A personal essay about growing up Presbyterian in Indiana in the 1950s. \u00a0Originally written in the late 199s and revised in 2005.<\/p>\n
I have a memory, recessed deeply in boyhood, of a towhead furiously peddling a balloon-tired single speed bicycle pretending it was a Corvette\u2026peddling toward Tabernacle Presbyterian Church.<\/p>\n
Indianapolis in the \u201850s was just down the sociological and chronological road from the Middletown of 1927.[1]<\/a>\u00a0 When later I read Robert and Helen Lynd\u2019s classic, I would come to understand concepts such a privilege and class, but those terms would have been wasted on the kid riding the bike.\u00a0 What I did know was that TAB, as the church was known, was big and important.\u00a0 It was an English gothic rockpile of Indiana limestone with rose windows and carved wood.\u00a0 Solemn sounds came from the sanctuary, where in my grandfather\u2019s day ushers were attired in frock coats and striped pants.\u00a0 It was high church, indeed.<\/p>\n But a boy\u2019s church was in the other wing of the building.\u00a0 It was an article of faith in those days that sufficient physical exercise could prevent \u201cimpure thoughts\u201d among the young.\u00a0 Accordingly, TAB invested heavily in baseball and that lodestone of Hoosierism, basketball.\u00a0 I proved almost entirely inept at baseball and a willing but untalented basketball player.\u00a0 (I solved this problem in later adolescence by becoming a sports writer and photographer thus determining which of the Golden Boys would get their pictures in the town newspaper.\u00a0 This created for me an elevated and protected status among the geeks.\u00a0 But that is another story.)<\/p>\n But I was a good Scout.\u00a0 Troop 72 BSA met in the church basement, and from Tenderfoot to Eagle, it was the greater part of my pubescent life.\u00a0 At age 12 I was even allowed to travel to a strange and exotic place called Irvine Ranch to participate in a Jamboree.[2]<\/a><\/p>\n Throughout all of this, God hovered politely.<\/p>\n There was a literal, biblical God in Sunday school classes.\u00a0 On occasion, the Sunday school superintendent, Miss Dudley, beckoned us to come to the \u201cbosom of God.\u201d This raised nervous laughter among the boys for Miss Dudley, indeed had a bosom: not bumps like some of the 6th<\/sup> grade girls were developing or breasts like the calendars in the back room at the Standard Oil filing station.\u00a0 Beneath that starched blouse laid a structure of architectural significance.\u00a0 Finding God in there seemed scary.<\/p>\n Miss Dudley also bade us to become \u201cfishers of men\u201d by marching forward and reciting Bible verses.\u00a0 Successful recitation earned you a little metal fish strung on a ribbon.\u00a0 Some girls had many fish dangling from their ribbons.\u00a0 But I quickly realized that becoming a fisher of men was an optional activity, and\u2014like most of the boys\u2014I opted to fish elsewhere.<\/p>\n The God of these stories and verses was distant though historic.\u00a0 We learned about the Tribes of Israel, about their slavery and oppression.\u00a0 No one mentioned the modern parallels: that schools in Indianapolis were segregated; that most of our houses conveyed by restrictive real estate covenants that prevented the descendants of our slaves or Israel\u2019s tribes from living in them.<\/p>\n Anyway, the general idea was that God\u2019s work was pretty much done.\u00a0 Jesus came down, taught some lessons, healed a few people, offended mean Harrod, and got himself killed because he refused to bring Big Daddy in to save him.\u00a0 Then he went back up, and that was mostly the end of things.\u00a0 Some men my father\u2019s age\u2014particularly one who survived Corregidor\u2014spoke about personal encounters with God, but at TAB God was an institution, not a being.<\/p>\n By the 7th<\/sup> grade we had left Miss Dudley behind and went to Mr. Sisson\u2019s class for Sunday school.\u00a0 Mr. Sisson kept order by paying for good behavior with Cherry Cokes.\u00a0 We thought Mr. Sisson was cool, but I can\u2019t remember a thing that happened in his class.<\/p>\n In youth group we learned the difference between true and false gods.\u00a0 A true god was Protestant.\u00a0 This was to be clearly differentiated from a Catholic God, which is why we should not date any of those<\/em> girls.\u00a0 (Having been totally unsuccessful in convincing us not to have impure thoughts, youth group moved straightaway to impure deeds.