The Kind of Man Fred Was

by

Special to United Methodist Insight | April 23, 2025

The highlight of my eight years as a pastor in Montello, Wisconsin, was the night our church softball team almost beat the best bar team in the tavern league. I was pitching. We were ahead 4 to 3 in the 5th inning, until I walked the bases loaded and gave up a grand slam to a big bruiser named Kerry Dagner. Our coach, Mark Sherin, took me out immediately but it was too late.

Still, we were more proud of that loss than any game we ever won and there were not many of those. Being a church team, we viewed losing in the tavern league as a kind of a witness to the community. 

In the stands, cheering us on that night, was the Lay Leader of our congregation, a dairy farmer named Fred Cartwright. Fred was the kind of man you don’t soon forget. He was one of the first persons I met when Jo and I moved to Montello in 1978, just after I graduated from seminary. 

I met Fred on the Saturday night before my first Sunday at Trinity United Methodist Church. I was told he was going to be the liturgist the next day, so I went out to his farm to deliver the bulletin with the reading assignments. I pulled into the driveway in front of the barn and Fred came out to meet me dressed very much like my dad and all the farmers I grew up with in Richland County, Wisconsin. Fred was about the same height as my dad, just a little taller than me.

I introduced myself and told Fred some of my memories of growing up on the farm and milking cows. We hit it off, and when I turned to leave Fred shook my hand, gave an eye-level salute and said, “I think we are going to see eye to eye.”

Fred and I were both tenors in the choir. I used to stand beside him so I could follow his lead. I think we were off-key a lot of the time, judging by some of the looks we got from our choir director, Nancy Rice. One time when we were rehearsing “For All the Saints,” Fred said, he felt the strength of that hymn personally. Pointing first to the tenor section, and then to the sopranos, he said, “We feebly struggle, they in glory shine.”

I will never forget the Sunday the choir was singing up in the balcony of the old church on HWY 23 in Montello, two blocks from the granite quarry. Somehow Fred managed to knock a hymnal off the rail, and it careened down into the sanctuary and almost hit Herb Sheller, who was sitting in the back pew. We never let Fred live that down.

Being Lay Leader of the congregation meant, among other things, that Fred was on the building committee when we built the new church in 1984. He was there the night we had the big debate about moving the stained-glass windows from the old building to the new. There was no question about keeping that beautiful stained glass; the controversy was whether to keep the memorial plaques that were under each window. The committee was about evenly divided.

It is funny how the details of certain events stay in memory. I can see every member of that group and where they were sitting around a table in the unfinished sanctuary of the new building. At the head of the table was Bill Dow, our chair, now a retired United Methodist pastor; next to him was Jim Paul, then Shelley Robinson, Linda Tanner, Krista Sherin, Wayne Reiche, Herb Sheller, Eleanor Steinhaus, and Fred, sitting next to me.

Herb Sheller was a well-known muck farmer in Marquette County, and Eleanor was a retired funeral director. She and her husband Carl operated Steinhaus Funeral Home in Montello from 1947 to 1976. They inherited the business from Eleanor’s father, C.A. Cummings, who founded it in 1905. The new Trinity United Methodist Church building sits up behind what is now the Crawford Funeral Home on Fern Drive on the west side of Montello.

Eleanor saw to it that the front doors of the new church were high enough that her six-foot-eight basketball player grandsons, Tom and Gregg Steinhaus, would be able to carry her coffin into the church without ducking their heads. Gregg starred for the Wisconsin Badgers and Tom for the UW-Platteville Pioneers in the 1980s.

Herb and Eleanor, who were the senior members of the building committee and good friends, went at it tooth and nail in the debate about the memorial plaques that fateful night. I won’t say who was on which side; they may still be wrangling over it in heaven. The rest of us kind of ducked down under the table while the matriarch and the patriarch politely duked it out.

In the end, Fred Cartwright, always the peacemaker, made a few “bread upon the waters" remarks and we voted. You will have to visit the church to see for yourself how it turned out. Like most church disagreements it doesn’t much matter now, 41 years later.

The other thing that stands out in memory about Fred is what Arlis Olson, one of the longtime members of Trinity, told me about him shortly after I started as their pastor. Arlis’s late husband, Les, had been the bank president in Montello before we moved to town. And like Fred after him, he was the much-loved Lay Leader of the congregation. Arlis said that when Les was dying of cancer over in the Portage hospital, “Fred Cartwright was the only man in the church who came to visit him.”  And she told me this was not to disparage any of the other men. She understood that all of us, both men and women, find it difficult to make those kinds of visits.

Arlis said, “It just goes to show the kind of man Fred was.”

John Sumwalt is a retired pastor and the author of “Vision Stories” & “How to Preach the Miracles.” He will be preaching about “Angels & Visions” at Caledonia Presbyterian Church near Portage, April 27 at 10:30 AM. (N5123 State Hwy 78)