We haven’t been disappointed in our decision to leave the “rat race,”
and the advantages of being retired have extended beyond achieving our
objectives of painting, worthwhile outside work, and travel. Being able to “go with the flow” has enabled
us to (1) do nothing of consequence when that was our choice or (2) take
advantage of worthwhile opportunites as they’ve come along.
Arlette’s retirement from the
classroom was permanent, but I didn’t finally escape work in smoky offices
until nearly five years after I retired from TIMEX, for I was
recruited/employed (for two fifteen-month periods) by firms needing accounting
help; those jobs are discussed later in this segment. Other situations arose which delayed reaching some of our
retirement goals, but, in spite of those delays, all were eventually achieved:
·
Arlette
resumed art pursuits even before leaving the classroom, attending workshops and
dedicating one night per week to painting; art-related work has occupied most
of her post-retirement time.
·
Over six years passed after my retirement before the
opportunity for worthwhile outside effort arose, but the work was worth the
wait. I discuss that work in a later
segment (NAILBENDER YEARS).
·
Our travel since retirement has been sporadic, not as much,
perhaps, as we expected. Limitations
thereon have largely been self-imposed, because we haven’t wanted to risk
spending everything we have with life yet to live; splurging on travel could
have left us unable to support ourselves adequately in our declining years.
Despite
self-imposed restrictions, we’ve been (counting travel before retirement) in
all of the contiguous United States – plus Alberta, British Columbia, and
Ontario, Canada; Arlette has visited Alaska and Mexico (San Miguel de Allende), and I
visited Puerto Rico and several European countries while I was employed by TIMEX. We haven’t been travel-deprived, so haven’t
envied retirees traveling in RVs bearing bumper stickers proclaiming, “We’re spending
our children’s inheritance;” we hope we’ll never be forced to spend our
financial “nest egg.”
Our pre-retirement RV travels had never taken us eastward, so our first
post-retirement RV trip was a tour of the southeastern United States. We were ready to leave by late September,
but our departure was delayed several days because our attic was invaded:
Arlette
discovered the invasion when she saw squirrels carrying leafy branch-ends (for their winter nest) through a roof
ventilator from which they had pulled away the screening. I replaced the screening with heavier
material, only to find I had trapped the squirrels inside. Mama Squirrel,
however, found a way out through a “whirlybird” vent; she was soon coming and
going as if her first route had never been discovered.
I screened
off her new passageway while she was outside one morning and beefed up the
screening over every other opening I thought she might try to enter. She was frantic when she found she couldn’t
return to her family. She ran down the
roof to its edge just above the boxed eave she had selected for their home (and
where she knew her “children” to be), then hung from the roof by one foot as
she stretched over the fascia and looked at the under side of the soffit, only
to find nothing but solid materials.
She finally gave up, sat in a nearby tree, and fussed – uttering the
gnashing/chittering sound peculiar to upset squirrels.
Three baby
squirrels were trapped in the attic; their nest was at the south end of the
front eave of our carport – a place I couldn’t reach from inside the attic – so
we borrowed three traps from a state agency, which I baited and set across
ceiling joists, as close to the babies as I could get.
Only one
squirrel took the bait, so I decided to open the boxed eave at the end, then
provide the squirrels some way to reach the ground – but I didn’t want to
provide an access to the attic for Mama, so I needed to trap her first.
I took the
trapped baby squirrel into our back yard, baited another trap, then placed that
second trap beside the one containing Baby.
Sure enough, in trying to get to Junior, Mama entered the second trap
and was caught. I could then
concentrate on the other two babies.
I opened
the end of the eave, leaned a long (dead) tree branch into the opening, and
backed off to watch. One squirrel
quickly appeared at the opening, saw the free world, ran down the branch to the
ground, and was soon out of sight. The
last of the three babies was not so brave, but he finally crept cautiously out
on the limb, and ultimately reached the ground.
I closed
the eave, we took the trapped baby squirrel and his mama several miles out
Kanis Road and released them in a heavily wooded area, Arlette took the three
traps back to the agency from which she had borrowed them, and we left for
Myrtle Beach, South Carolina the next day.
