipment that sat out in the barnyard.  Beside the house there were two evergreen trees with limbs just right to make them good climbing trees.  One day David got his head caught between two of the limbs and mother had to help him get loose.  That was the last of our playing in those trees.

When it rained, we quite often stayed inside, but this was not so bad for there were so many things to do.  Upstairs in the attic, Grandma stored all of the games and toys. Not only that, but we had a whole big room to play in.  I especially enjoyed looking through a pair of glasses called a stereopticon.  Grandma had literally hundreds of pictures of places like Rome, Paris, Vienna, London, etc.  I believe that this stereopticon gave the pictures a 3 dimensional look.  The colored pictures used in this stereopticon were about the size of a picture post card and there were two identical pictures on each card.

Grandma also kept all of her empty thread spools.  We played with these just like they were blocks.  We built towers and houses, and strung them together like beads.

We also made little racers out of empty spools with the use of two matchsticks and a rubber band.  We would have contests to see which one would go the farthest across the floor.

In the front room there was a player piano.  If we were real good, Mother or Grandpa would play a few rolls on this old player piano, and I was always fascinated with how the keys would depress while it played.In later years, our family would spend about half of our vacation, generally one week, in a cabin along a river in Missouri.  This was always very primitive, but oh, what fun.

The first cabin we stayed in for several years was owned by the scouts.  It was on the bank of a small river.  Doris and I used to go down to the riverbank just below the cabin where there was a fairly deep hole.  Here we would catch all kinds of sunfish and blue gill.  Doris also caught a channel catfish one time that weighed about 1 pound.  The older kids would go fishing with Dad on a bigger river not too far away.  One time when they came back from a day’s fishing with only one small fish, they were very happy to have the little ones which Dorie and I had caught.  At one of these fish dinners when it came time for grace, my father said, “Frankie would you offer grace.”  Mom relates that I was a wee bit hungry and so I gave the shortest prayer of my life when I said, “Dear Lord, fishie.  Amen.”

Below this cabin perhaps a quarter of a mile there was a big pool of water, quite deep with a rock bluff on one side.  The water was clear and you could see down quite a ways.  I remember seeing gars, which I thought would weight from 10 to 15 pounds.  Over by the rock bluffs, my brothers ran a trotline.  Sometimes they would swim across to it, and I always wondered what would happen if one of those gars took a bite out of them.  One time my brother John caught one of these gars, and while he was trying to land him, he bit John’s leg and left one of his teeth embedded in the flesh.  For several months, John had a sore leg, and one day while he was pressing on the sore place that looked a little like a boil, out pooped the tooth of the gar.

Many people told my father that gar was poisonous to eat.  Dad wouldn’t believe them, so one day he skinned one out and mother prepared it and found that the meat was very good.

I can remember spending many hours learning how to row a boat in the little river in front of this cabin.  We also did a lot of swimming when there was someone around to watch out for us.

One night as I was sleeping on the cabin porch, I had a strange feeling of something very near to me.  I finally talked one of my sisters into turning on a flashlight, and right beside my bed on the wall there was a huge spider.  It’s legs stretched out to about the size of my hand.  At this point mother came and killed it with a broom.  That night, I stayed awake wondering how many more spiders were going to stalk me in my sleep.It was while vacationing at this cabin that one of my sisters had the unfortunate experience of using a poising ivy leaf for toilet paper.  I remember that she groaned and cried and shrieked for several days.

In 1943, my father was appointed to the Methodist Church in Harlan, Iowa.  I always liked to sing and mom always encouraged me to sing, and so I sang loud enough for 5 people.  On the first Sunday, as I was sitting next to mom, I began singing with my volume on as loud as it would go.  Several people turned around and looked at me.  Mother said that she thought about saying something to me about not singing quite so loud, but she decided that if I wanted to sing like I enjoyed singing, she wasn’t going to stop me, and so she just let me continue.

