A Place Called Rosebud

A Rosebush in Every Yard

After graduation God gave me an opportunity to preach for a small church in Rosebud, Texas.  Rosebud was a farming community south of Waco.    The town slogan was “a rosebush in every hard. The area population consisted of mostly Czech and German people with a sizable number of rednecks thrown in.  The black community probably made up a fourth of the community.  The Lutheran and Catholic churches were the predominate religions.   There was a large Baptist church, and other denominations were also represented.

Our congregation had about 75 members.  For the most part, they were simple, humble folks with a love for the gospel and caring hearts.  They were willing to take on a young preacher with little experience.  As I look back on it, I can scarcely imagine that it happened.  Since that time, I’ve known very few ministers, who were asked to step into a full time pulpit role immediately following graduation from college.   Everybody wants a “seasoned preacher.”  Rosebud took the view that what a young preacher lacks in maturity, he makes up for with enthusiasm.   He might have added that he tends to be a visionary who doesn’t understand when someone says, “It can’t be done here.”

He also does some very dumb things.  During my first week at Rosebud we had the annual Vacation Bible School, and I was in charge.   We took the kids to a park for a picnic on the last day.  I conducted the closing assembly and closed out the way I’d seen chapel dismissed at ACC.   I simply said, “You’re dismissed.”  Kid’s started running out of the building aimlessly.  It was all the adults could do to round them up, and get them in cars so they could go to the park.  Obviously, I didn’t really get off to a great start.  I saw a lady from Rosebud about forty years later who reminded me of that experience.  

My friend Evelyn Spring used to tell visiting preachers, "I was impressed" following their sermons.  If the guy was bad she didn't want to offend him.  "I was impressed" was neutral.  It could be a good or bad impression.   Clearly I impressed the folks at Rosebud when I closed out the VBS.

Graduation from College

With All the Rights and Privileges Appertaining Thereto

Graduation was almost anti-climactic.  I had to work off some required courses that I had been neglecting before I got my sheepskin.  One of those was a biology course.  It was taught by J. R. Endsley, who was not the most exciting educator in the world.   Graduation actually came before finals, so during the semester of your graduation, you had to take finals early. If you were carrying a B average in any given course, you didn’t have to take the final, but I wasn’t carrying a B in biology.  I wasn’t even sure how strong my C was.  After I took my final, I went by Mr. Endsley’s office and said, “I came to find out if I passed your course.”  Endsley preached for some church on Sundays, so he understood things from my point of view.  Without a smile he said, “You did, but it was by grace and not by works.”

Before enrolling for the last semester, I learned that I was going to be short of the required number of hours by one semester hour.   I asked Dr. Southern, the department chair, what I could do to pick up that one hour.   He said “Well you could sing in a chorus.  That carries one hour of credit.”

I knew there was no way I could make the A Capella Chorus, which was the school’s premier choral organization, but there was a singing group called, “The Choralaires.”   There was no audition for The Choralaires.”  You just had to enjoy singing.  I enrolled and thoroughly enjoyed the experience.   I still have my music.   It was really fairly boring stuff except for “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel,” which was a spiritual.  I learned a lot more about singing, and I loved being around the people.  We did an outdoor concert under the stars, which was well attended.

Graduation finally came.  Abilene Christian has a “hooding” ceremony.  Someone sits behind you and places a hood over your head when the degree is conferred.  In case you’re thinking about the kind of hood they put over someone who’s being hanged, let me explain that it’s draped around your neck and hands loose down your back. Normally it’s a parent who does the honors.  It’s usually a parent of the opposite sex.  I was pretty nervous about my mother doing the hooding ceremony because she was susceptible to schizophrenic episodes.  My cousin, Jean, the daughter of my mother’s sister, was a student at ACC at the time.   Jean did the hooding ceremony, and Mama thought it was a great idea.

I received my diploma from B. Sherrod, who was the board chairman at the time.   I always thought B. Sherrod to be the quintessential, “Christian gentleman.”  However, I later learned that he did have his limits.  In his book, No Ordinary University John C. Stevens told about an unhappy set of circumstances in which the school was taken to court by the relatives of a benefactor who had given a large donation to the school.   Apparently B. Sherrod was placed on the witness stand and badgered by the attorney for the plaintiffs.  When he finished his testimony, the judge declared a recess for lunch.  Sherrod stayed around until the courtroom was cleared.  He walked up to the judge and said, “Your honor, what is the fine if I plaster that lawyer’s nose all over his face?”   The judge said, “Just don’t let me see you do it.

