Special to United Methodist Insight
In June 1949, as an ill-prepared 22-year-old college junior, I was appointed minister of the Trout Run, Pa., Methodist Charge, a designated student parish, consisting of four small area churches, with the parsonage next door to the Trout Run village church. Married, with our first child due in October, the parsonage offered a place to live and a small salary, which helped to support my family and me through Lycoming College on my way to seminary. Lycoming, a United Methodist-affiliated college, is located in Williamsport, Pa., just 15 miles from Trout Rum.
Trout Run
Trout Run is a village in the Lewis Township in Lycoming County, Pa., shown in red. (Map by David Benbennick from public domain data)
Did I mention that I was ill-prepared to be minister of a church? All I had was a calling: my belief that God wanted me to be a minister. But after that, I was on my own i.e., I still had to write and deliver weekly sermons and work with people. Writing sermons was especially challenging, as I took the industrial course in high school, and was limited in my knowledge of English grammar, which certainly impacts the effectiveness of preaching. My grammar was so poor that when I got to seminary, I flunked an entrance exam on English grammar and was required to take a course on the subject. But back to the lessons offered by Trout Run.
I had a friendly disposition and a need for people to like me. But when I believed God called me to be a minister, I became moralistic about certain behavior. Drinking especially was a sore spot. My father drank, at times too much, leading him on occasion to become physically abusive toward our mother, which was terrifying. After my assumed divine calling to the ministry, I withdrew my membership from the local Veterans of Foreign Wars where my father, a World War I veteran and prominent longtime member, had done his drinking.
My father’s influence showed up in Trout Run. My abstinence views led me to confront the owner of the one tavern in the village, who was not a member of my church. I went to his tavern, sat on bar stools with him and read from the Bible: “Wine is a mocker, strong drink is raging: and whoever is deceived thereby is not wise.” (Proverbs 20: 1, KJV) He listened politely to my sermonizing about drinking. Then he said to me, “Reverend, if you try to shut me down, I will fight you.” My crusade backfired. A number of my parishioners and others who drank were giving me the cold shoulder.
Moralizing got in the way
My moralizing also got in the way of my relationship with members of the Trout Run Volunteer Fire Company, a number of whom were members of the church including Carl Gray who was both president of the Fire Company and the church’s Sunday School superintendent. The issue was the Fire Company’s use of gambling to raise money for a new fire engine; at that time gambling was illegal in the county. During a general meeting of the Fire Company, I stood before those present and in an emotionally-charged speech condemned the use of gambling to raise funds. A few minutes later, big Dean Dawes, a volunteer fireman and longtime Trout Run resident, asked me to step outside. I wisely refused.
I have also to mention that my mother had played the slot machines at the VFW in an attempt to hit the jackpot for our poor family. It was during the Great Cepression and our family of 10 was on relief. My grandmother and I would take a wagon and go to the local federal distribution center and obtain a supply of food and other goods to bring home.
Gambling thrives among people in poverty, fed by the illusion that their ship will come in and their economic struggle will suddenly end. Thus my mother’s gambling at the VFW was another unconscious influence, fueling my moralistic reaction to the Trout Run Volunteer Fire Company
There is more to be mentioned about my mother. She had an eighth-grade education, quitting school and going to work to help provide for her sister and their mother whose husband had abandoned them. My mother then had seven children of her own, five of us within nine years, and worked very hard caring for us. She was like a magician, doing much with so little in nurturing our big family.
But my past, which my calling to the ministry did not address, showed up in Trout Run. Instead of gaining the acceptance of people important to me, I was being rejected for my judgmental ministerial approach to them. That rejection caused much emotional pain, which forced me to do a considerable amount of soul-searching. Unfortunately, there was no wise mentor or psychiatrist in whom to confide. Forced to engage in lonely, painful soul-searching, I finally did manage to move in another, caring, direction.
The tavern owner’s wife became ill and was hospitalized. While they were not Methodists, I visited and talked with her in the hospital, getting to know her as a person and she experiencing me. I also offered prayer, which she readily accepted. It was not moralizing about people drinking but empathizing with them when they become ill and need pastoral care. I responded to her humanity and she to mine.
