Two Venerable Institutions at Belton
Although our primary involvement at Belton was with the young people, we also had many close friends who were elderly. There were two venerable institutions in the Belton church among people of more mature age. You ignored them or fought them at your own peril, but if they liked you, you couldn’t possibly have better friends.
One was the senior men’s Bible class. By the time I got there, the class had dwindled to less than a dozen. Leland Duke, our educational director, knew better than try to mess with their curriculum or exercise control over their choice of teachers. The men had a wonderful time. They would read a verse of scripture and argue about it. They might cover three or four verses in a one class period. All of them were hardnosed, but they deeply loved each other. When one of them died, the others were always honorary pallbearers. Some of those guys became my friends. I loved spending time with them, fishing with them, and listening to their stories. It was sad to watch their numbers dwindle while I was there.
The other class was the senior women’s class. They outnumbered the men’s class by at least three to one. If you wanted to keep your job, you didn’t mess with the women’s class or the men’s class, but you would be in bigger trouble if you messed with the women’s class. For a long time the women maintained their own treasury. They even had their own bank account. According to many stories, they actually loaned money to the church, when the congregation was having a rough time during the Depression. Many years after that the elders decided their funds needed to be combined with the general treasury. The man who had the unfortunate experience of relieving them of their funds was the son of the teacher. His treatment fell just short of being tarred and feathered, and his severest critic was his own mother.
With the passage of time, these two venerable institutions have gone away, but they left sweet, and sometimes amusing memories behind.
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