Arlette painted most of the week we stayed at Myrtle Beach State Park,
after which we traveled the Atlantic
coast southward to Miami, crossed the Everglades, came up Florida’s west coast,
and stayed near the Gulf coast as we crossed Alabama and Mississippi on US 90
and I-10. Interstate 12 took us to
Baton Rouge, where we spent our last weekend before returning home. Our tour lasted a month.
We took photos all along our journey, from which Arlette produced
paintings after we returned home.
Perhaps the best were oil paintings of Christ Church on St. Simons Island, Georgia,
an impressive old structure where both Charles and John Wesley preached; an 18”
x 36” painting has won two “Best of Show” awards, accompanied by significant
monetary rewards.
Our next out-of-state RV foray began in late June 1983,
when Arlette and I traveled to Pewaukee, Wisconsin with Ed
Greathouse and his family for a week of work on a new building for the First
Baptist Church. A crew of fifty-one men
from an Alabama church had framed the structure, decked the roof, hung some
sheetrock, and installed kitchen cabinetry.
A group of men from College Station, Texas were scheduled to complete
sheetrock installation a week or so after our visit.
Ed and I spent most of our week correcting problems caused by
design errors or defective work by the first crew. For example, the entry and exit to the baptistry had been routed
through the choir loft. We rerouted the
stairway beside and behind the loft, so dripping-wet people could exit the
baptistry without being seen and without soaking the carpet. That job alone took a couple of days. We also taped and bedded some sheetrock the
Alabama crew had hung, an effort at which we were joined by Arlette and Marian
(Ed’s wife).
Ed wasn’t retired, so had to leave at the end of one
week. Arlette and I, however, wanted to
explore more of that part of our country, so decided to stay in Pewaukee
through the weekend and the Monday, July 4 holiday, then head further north on
Tuesday. We spent the fourth of July
applying polyurethane varnish to kitchen cabinetry in the new building.
We toured the Door Peninsula, then
drove north on US 41 to its junction with US 2 in Upper Michigan, where we
turned west and followed that highway to Ironwood; we then dropped south on US
51 the length of both Wisconsin and Illinois as we headed homeward. We thoroughly enjoyed (1) the drive along
the Wisconsin River on US 51 and (2) a weekend during which we camped at an RV
park in Portage while we visited the Wisconsin Dells and Madison; Arlette particularly enjoyed an
art show in Madison.
Later that same year (1983) I decided I would see if something could be
done about my damaged nose; I’d been unable to breathe through my left nostril
most of the time since 1947, when my nose was broken (as described earlier in
these writings). I consulted Dr. James
F. Kyser (a local ear, nose, and throat specialist of good repute), to see
whether surgery might help; on October 14, 1983, he (1) repaired the deviated
septum and (2) corrected cartilage damage that had resulted from my
flight into the angle iron above the windshield of the old GMC truck those long
years before.
Aetna Healthcare (through whom I had TIMEX-provided health
insurance) tried to disallow payment for a portion of Dr. Kyser’s surgery
charge, claiming its purpose was cosmetic.
Ed Buczkowski, a banker friend and a member of my Sunday
School class at Calvary Baptist Church, volunteered (while the matter was still
unresolved) to tell Aetna that the purpose of the surgery couldn’t have
been cosmetic, because I looked no better after the surgery than before.
Months elapsed before Aetna finally paid the charges, without
Ed’s “help,” but only after intervention by the TIMEX Industrial
Relations Department.
Ed Buczkowski, the banker friend
mentioned just above, called me some weeks after the nasal surgery and asked if
I would be willing to help a client of his whose business was having accounting
and computer system problems. I talked
with the client, Bruce Oakley, and agreed to try to
help. I reported for duty on December
1, 1983, worked full time for a few months, then cut back to part time (usually
three days per week) as things smoothed out.
Inasmuch as Oakley’s work didn’t demand all my time, I could take off
occasionally to travel or fulfill family obligations during my fifteen months
on the job:
·
I was off a few days after Marty’s oldest child (Stephen)
was born December 23, 1983.