Anyway B. Sherrod handed me my diploma.  Don Morris shook my hand and congratulated me, and I walked out with a piece of paper that said I had obtained a bachelor’s degree and all the rights and privileges appertaining thereto.   It took me a while to figure out that if you had enough money to go with it, the diploma entitled you to buy a Coke.  I was dating a young lady at the time, and she came to my graduation.  We went to a drive-in restaurant and ordered Cokes.  They didn’t ask to see my diploma.  I just forked over the change for the drinks. I drove her to her grandmother’s house in Albany, and that’s the way I celebrated by graduation from college.

Humbled By An English Teacher

Mima Ann Williams

There was a rule about English that I did not like.  If you failed to make a B or higher in Freshman English you were required to take English 230 – popularly known as “ignorant English” and “dumbbell English” if you wanted to graduate.  I shouldn’t have made a C in Freshman English.  I don’t blame the instructor.  I blame my own poor study habits.

English 230 was straight grammar, and it was one of the best things that ever happened to me during my college years.  Our instructor was Mima Ann Williams.   She was a spinster, and rumored to have been a Women’s Army Corps officer in World War II.  She loved the English language and did everything in her power to make sure that it is properly spoken and written, and she was hard as nails.  Winston Churchill had to repeat an English grammar course during his educational experiences.  He later looked back on it and said, “The language was ground into my bones.”  Miss Williams did the same thing for me.

I always thought she resented the fact that we were such poor English students that we had to take her course.  She took aim at us with a double barreled shotgun.  I thought I was fairly proficient in English grammar already.  I figured Ione McIntyre taught me all I needed to know about grammar when I was in high school. So I didn’t take her seriously at first.   It was a nightmare.  I think I probably diagrammed sentences in my sleep.  I know today’s English teachers think sentence diagramming is an outdate technique, but I’ll say this for it.  You learned the parts of speech and how they fit into a sentence.

One day she got enough of having a class full of people who weren’t serious about what she was trying to teach them.  I was thinking, “Yeah, you think this is the best things since the pocket on the shirt.”  Suddenly she said, “There are people in this class who are capable of doing good work.”  But she didn’t stop there.  She said, “You take Norman Bales.  He could do good work if he just would.”  I thought, “I’ll show you a thing or two” and from that moment on I got serious about studying grammar.  I’ve had three published books, and I co-authored a fourth one. That would not have been possible without Mima Ann Williams.  When she publicly called me out, I began learning the language.

When I completed my first book, I dedicated it to Miss Williams and to Della Pack, whom I’ve already mentioned.

When the book was published, she had retired but was working as a volunteer at the college library.  My daughter, Ruby, was in school then.  I sent her a copy of the book and asked her to give it to Miss Williams.  In the inscription I apologized for any grammatical errors that might appear in the text.  Ruby said she cried when it was presented to her.   I didn’t even know she was capable of tears.   Then she told Ruby, “You’ve got his eyes.”  I never realized she watched me that close.

After she received the book, she wrote me a wonderful letter.  Among other things she said, “If I embarrassed you in front of your classmates, and that caused you to get serious about writing, I’m glad I did it.”

A Radical on Campus

When I returned to school that fall, the first thing I did was drive to Manitou, and resign my position as their preacher.  My excuse was that I wanted to concentrate on academics, which was true enough.  In retrospect I think it was one of the wisest things I did during my senior year.  I could have really messed things up in the church at Manitou if I had continued to preach for them.

At school I was respectful of my teachers.  I recognized the validity of their scholarship, and I also knew I couldn’t hold my own with them if I started an argument in class.

It was a different story with my fellow students.   I badgered them and tried to get them to see my point of view.  Sometimes it created hard feelings.   There was one guy who really gave me a lot of trouble.  His name was Rollo Tinkler.  Rollo was older than me, and he had just returned to Abilene to work on his Master’s Degree.   When Rollo started that fall semester, he was a proponent of the same kind of belligerence that I had adopted.

In the middle of the first semester, he attended a debate over “the issues” and was converted on the spot.  He set out to convert me to his point of view.   I may have been a religious radical, but I was also a young, single college student.  I was interested in girls and a social life.   One of the places where my social life took place was in the “Grill” – a short order restaurant on campus.  Since I was living at home, I didn’t eat in the “Bean,” – the college cafeteria.  I usually had a hamburger in the Grill.  Rollo would spot me, pull up a chair and start hammering on me.  The “Grill” had a double meaning.  It was the place where I got “grilled.”   But he didn’t stop there.  Even though he was older, he was still single, and he was dating the girls.  I was dating a young lady who lived in Zellner Hall.  When you went to pick up your date, you left your name with the receptionist, and she would page your date.  Most of the time the girls made us wait for a while before they came down.  On more than one occasion Rollo would call for his date at the same time, and we were into it until our dates came.  I tried avoiding him, but he turned up everywhere I went.

