Aug. 3,1986
Dear Judy,
This has been an interesting day. Norman Larsen represented the Gideons in church today. I gave a testimony. Perhaps you know this, but if you don't, this is for the record. I joined the church at Tasco in December of 1934. Dad died in February of 1937. As you can see these events were only a little over two years apart. We were destitute. Mom, Lucille, Arthur and I left that farm with some meager household goods and a 1929 Model A Ford. We moved into a small place in Studley with your Aunt Vera. She was teaching school there. I may have spent a few nights there but never really lived there. As the expression was then I "knocked around." That simply meant that I was what you might call an itinerate farm worker. I worked, received a little money and moved on. Mom moved to Hoxie sometime before school opened in the fall of 1938. I came home that fall and for the next two years that was my home too while I finished school. During that time and the years in the Navy I was kept on the church rolls and transferred to Hoxie when the Tasco church disbanded in the fifties. When your mother and I were married, it was a simple ceremony with Albert Smith, a Baptist preacher, performing the ceremony at your Aunt Irene's house in Hoxie. To be exact it took place in the yard I think. We did not attend church. I think your mother attended the Methodist church some but was not a member. Along about 1957, Elsie said to me "Daddy, when are we going to go to church?" I wonder if she remembers! She asked me several times and one time I told her that she and I would go the next Sunday. That was the beginning. It wasn't long before the whole family was going, but at first it was just the two of us - then Myrna - then the whole family. There you have it. I think of the passage in Isaiah "a little child shall lead them."
Dad