·
I was gone a week when Terry’s second boy (Drew) was born
April 3, 1984.
·
I was away two weeks in October, 1984 – visiting, with Ruth
and Virgil, Alabama cousins I’d never met. They lived at Grant, a mountaintop community several miles
southeast of the farm (near Woodville) where Papa Grammer (my granddad) and his
siblings grew up. His sister (Violet)
married Silas (Babe) Wright, a Grant farmer, and had several children, two of
whom (Oscar and Dorcas) still lived, and raised cattle, on the home place
(Dorcas never married; she lived with Oscar and his wife, Kathleen, for all but
the first two years of their marriage); we stayed with Dorcas, Kathleen, and
Oscar during our visit. [Arlette and I
were amused by back-country expressions we heard (e.g., Dorcas and Kathleen
“looked the beans” before cooking them, meaning they inspected them for
contamination, and “I’ll bound you …” meant something like “I’ll bet you …” or
“you can be sure …”). We enjoyed the
visit immensely, so went back to see them several more times in the years
before they died – Oscar first, then Kathleen, finally Dorcas (who was the
oldest of the three).]
·
I worked
little of January, 1985 because of my dad’s final illness and his death on
January 16, the result of prostate cancer (discovered a year or two earlier,
but too late for cure). Arlette and I
spent the last two or three weeks of his life in Tolar, much of which time he
was in Hood General Hospital at Granbury; I took Mother back and forth to the
hospital each day, stayed nights with my dad (the second bed in his room was
unoccupied, so I could stretch out and nap pretty well), and helped with
projects around my parents’ house (e.g., Hugh and I moved their waste water
connection from a septic tank to Tolar’s relatively new city sewer system).
My
dad was in the hospital (because of severe pain resulting from the spread of cancer
throughout his upper body) when Arlette and I arrived in Tolar. His doctor prescribed Dilauded, but its
effect went far beyond the intended pain amelioration – the hallucinations
produced caused him to (1) see imaginary fires and (2) “redo” many jobs upon
which he had worked during his lifetime; my naps were punctuated by his
warnings of fire dangers he “saw” and his calling out instructions to helpers
on jobs he “redid.” He was released
from the hospital after a few days and spent several at home before having to
go back because the pain was so severe that prescription drugs didn’t
help. He was given intravenous morphine
for the intractable pain when he returned to the hospital for the final few
days before his death.
The need for my being at Oakley’s lessened
gradually over the months I was a part of the organization, as “regulars”
became able to carry the ball without assistance. I stayed only a few weeks after returning from my dad’s funeral
before I was freed (at the end of February, 1985) for “real” retirement
activities. While the job hadn’t been
sought, the money earned helped bridge the financial gap between cessation of
income from TIMEX and the start of Social Security benefits.
On August 16, 1985 Arlette and I began a nine-week RV trip through the
western United States and southwestern Canadian provinces. Our route northwestward took us through
Missouri, across the southwest corner of Iowa, through the sand hills along
Nebraska Route 2, and into the Black Hills of South Dakota. We spent
four days in the Rapid City area, during which we saw Custer State Park, Mount
Rushmore, the Needles Highway, and the
South Dakota Badlands.
We ran
into Gerry and Mae Huslage in the Badlands; I hadn’t seen them but a couple of times since
Gerry and I worked together in Abilene.
They invited us to their RV (in which they lived full-time) at the campground,
where we spent two or three hours catching up on news of old friends.
We visited Rapid City’s Calvary Baptist Church Sunday morning and
evening, then hooked up our RV for continued travel on Monday morning. We picked up US 385, then US 85, as we
proceeded northward from Rapid City, seeing the North Dakota Badlands and
Theodore Roosevelt National Park on our way toward Williston, where we turned westward on US 2 and
followed it several hundred miles to East Glacier, Montana; while camped there
we drove the spectacular “Going to the Sun” highway through Glacier National
Park.
We proceeded northwestward from East Glacier to Canada’s Lake Louise, where we spent Labor Day
weekend, then moved on west via Trans-Canada 1 to Canada 97, taking it
southward along the Okanagan River valley and into Washington, past miles and
miles of apple orchards.