After graduation, he wrote me an eleven page single spaced typewritten letter in which he aggressively promoted his viewpoint. I had already begun to question my radicalism before I graduated.  My first church after graduation was a congregation that was not bothered by “the issues.”  I was determined not to be a source of contention in the church, so I kept my mouth shut about the views I had picked up in Houston.  Rollo’s letter pretty much convinced me that I had (1) been wrong in my attitudes and (2) argued for positions that were untenable.  Theologically I went through a rough couple of years.

A Summer in Houston

Between my junior and senior year, I was invited to work with the Garden Oaks Church of Christ in Houston.  In today’s world I would have been called a youth ministry intern.   I was involved with both high school and college age young people.  I participated in visitation, and spent the summer trying to learn how to do church work.

When I moved from my parents’ home in Clyde and took up residence in Houston, I thought I had moved to a different planet.   I saw many things I hadn’t seen more before – violence, blatant racial hatred, social intolerance, and a fast paced way of living I wasn’t used to.  I took a group of young boys on an overnight camping excursion to Lake Houston, and almost got thrown in jail in Humble because we parked incorrectly. 

The church was different too.  On the one hand, there was an atmosphere that I considered legalistic.  Actually I was pretty much a legalist myself, but this form of legalism had some different twists.   Many forms of behavior that I had always considered to be sinful, were approved and openly practiced.  If you asked why, they would simply say, “The Bible doesn’t condemn it.”

There an atmosphere of suspicion within the Houston church community, and the distrust was primarily directed toward Nashville and Abilene.  I gradually bought into their rationale.  It was a paranoid response.  There was probably a greater concentration of people in Churches of Christ per-capita in Abilene and Nashville than in any other two cities in the country.  I came to believe that the people in Abilene and Nashville were seeking to control the Churches of Christ.  That was an irrational fear, when you stop to think about just how independent we are as a group of people. It’s almost impossible to get us to cooperate on anything, and if some strong man in a place like Abilene or Nashville had actually desired to crown himself the archbishop of the Churches of Christ, he would either have met with strong opposition, or been dismissed as a crank.  

Along with that I developed a certain attitude of cynicism, and I began to view church leaders, my professors, and most members of the church with suspicion.  When I returned to Abilene, I was a very different person. I was a rebel, although my rebellion took a very different track from most religious rebellion.   I was on a crusade to straighten out the churches whom I perceived to be on the wrong track.  I’ll have to also admit that I adopted that I became a racist.

Not all my experiences were negative, however.  Later on this same church would support me in mission activities.  I met some wonderful people at Garden Oaks and remained connected with them throughout the rest of my life.  One of these was Louie Welch, who later would become the mayor of Houston.  Louie seemed to understand my difficulties in adapting to life in a big city and a different church environment.  He remained my friend until he died when he was about 90.   A few years before he died, I received a telephone call from him one day, and it was a real joy to share good memories.  One of those involved a sermon I preached at Garden Oaks one time.   For some reason I chose to address the topic, “The Christian View of Death.”  I started the sermon my saying, “As a gospel preacher I have the solemn responsibility to prepare people for death and the judgment to come.”   Later I found out that, Louie and his wife, Iola Faye,  were passing notes back and forth during the sermon. Iola Faye wrote, “What’s that idiot doing preaching on death on a beautiful day like this?”   Louise wrote back, “It’s his solemn responsibility.”

Manitou, Oklahoma

Preaching and Bootlegging Sugar

Manitou, Oklahoma is not a very large town, but it was the place where I did my first regular preaching.  One of my co-workers at the maintenance shop was a young man named Leo Schreiner.   Leo was from Manitou.  His father operated a blacksmith shop there, and Leo grew up with an understanding of welding and metallurgy.   He was a natural for the maintenance shop. 

One Sunday he made arrangements for me to go home with him and preach for his home church.  I was all of 19 years old.   The brothers liked what I did and asked me to come back on a regular basis.  I did that for more than a year.  In fact I think it was almost two years.   A big event, among the churches of that day, was the summer gospel meeting.  I was asked to preach in the meeting and preached every night for ten days.   We had great crowds, and it was the only time I ever preached for a ten day meeting.   After that meetings got shorter and shorter, and we have pretty much abandoned them now.

It was 180 miles from Abilene to Manitou.  I had a 1947 Mercury, which got me there most of the time.  Once I called them and told them I had car trouble and couldn’t make it.  I had old tires, and I blew several of them out.  I would buy another used tire for $2.00, but there was a good chance I would blow that one out too.  One night I drove the last few miles back to Abilene on the rim.  They paid me $20.00 a week, but I usually bought gas in Vernon, Texas.  They nearly always had a price war going on in Vernon, so I bought gas for 19 cents a gallon (That is not a misprint).  