\u00a0 The list was long.\u00a0 Catholic girls were near the top.\u00a0 Jewish girls, such as object of my 8th<\/sup> grade affection, Nancy Reigenstreif, were beyond the pale.)<\/p>\n True god was also distinguished from godlessness.\u00a0 Communists were godless, socialists were fellow travelers, and Democrats were highly suspect.\u00a0 Joe McCarthy was alive and well, and his influence was strong.[3]<\/a>\u00a0 Almost anything to the left of Homer Caphart[4]<\/a> was a little pink.\u00a0 Jesus, the social radical and movement founder, was nowhere to be seen.<\/p>\n We left Indiana midway through high school for the suburbs of Chicago.\u00a0 There was no Presbyterian Church in town, and the Methodists invited us in.\u00a0 Carl Mettling, the pastor, came to call, and I remember the highly polished black wingtips and the balanced teacup on his knees.\u00a0 Carl wasn\u2019t cool, and I wanted cool above all things.\u00a0 So, church was a holiday thing\u2026. \u201cwe gather together to ask the Lord\u2019s blessing, \u201d etcetera.<\/p>\n My heathen buddies and I did talk about God, however.\u00a0 Dave Stroh, one of my closest friends gave good God talk.\u00a0 We worked as camp counselors together and spent many evenings conversing.\u00a0 He went to Wheaton College and Yale Divinity School and served as a pastor before leaving the ministry for city planning and the law.\u00a0 He lost God for a while, but has found him again.<\/p>\n When Dave went to Wheaton I went to Illinois and found God and cool at the same time. The campus YMCA had on its staff a wonderful man, Ed Nestigen, who filled a young man\u2019s appetite for quest and understanding.\u00a0 The place was full of brilliant speakers and high profile politicians, who were forbidden to speak on campus. The Y was everything the church and not been, God was inquisitive and social, there and the relationship between God and action was on everyone\u2019s lips.\u00a0 People were leaving the cornfields in buses to fight for integration in the South.\u00a0 Stroh went; walked across the bridge in Selma with MLK.\u00a0 You could talk about God at the Y; you could debate about him.<\/p>\n I edited the campus newspaper and thus was allowed to hold court in the coffee room, which was an altogether strange experience for a shy and insecure guy.\u00a0 Great conversations and conversationalists!\u00a0 Kenny Brown and Bill Stevens from the paper were often there.\u00a0 Steve Sample, later the president of USC, wandered in occasionally.\u00a0 Roger Ebert, who later became Roger Ebert, was a contentious regular, as was Bob Backoff, who became a spy.\u00a0 With some regularity Harry Tiebout, the philosopher, would wander through exclaiming that, \u201cthe only culture in this town is ag-ri-culture.\u201d<\/p>\n But mostly there was this very attractive blond.\u00a0 God was God, but Leanne was heavenly.\u00a0 We courted and married.\u00a0 Jim Hine minister of the campus Presbyterian church was our special friend and spirit guide.\u00a0 He counseled us and officiated at our wedding.<\/p>\n Camelot came, and it vanished one November afternoon in the middle of Leon Richard\u2019s lecture on operations research.[5]<\/a>\u00a0\u00a0 The next day Bill Mauldin drew a brilliant editorial cartoon of the Lincoln Memorial sculpture sobbing head in hands.\u00a0 I always felt that that was the real end of adolescence.<\/p>\n Florida and journalism followed, testing the Civil Rights Act, desegregating the schools, witnessing Vietnam start and its escalation pour from the Teletype.\u00a0 A conventional God morphed into a very angry God in my mind, and the evening I edited Seymour Hirsch\u2019s dispatch about our slaughter of civilians in My Lai, I cried real tears in the newsroom and remembered Jesus\u2019 lament, \u201cMy God, My God, why have you forsaken me.\u201d<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n [1]<\/a> \u201cMiddletown\u201d was Muncie, Indiana<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> As far as I can reckon, our campsite was about where Fashion Island shopping center is today.<\/p>\n [3]<\/a> The man who lived next door to us headed the Americanism committee of the American Legion.\u00a0 He was, by his own recounting, a great American.\u00a0 It turned out that he also beat his wife, who eventually left him.<\/p>\n [4]<\/a> Indiana\u2019s notoriously retrograde U.S. Senator.<\/p>\n