At Harlan, Iowa, I went to the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th grades.  At the conclusion of the 2nd grade, the teacher was planning to flunk me because I just wasn’t doing the work.  I can remember this classroom very well.  I always wondered why I could never hear what the teacher was saying to the rest of the class.  I can even remember being frightened when she would call on me for an answer or ask me to go to the blackboard and write something on the board.  I can remember the awful feeling of not knowing what to write.  Sometimes she got very mad at me and rebuked me in front of the class.

However, at the close of the year when she decided to flunk me, they decided to give me an IQ test to see if I was mentally retarded.  When they found out that I had a good IQ, they began to look for something else.  It was at this point that they found out that I was deaf.  I could only hear when somebody spoke directly to me with a very loud voice.

My parents finally took me to a Dr. Zunbrun in Bolivar, Missouri.  He was an osteopathic surgeon who performed what was called finger surgery.  With his finger, he would reach down my throat and tear out the tissue that had grown over my Eustachian tube.  The growth of this tissue over my Eustachian tube was the result of a poor tonsillectomy.  My brother Art had to have a similar operation.

Each year for several years, I would have to have this operation performed.  It was very painful, but it didn’t last very long, and after the operation my parents would buy me a large ice creamcicle.  I never looked forward to the operation, but I always looked forward to this ice creamcicle.

While we lived in Harlan, I had several embarrassing experiences, which I will never forget.As children in a large family, we rarely had any money for candy and ice cream like so many of the other children had.  One day as I was walking down to the corner drugstore with one of my playmates, we stopped at the alley in back of the store and saw a whole box of little Hershey chocolate candies thrown into the trash barrel.  There must have been over a hundred in the box.  We ate a few on the way home.  He didn’t want to take any with him, and so I took the whole box in the house, proud of my wonderful discovery.  Immediately my mother sensed something wrong, and when I showed her the box of candy, she was fearful that they might be poisoned or something.  She then called the drugstore and told them what I had done.  They told her that the candy bars were not poisoned, they had merely been thrown out because they were a bit old and stale.  My mother then confiscated the box of candy bars and the whole family enjoyed them.

On another occasion, several of the neighborhood boys were picking grapes from a neighbor’s grapevine.  When I came home with grapes in hand, my father asked me where I got them.  When I told him, he made me go right over to the neighbor’s house.  I knocked on the back door and it seemed like an eternity before he answered.  I then told him what I had done, hardly able to get the words out of my mouth because I was all choked up.  He told me not to worry about it, and that any time I wanted some grapes to just come and ask him and I could have them. Of course, I never did ask him, and I never again ate any more of his grapes.

Because of the tight family budget, I was rarely able to have any spending money.  On one occasion I began stealing pennies from my mother’s purse.  That was in the day in which you could have a pretty good selection of candy even for a penny.  However, it wasn’t too many weeks before I became brave enough to take nickels from my mother’s purse.  And then one day I took four quarters out of her purse.  This was when I was in 3rd or 4th grade.  Mother soon found out that the money was missing and she evidently suspected that I had taken it.She called me in the house and stood at the door as I came in.  I made all kinds of excuses why I needed to go to the bathroom.  However, mother evidently suspected that I had the money on me.  She walked with me through the house, not letting me get out of her sight.  Going up the stairs, I separated the contraband into my four pockets.  When we got upstairs in one of the rooms, mother said, “Frank what do you have in your pocket” and I said, “Nothing.”  She said, “Let’s see.”  Lo and behold, I had a quarter in that pocket.  She went around all of my pockets until she had the four quarters.  She then told me how much she needed that money to put food on the table and I felt really bad.

The worst part of it was when my older brother, Art, who had a job at a shoe store, told me the next day that if I ever wanted a nickel to ask him and he would give it to me.  I was so embarrassed that I never remember asking him for any money.

Frank Greenwood
November 2, 1967 - 9:00 a.m.