Leo led singing, but he was a semi-pro baseball pitcher.  On Saturdays he wanted me to help him warm up, so he handed me a glove and started firing fastballs at me.   At first I was scared of them, but I finally I was able catch them pretty well, although nobody ever suggested that I join the team.  I usually went with him to the games on Sunday afternoons, but I was always scared that a game would go into extra innings, and we would miss the Sunday night service.  We never did.

There was no sign on the church building to give anybody an idea of what kind of church it might be.  After all everybody in Manitou (population 200) knew where everything was.  One Sunday morning I arrived at the building, and I was greeted by an older gentleman I had never seen before.   He said, “I’m glad to see you young men here.  You mean so much to the church.”  He flipped his Bible open and I saw a sermon outline.  I knew something was strange, but when it came time to start the Bible class, I taught the adult Bible class.  At one point he disagreed with something I said, and stood up and shook his finger at me.  I don’t recall what kind of point he made, and I don’t think I understood it at the time.

I was somewhat afraid that he might try to preach that morning, so as soon as Leo finished the last note of the song before the sermon, I hit rostrum preaching.   About ten minutes into the sermon, the fellow leaned over and said something to Leo.  He then got up and left.  Later Leo told me that he asked, “What church is this?”  Leo said, “It’s the Church of Christ.”  He said, “Well where’s the Methodist church.”  Leo said, “It’s two blocks down the street.”  The guy said, “I’m sorry, but I must leave.”   We later learned that the Methodists where wondering where he was.  They were singing extra songs, but finally he showed up.  I’m thinking he saw two church buildings on the same street.  The Methodist church had the biggest building, so I’m guess that he assumed it was the Baptist church.  We had no sign on our building, so he probably figured we were Methodists.   He probably thought we were the weirdest bunch of Methodists he ever met.

Another Manitou experience involved bootlegging sugar.  The stores in Abilene were in the middle of a price war on sugar.  You could buy 10 pounds of sugar for fifty since, but there was a limit of one to a person.  It was strawberry season in Oklahoma.  We distributed fifty cent pieces to our friends, converged on the store, and bought several bags of sugar.  Then I hauled them to Oklahoma.  That went on for two or three weeks.   We never tried to make money on the deal.  We let the people have the sugar for what it cost us.

I owe much to the folks at Manitou.  They listened patiently and offered encouragement when I was learning to preach.  They also fed well, and I usually brought some hungry college students with me.

The Maintenance Shop

The Maintenance Shop

Even though the tuition was relatively low in comparison to college costs today, you still had to come up with a way of meeting expenses.  I landed a job working for the college maintenance department.  The man who hired me was Lawrence Smith.  He was the school’s bursar, which was the title they gave to the chief financial officer.  I don’t want to say that he was cheap, but he did protect the school’s bottom line.  After all he worked for the school in that capacity during the depression.

He told me that I would make 55 cents an hour.  Minimum wage was 75 cents.  Besides that you didn’t get paid real money.  It all went on your school bill.

There were two levels of personnel at the shop (1) the full time workers (who got paid a little better) and (2) the students.

My jobs varied.  During my freshman year I kept the yard for the home of President Don H. Morris.  Fortunately I didn’t lose my job when I pulled up a bunch of flowers thinking they were weeds.  Sometimes I hauled trash.  That was my punishment for messing up the President’s yard no doubt.   I unclogged drains.  I assisted electricians, plumbers and others. I had only been working a few days when they sent me and a couple of others to clean and polish the tile floors of the SAC (Student Activity Center) in the basement of McKenzie.  One of the guys rather nonchalantly pointed at the buffer and told me to buff the floors.  Within seconds I was being swung around all over the floor, and out of the corner of my eye, I noticed my co-workers were laughing.   That’s the way they broke in a rookie.  I learned my lesson well.  I could operate a buffer today if required to do so, and I would control it, not the other way around.

After awhile I got a reputation for clumsiness and ineptness.  Part of it was earned, and part of it was imagined. There was a saying at the shop. “If anything goes wrong, Bales did it.”  I survived the whole thing, and it helped pay for my education. 

Most of the full time employees at the shop were amateur theologians.  When we came to work, they would ask, “What did they teach you in Bible class today?”  If we told them, they would quickly explain why we ought to discount what our professors said and listen to them.   Perhaps they thought the Bible department would have been stronger if the professors were fixing things that broke, and they were lecturing the classes.

There was one special assignment that I always enjoyed.  Sometime I would get sent to one of the girls’ dorms to repair something or other.  I always announced by presence by yelling, “Man on first” (or second or third).  It wasn’t baseball talk.  I was announcing that a male had invaded the girl’s dorm.  They usually teased us about it, and it provided a nice break from some rather mundane labor.