The Belton Years (6)

Visits From Our Parents

Little did we realize that Ann’s father was living out his last days on the earth.  He was in his early fifties and appeared to be in good health, but he was a heavy smoker, and that took a toll on his heart.   In the Belton years, we didn’t know any of that, so we lived through a most enjoyable period.  They were often at our house.  It was a real joy to hook up Clyde’s boat and drive out to Lake Belton in search of fish.

Those were also tough economic years for us.  Although the Belton church was wonderful to us in many different ways, they were not so generous with salary.  Many of those people remembered the depression, and they were afraid of obligating the church too heavily.  When we moved there the church had about 400 members, and we were budgeted for a little over a $1.00 a week per member. After I had been there about 15 months, I interviewed with some other churches, but I couldn’t find one like Belton.  I told the elders I would stay there.   They responded by raising my salary – a whole five dollars a week.   One of brothers asked, me “Did the elders ever raise your salary?”   I said, “They sure did.  He said, “How much?”  I told him and he said, “I don’t know how they stood it.”

There was just no way that we could get by without Ann’s working.   She went to work in surgery at Hillcrest Baptist Hospital in Waco.  We worked out an arrangement where she would be home a week and in Waco a week.  It wasn’t the best situation in the world, but there were benefits.  After all we were really newlyweds with a lot of adjusting to go through.  Ann’s mother took care of Elliott when she was working.  Ann worked 3 till 11, which meant she had the mornings with Elliott.  Ann’s mother and father had him in the evening, and it was one of the great delights of their life.   It was especially important to have that time with Elliott in view of the fact that they knew we were making plans to enter the mission field.

At first I wanted to go to Nigeria, and we made plans for that to happen.  The closer we got to the fruition of those plans, the more I got cold feet.  I began to realize that Ann had a poor immune system, and I was fearful that Africa would not be good for her health, so we began to think about US Missions. 

During the Belton years, my parents visited in our home for the last time.   They never liked traveling very much anyway, and Daddy was afraid to drive in large cities.  It seemed like you had to drive through a large city to get anywhere I lived after we left Belton.   Daddy would frequently give me money when we traveled to Texas to visit them.  He said if he wasn’t going to come visit me, at least he could help my expenses when I visited him.  They came to see us two or three times while we were at Belton.  They didn’t have to drive through any cities. They spent Christmas at our house in 1962, and they were never in our home again after that.