At Omak we took Washington 20 toward the Pacific Coast, following it to
its northwesternmost point, where it turned southward and ultimately
intersected US 101 (although the Keystone to Port Townsend segment must be
traversed via ferry, across Admiralty Strait); the scenery along the
north/south portion of Washington 20 was spectacular; I liked Deception Pass
best.
After traveling westward on US 101 about thirty miles we camped at Port
Angeles for a day or two, to see Mount Olympus. Port Angeles was drab (it’s in a “rain shadow,” so receives
little precipitation each year), but Olympic National Park was very pretty.
From Port Angeles, we followed US 101 to its northwesternmost point,
where it turned southward along the Pacific Coast. We traveled the coastal highways (US 101 and California 1) the
entire length of the west coast, all the way to San Diego. Our first weekend stop (we like to set up a
weekend camp each Friday, then resume our travels on Monday) was at Blue
Pacific RV Park, near Ocean City, Washington.
We visited
a Community Church at Copalis on Sunday.
The pastor, Newt Rasor, was aptly named; very
sharp, he quoted from memory all the scripture he used in his sermon, including
lengthy passages from Old Testament history.
I followed along in my Bible to be sure he was quoting accurately. He emphasized the desirability of committing
Scripture to memory, and obviously practiced what he preached. I suspect he memorized material more easily
than most people, but, to his credit, had made the effort to utilize that
talent.
We moved from Ocean City to Fort Canby State Park on Monday, then spent
two or three days riding our bikes around the park roadways, visiting the Lewis
and Clark Interpretive Center, and just enjoying the sights around the mouth of
the Columbia River (e.g., we watched from atop a cliff as a group of Navy Seals
dropped from a helicopter into the water below).
When leaving Washington, we crossed the Columbia into Oregon at
Astoria, then stopped for a day or two at Seaside, where we picked up mail
forwarded to us by Pat and Ken Smith.
Giant, luscious blackberries grew wild all over Seaside.
I told Arlette my dad would have “gone nuts” if he could have seen those
millions of blackberries going to waste along the fencerows. She picked enough in the Riverside RV Park
to make a cobbler, which was as good as any I’ve ever eaten.
We visited a Tillamook cheese-making facility as we
traveled toward Cape Meares State Park (in the Three Capes area); we reached
the park on a Friday, so set up camp for the weekend. We explored the beach and visited an area lighthouse on Saturday,
then attended Tillamook’s First Baptist Church on Sunday; its pastor was an
Oklahoman, and many attendees were transplants from Arkansas and Oklahoma. After Sunday lunch Arlette and I hiked out
Cape Lookout – two and a half miles each way, up, down, and around. The views were spectacular; we could stand
at the base of 250’ Sitka spruce trees and look almost straight down at water
approximately that same distance below.
We traveled on down the coast Monday, and were cruising along the
southern outskirts of Coos Bay late that afternoon when our left trailer spring
broke, dropping the RV body on the tire and locking the wheel, quickly reducing
our speed from about fifty miles per hour to a dead stop; we drug the trailer
onto a side street, where we “camped” overnight. Bert’s RV Sales, less than a mile away, replaced the spring early
the next morning, speeding us on our way toward Harris Beach State Park, near Brookings, where we camped Tuesday
night. We entered northern California
the next day, and stopped Wednesday night at Eureka’s Hidden Creek RV Park; its
recreation/shower facility had a cute sign mounted on the bulletin board:
SOME DAY THERE WILL BE A GIANT EARTHQUAKE
AND EVERYTHING EAST OF CALIFORNIA WILL FALL
INTO THE ATLANTIC OCEAN
I thought that a neat way to
handle outsiders who joked that someday California would fall into the Pacific
as the result of an earthquake.
Many of
the RVers at Hidden Creek campground were permanent or semi-permanent
residents. A couple next to us had a
canning setup just outside their RV’s door, and canned 150 pounds of albacore
the evening we camped beside them (with attendant odors, Arlette says). They described albacore as similar to tuna;
my dictionary says it is “any of a number of salt-water fishes of the mackerel
family.”
