There were several things to take care of prior to leaving Jamestown. We had planned a second campaign for the summer of 1969. Jim and Charles came back, and we had a great reunion. Ward and Hope Glentzer replaced us. Ward and I had attended graduate school together at a summer session in Abilene. They arrived early in the summer of 1969, and we helped them get settled. I took care of a lot of the logistics involved in getting the pre campaign plans.
We needed to sell our house, and it didn’t move that quickly after it was put on the market. We changed realtors and they wanted us to make some changes. We were busy with a lot of that as the campaign was rushing in one us.
The campaign was really our last “hurrah” in Jamestown. Joe Barnett came from Amarillo, Texas to be our featured speaker. Charles, Jim, and I had all known Joe in school. He was an eloquent speaker, and his ministry was a blessing to us. Two rather mundane memories stand out from that experience.
Ann had not known him previously, and she was not impressed with him at first. Joe was the consummate dresser. He looked as if he had just been featured on the pages of Gentleman’s Quarterly. Ann’s first impression of people are usually, but not always accurate. She thought Joe was a stuffed shirt when he first showed up in Jamestown, but she changed her mind in a few days. Joe nicknamed her “Miz Preach.”
At the time our only television set was a black and white table top model that was in our bedroom. Ann and I liked to watch television before we went to sleep at night, so we kept the television set there. It also enabled us to monitor the children’s viewing since they had to come into our bedroom to watch television. I remember Joe being at our house when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. We all gathered in the bedroom and watched the moon landing. A room full of people in our bedroom heard Neil’s famous words “a small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” We were stunned to watch history in the making.
We also fed Joe at lunch every day. The kids were really into peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, so Ann would often feed them their sandwiches while we ate more substantial food. The peanut butter and jelly sandwiches was a favorite of our kids., so Ann would always buy the largest available container of peanut butter. Joe said, “I didn’t know it came in barrels.” He even asked Ann if she would make him a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. That became something of an inside joke for a number of years. We would see him at the lectureship in Abilene, and the first words out of us mouth would be, “Where’s my peanut butter?”
After a wonderful closing week, we said “good bye” to our friends in Jamestown. We loaded the kids, our luggage, and Ann’s plants into our 1968 Green Mercury Montego, and headed out for Kansas. An important chapter in our lives came to a close.
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