After she died, her husband sold the tavern and bought a set of fishing boats in New Jersey. The day he left Trout Run, he stopped by the parsonage, and asked me to come outside and sit with him in his car. As I sat beside him, he expressed appreciation for my hospital visits with his wife which, he said, brought her much comfort. He then pulled out a twenty-dollar bill and gave it to me as a concrete way of thanking me. I told him that was not necessary, but he insisted. I went back into the parsonage realizing that the tavern owner taught me an invaluable lesson on human caring. He triggered in me a human kind of conversion experience.
Playing basketball with firefighters
Next was the Trout Run Volunteer Fire Company. It had a basketball team, and I loved to play basketball. So I joined the team and became a substitute. During certain games, I enjoyed hearing some fans yell, “Put the Reverend in! Put the Reverend in!”
At a game in another town, I became the referee as no one else was available. A player on the opposing team did not like some of my calls, and at one point threatened me. Big Dean Dawes stepped between us and told the player to back off or he’d have to deal with Dean. Along with basketball, I joined the Fire Company, and went with the volunteers early one morning as they sped up a highway to put out a fire that was engulfing a big barn.
I left Trout Run with a heavy heart, but I was to go back again. When my wife and daughter and I returned to Williamsport to visit our relatives, I was shocked to read in the Williamsport newspaper that the state police had entered the Trout Run Volunteer Fire Company, seized four slot machines, and arrested the Fire Company’s officers including Carl Gray, its president, who, as I said, was the church’s Sunday School Superintendent. Carl also sang in the church choir, and was a dear, loving man with a big family of seven or eight wonderful children. The person who blew the whistle on the Fire Company was Rev. Charles Myers, who succeeded me as student minister of the Trout Run Methodist Church.
My outrage at reading this story led me to visit Rev. Myers in the Trout Run Parsonage. I don’t recall my exact words, but I raised hell with him in his living room – affirming the members of the Fire Company and condemning him calling the police. I was later told that you could you could hear my voice all the way down the street to Dean Dawes’ home.
The next day, I was contacted by the local Methodist district superintendent, Rev. G. Cecil Weimer. He kindly told me that when I leave a parish, I’m not to return and interfere in the work of the present minister. The next year I did return, not to Trout Run, but to the home of Dale Dawes, Dean’s brother, who lived another town. He asked me to baptize his baby daughter, which I happily did in the family’s living room.
Memories of my father
My father was not a church-going man; but he did attend a service I led at Trout Run Methodist Church. There was so much more to my father than his drinking. At the VFW, he was known as having a big heart, a so-called “softie,” listening to people’s troubles and helping them if he could.
My father was there for his family – for our mother and seven children, and grandmother, and our dog Pepper. He knew what it was like to suffer economic and emotional pain. He was a Democrat because the Democrats “were for the little guy,” he would say. But the continuing struggle to put food on the table and pay the rent sapped his strength; and, at times, alcohol momentarily eased his pain, until he had a heart attack and quit drinking. Through it all he cared deeply for his family, seen in him praying every day for the safe return of us four sons who were in war zones in World War II. He would say his prayers, sitting next to his radio with the pictures of my three brothers and me in our uniforms on the wall above the radio. He also wrote to us, as did our mother; and they occasionally sent us packages of food and essentials.
Early on, my father taught me how to throw a baseball, and was present when I pitched a no-hitter at Brandon Park in Williamsport’s sandlot league. That was a moment of pride for him – and for me!
My father and mother taught me how to care for people in caring for me. That part of them also began showing up in me at Trout Run – and has stayed with me to this day.
My last sermon at Trout Run was called “Love and Understanding.” What a change. Not that I had arrived. Far from it. But the humanizing began.
Before my wife and daughter and I left Trout Run, the church members had a farewell gathering for us. Their gift: a beautiful, large, framed colored picture of Trout Run with Round Top Mountain in the background. Now, at my age of 93, that picture still hangs in my living room, reminding me that before seminary there was Trout Run, Pa.
The Rev William E. Alberts, Ph.D., a former hospital chaplain at Boston Medical Center, is both a Unitarian Universalist and United Methodist minister. His newly published book, The Minister Who Could Not Be “preyed” Away, is available on Amazon.com.