We left US 101 at Leggett, the northernmost
point of California 1, the first 22 mountainous miles of which (from Leggett to
the coast) we drove in low and second gears, dodging logging trucks all along
the way. We spent one night at
Macherricher State Park (just north of Fort Bragg), than drove on to San Francisco,
reaching there in late afternoon. Unable
to find an RV park along our route through town, we drove on to Pelican Point
RV Park at Half Moon Bay, twenty-five miles south; the park was clean and nice,
but the most expensive of our trip (about $25).
Our next stop was at San Simeon State Park;
I did some RV maintenance work the next morning while Arlette toured the Hearst
castle, then we went on to Pismo State Beach.
We
had enjoyed traveling the rugged segments of California 1, winding up, down,
and around the hills and bluffs at water’s edge, moving alternately from near
sea level to several hundred feet above, but in view of the water most of the
time. As driver of our southbound
vehicle, I was always near the center of the highway, but Arlette’s copilot
position was often near the edge of precipitous drops toward the ocean; I
laughed as she scooted over toward my side and urged me to be careful. She rode easier as we moved into southern
California, but the scenery wasn’t as spectacular as that further north.
After one night at Pismo, we moved to San
Clemente State Beach, where we’d spent a night back in 1970
when the kids were with us; this time we stayed three days. We met a nice older Christian couple
(Mildred and Gordon Morris) soon after arriving; upon learning that
we planned to spend some time in the San Diego area, they insisted we visit
their home in El Cajon. Gordon also
wanted me to see the museum at the Institute for Creation Research and
meet his nephew, Dr. Henry Morris, the president of that organization.
We camped at the Vacationer RV Park in El Cajon our last five days in
California. We visited with Gordon and
Mildred, did most of the things they suggested, toured the San Diego Naval
Training Center (where I’d gone through boot camp forty years earlier), and
Arlette spent a day at the San Diego Wild Animal Park (while I sat in the pickup
reading a Louis L’Amour book she’d given me for my birthday). We attended Sunday worship at Scott Memorial
Baptist Church, whose pastor was Dr. David Jeremiah,
successor to Dr. Tim LeHaye – both well-known men in Christian circles.
I visited the
Institute for Creation Research with Gordon.
The first display I saw when we walked into its museum were models of
dinosaur footprints found at the Paluxy River near Glen Rose, Texas.
(The prints were exposed as a result of floodwaters in 1936; that
portion of the river is now a part of Dinosaur Valley State Park.)
When Gordon introduced me to his nephew, Dr. Henry Morris, I told him I
had spent several of my growing-up years within a few miles of those dinosaur
footprints (but the area hadn’t been a state park back then, so I’d never seen
them).
We came eastward from San Diego via Interstates 8 and 10 to Van Horn, Texas,
where we turned southeast on US 90; at Marathon we temporarily left US 90 to
camp a few days at Big Bend National Park. We reached
the park at a perfect time, just after a fall rain; much of the desert was
covered with flowers, but immense stretches of barren land reminded me of Papa
Miller’s wasted Big Bend “investment” back in 1920 (I discussed that investment
in an earlier segment about MY MILLER GRANDPARENTS).
We camped
in the Chisos Basin, high in the mountains, over one mile above sea level,
where vegetation was thicker, greener, and taller than on the desert floor;
piñon trees adorned the mountaintops.
Wildlife roamed the Basin campground; we enjoyed watching deer and
javelina hogs amble around our RV.
(While camped at the Basin, we returned to lower levels to explore the
Boquillas and Santa Elena Canyons on the east and west sides of the river bend
for which the park is named.)
The Basin
is about 750 feet deep, near the top of the Chisos Mountains. The campground access road, about a mile in
length, is a steep 15% grade; the climb out was an acid test for our engine and
transmission, but we made it without difficulty.
Leaving Big Bend, we returned to US 90, drove to San Antonio, spent a
couple of days with Marty’s family, then headed for Tolar, intending to visit a
couple of days with my mother, aunt, and uncle, then return home. However, we were delayed a week because the
five of us decided we would visit our Alabama cousins. We traveled by automobile to Alabama and
back, stopping in Little Rock as we traveled each way, but only to use our
house as a motel. After returning to
Tolar, then bringing our RV to Little Rock (including a detour by Chandler to
spend a weekend with Arlette’s mother), we had been gone nine weeks and three
days (August 16 – October 21), the longest period we have ever been away from
home.
Marty and Physina asked me (while Arlette and I were in San Antonio
during the just-described trip) to write an accounting systems and procedures
manual for use in their new computer systems and consulting business;
they wanted written material to provide small clients who needed help in
setting up accounting systems. I spent
most of November and December fulfilling their request.
While writing the manual I received a call from Peggy Doyle, a former
co-worker at Oakley’s, asking me if I could help with accounting for the
liquidation of Hollis & Company, a local
industrial supply house which had fallen into bankruptcy. I told her I needed to finish the writing
job I was doing for the kids and spend some time in San Antonio helping them
with their new business, but would call her when I returned to Little Rock, to
see if my help was still needed.
When Peggy
called she said Jim Jenkins, manager of the Hollis liquidation, had
asked her if she knew of an accountant who might be available to help him; she told
Jim she had worked at Oakley’s with a retired CPA who had left shortly before
she did. Jim asked, “Who was
that?” When Peggy said, “Ken Miller,”
Jim exclaimed, “I knew Ken Miller before you were born,” which wasn’t quite
true, inasmuch as Peggy was nearly thirty, but he and I had been in the same
Sunday School class at Calvary Baptist Church back in the mid-sixties.
The work in San Antonio took several weeks, so I wasn’t free until
March, 1986. As promised, I called
Peggy soon after Arlette and I returned home; she had found another job since
calling me about Hollis’ situation, but I talked with Jim, who said help was
still needed, and put me on the payroll.
I worked full time over the next few
months, setting up a basic records system, then bringing reporting up to date
for activities that had occurred since bankruptcy declaration eight months
earlier; no records or reports of any sort had been produced during that
period. After about three months I had
an automated reporting system going, produced reports for all the months since
bankruptcy had been declared, and got my work schedule cut to only two weeks
per month; I spent those two weeks processing paper (i.e., keying financial
transactions), then running the reports.
Gradually, however, I trained Angie Ballard (a sharp young clerk) to
process the data and run the finished documents. My objective was to work myself out of a job; that happened in
June, 1987, setting me free again.
As had been the case at Oakley’s, I hadn’t sought the work, but pay
from Hollis helped bridge the gap between cessation of my TIMEX salary
and starting of Social Security benefits.
As things
turned out, I might as well have started work for Hollis when first called, for
I don’t think Marty and Physina were able to use the systems and procedures
manual I
produced for them; it may well have been unusable. But, I wouldn’t have been available to help in San Antonio had I
gone to work for Hollis when first invited, so, all in all, everything worked
out well – the manual cost nothing but my time and some printing materials, and
writing it forced me to review things I had learned during college and thirty
years of accounting-related activity; that review, together with computer
knowledge picked up while I helped the kids in their new business, undoubtedly
helped as I developed a system for recording Hollis’ financial activity during
liquidation.
I haven’t earned a penny since I left Hollis in June, 1987, but over
the next few years I did some of the hardest work of my life, by (1) helping
start a new church and (2) working with a voluntary group in constructing
church buildings. The hard work wasn’t
continuous, as is full-time employment, but was fulfilling, and, I hope, of
some value.
The new
church start followed an early fall trip to Alabama and the Smoky
Mountains. We visited Alabama cousins (parked in their back yard), then camped
several days in the foothills west of Smoky Mountains National Park. The
weather was mild, perfect for a fall trip, until we awoke on the morning of
October 15, 1987 without running water - that in the hose supplying our RV had
frozen overnight. We had onboard water,
so weren’t hurt by the freeze-up, but we don’t enjoy cold weather camping, so,
after I thawed the hose, we unhooked from campground facilities, drove through
Smoky National Park from north to south (the mountain scenery was spectacular),
then headed west toward Little Rock, stopping that night at Cloudland Canyon
State Park in northwest Georgia.
We
made it from Cloudland Canyon State Park to Little Rock in one day, arriving
about midnight. Arlette wanted to stop
at nightfall, but we saw no campgrounds or RV parks along the roads we
traveled, so came on home. She claims I
didn’t hunt for a place to stay because I wanted to get home to see the
Longhorn/Razorback football game on television the next day. I wanted to see the game, but would have
stopped overnight had we seen a place to stop along our way (we could still
have gotten home Saturday in time to see the game).
We reached home to find fruition of church-starting plans
that had been in the works for several months.
A small group of people (most from Calvary Baptist) had begun meeting a
week earlier as Pinnacle Baptist Church, hoping to reach and
minister to people in an area west of the city near Pinnacle Mountain.
The group was meeting at 18020 Cantrell Road, just past the
Johnson Ranch, a familiar landmark, in a house purchased with the aid of
Calvary church and Pulaski Baptist Association. The house, with some modifications, was adequate, even nice, for
new church facilities; it was located well back from the highway, had five
bedrooms, four baths, a large kitchen/den, a dining room, living room, space
for an office, and an oversized double garage.
Calvary members assisted with modifications (e.g., wiring for additional
lighting, construction of an outside stairway, and a safety rail across the
back of the second story porch).
Bible study groups met in the dining room and bedrooms;
worship activities took place in the living room initially, but were moved to
the larger kitchen/den when we decided to convert the living room to a
nursery. The conversion required
framing for, and installation of, doors between the former living room and (1)
the front entryway and (2) the dining room; those passageways had originally
been only large cased openings.
Pinnacle members did the carpentry work.
Eight acres of land surrounded the house. Only the front
four acres were used; a fence separated the front and rear halves of the
property, and the rear portion remained in its natural, forested condition. Keeping the used acres neat demanded regular
attention after spring arrived.
Inasmuch
as I was the only retired male member when we began the new church, I did most
mowing of church grounds the first spring, summer, and fall (1988). Ivan Gibbons and John Wallace retired after
a year or two and thereafter did most of the maintenance work (both inside and
outside), because I became involved with a volunteer construction group in
March, 1989; I’ll discuss that work in the next segment.
We eventually decided to convert the large (27’ x 27’) garage into a
worship center that could seat about sixty-five people; the long but relatively
narrow kitchen/den was large enough, but was aesthetically deficient. We men of the church removed the garage
doors, reframed that wall to include a window and doorway, then refinished the
interior; I was involved only with the rough carpentry (i.e., laying
out/framing the wall and doorway, plus installing sheetrock).
The effort
at Pinnacle lasted nearly eight years, but growth was negligible. Additions were offset by reductions;
retaining families with children was difficult, for most of the startup group
were older folks – children were needed to attract other children.
Our
efforts, however, weren’t wasted. In
early 1995 Immanuel Baptist proposed a merger with Pinnacle, with the objective
of establishing a satellite group to reach young adults through a contemporary
worship style (while the mother church would continue its more traditional
style, thus providing all members a choice).
The timing of Immanuel’s proposal was propitious, for Pinnacle had been
without a pastor for several months; we agreed to the merger, it was effected
that summer, a “bubble dome” was erected to accommodate the expected larger
group, and about 125 Immanuel members moved “out west.” Most of the older Pinnacle folks moved to
churches with more traditional worship styles soon after the merger, but
Arlette and I stayed until the summer of 1998, when we moved our membership to
Geyer Springs First Baptist – a church we had liked for years.
Immanuel
West, as the satellite was
called until it became independent of the mother church, was renamed Saddle
Creek Church after separation from Immanuel. Contemporary music has been a major attraction.
Arlette and I (with others) had spent our
first year and a half at Pinnacle in rather intensive effort (multiple outreach
programs, building upkeep and modifications, plus yard maintenance), but were
attracted to an even larger (in our view) opportunity in early 1989 – with a
volunteer group constructing buildings for churches needing new or larger
facilities. We still attended Pinnacle
when we were in town, but the new work kept us away two or three weeks of eight
months of each year we were involved with the construction group.