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J. Ellsworth Kalas (1923-2015) was the author of over 35 books, including the popular Back Side series, A Faith of Her Own: Women of the Old Testament, Strong Was Her Faith: Women of the New Testament, I Bought a House on Gratitude Street, and the Christian Believer study, and was a presenter on DISCIPLE videos. He was part of the faculty of Asbury Theological Seminary since 1993, formerly serving as president and then as senior professor of homiletics. He was a United Methodist pastor for 38 years and also served five years in evangelism with the World Methodist Council.

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What I Learned When I Was Ten

Abingdon Press

Chapter One

I'M AN INSATIABLE READER, so of course I collect a good deal of unverifiable information. Much of it, I can't document later. When in the course of a day one passes happily and without discrimination through newspapers, billboards, philosophical journals, student papers, and maybe a chapter of a novel, one doesn't remember the source of each insight, whether treasured or trivial.

So I can't tell you where I read it, nor if the source was responsible, but I read somewhere that for most people the tenth year of life is the most important. It shapes, perhaps even controls, much of what follows. I suppose the reason this tidbit stayed with me is because it is true to my own experience. Can anything make a theory more surely true than that it has proved true in one's own experience? This is Newton's apple in every soul's search for gravity.

My tenth year was a long one. It began in August l932, when I was still nine years old, and concluded in February l934, just as I reached eleven. Everything that has happened to me in the more than sixty years since then is a product of those eighteen months. A psychiatrist would want to make a case for the influences of the oral and anal periods, and might want even to suggest the possibility of prenatal factors; if so, I would listen appreciatively. But it's that tenth year that picked up all the stuff from the days beyond conscious memory and conjured purpose from them.

Nor is it simply a matter of memory coming alive at that tenth juncture. I can reconstruct several scenes and dialogue from our visit to the Mayo Clinic when I was four years old. And I remember, early in my fourth year (I can date many memories by the houses in which we lived; this is an advantage of living in rental properties), sitting at the foot of the concrete steps of our yard, saying, "Good morning" to each person who walked by. This experience may have prepared me for the long decades of greeting people at church doors on several thousand Sunday mornings. I do wonder why that particular early childhood memory stays with me and how it is that, timid as I was, I dared so to approach each passerby. But with all of the earlier memories, there is nothing to compare with what I think of as my tenth year.

A Simpler World?

As we grow older, most of us insist that the world was simpler when we were young. It's an illusion, of course. The point is, we have hindsight to grasp the past, and hindsight is a great simplifier. It is possible, however, that the world was more accessible in those days. Not in the way that television, fax machines, and the Internet make things accessible now, but in the way intimacy makes life accessible. It was a world where automobiles had running boards, and where—though adults warned against it—you could jump onto the running board to ride a few blocks without asking your friends to let you inside. Soda fountains were accessible too; you could perch on a stool and sip a cherry Coke for a nickel, with the quality varying according to the skills of the soda jerk.

Politicians were accessible too. We didn't have their images on a television screen, but there was a good chance that even presidential candidates would get within driving distance (say, one hundred miles) on one of their whistle-stop trips, where you could see them up close and personal.

The year 1932 was an election year, and an exceedingly lively one. Herbert Hoover's run for reelection was being challenged by a patrician candidate (or so it seemed to us Iowans) from New York, Franklin Delano Roosevelt. We hung over the radio, enchanted by Mr. Roosevelt's patterns of speech, so different from our flat, Midwestern talk. But my father's heart was with President Hoover. After all, Mr. Hoover had been born in Iowa, and besides, Dad was an unrepentant Republican. Poor as we were in the Depression years that followed, Dad never believed that the Democratic Party was on his side. In human relationships, my father was the most democratic person I have ever known. I doubt that there was a prejudiced bone in his body. He needed no lessons in race relations. And although he was a Sunday school teacher and church officer, the prostitutes and small-time gamblers on his laundry route were to him nothing other than human beings who had made a wrong turn. They were, in the language of an old song, more to be pitied than censured. Indeed, I don't know that even pity would have occurred to my father, because pity implies judgment, even if kindly judgment. If he had known Robert Burns, he would have agreed with him, that "a Man's a Man [or a Woman's a Woman] for a' that." But when he voted (as he always did), he voted Republican.

Those were very dark days. When Iowa farmers couldn't get a fair price for their milk, they refused to sell to the dairies and drove caravans of trucks into town to pour their milk into the containers of us city dwellers, for free or for a donation. We were glad to fill our fruit jars and kettles with this very unpasteurized milk. Our fear of germs was subordinate to our shortage of money. There were instances of violence when some farmers decided to sell to the dairies, and bitter feelings ran deep among people who had been neighbors for generations.

Fear ran deep, too. I remember the evening Dad returned from work to tell us he had just learned that Frank had committed suicide the day before. "Hung himself in the barn. I guess he decided it was easier to die than to go through a sheriff's sale." I knew Frank only from seeing him at family reunions—a slight man who looked better fitted to an accountant's office or to teaching medieval English than wrestling milk cans and plows. Now he was like a small side of beef, to be taken down and buried.

Nevertheless, we remembered how to laugh. There was the politician from the South, speaking on a national broadcast so that we got him in Iowa. "My opponent reminds me of the day old Davy Crockett thought he spotted a raccoon up in a tree. He took a shot, and it was still there. Tried again, and it hardly moved. It was only after the third try that Davy realized the raccoon was nothing more than a louse on his eyelash." My father and my brothers-in-law laughed loudly, but the women said, "That's such nonsense!"

If the radios gave immediacy to our news, the daily papers gave permanence. We waited for the delivery boy to throw our copy of The Sioux City Tribune in the vicinity of our porch. As a nine-year-old I looked each evening for the short front-page column by Will Rogers. Poor as we were in the years that began that October 1932, we never stopped getting the newspaper. We had no telephone, and our diet was modest by any standards, but we always had a newspaper. It cost only three cents a day and five cents on Sunday (even less by weekly subscription), but since my father—like many laboring men—earned only a dollar a day (six days a week), after losing his "good" job at the laundry, three cents was significant. Today's fifty-cent newspaper is, by comparison, a bit of a bargain.

At our house, and in the homes of our best friends and family, we had a vested interest in reading the newspaper. We believed that any day the news we discussed in private would become public headlines: the Drake Estate. As in Sir Francis Drake (1540?–l596), the first Englishman to sail around the world, favorite of Queen Elizabeth I, and the most famous sea captain of his day. For our family, and hundreds of others like us in Iowa, South Dakota, Nebraska, and Minnesota, he was the Moses who would lead us out of poverty and into wealth unimaginable.

Sir Francis Drake came to us by way of Oscar M. Hartzell; Oscar Merrill Hartzell, to be exact. For a long time, he was a man of mystery. We knew him for quite a time only by cablegrams sent to his trusted lieutenant somewhere in South Dakota or Nebraska, who then gave the word to other trusting souls for wider distribution. Our point of contact was Audie and Esther Sickels, at Esther's Barbershop, where Dad went for a shave every Saturday night. He did, that is, until he lost his job and had to resort to what we then called a safety razor. This was an appropriate name, by way of contrast with what had been the standard instrument before, the perilous straight-edged razor.

Audie was a wonderfully likable man who lived mainly by virtue of Esther's barbershop. Occasionally he cut a head of hair himself, but it always seemed beneath him. Not that he said so; it just seemed that he was made for more exotic things. Slight of build, with nicely graying hair, he cut quite a figure. He always wore spats in the winter. Spats, of course, kept out the Iowa cold, but they were also something of a fashion statement. My dad, for example, could never have brought them off. Fortunately, he knew it. Mother would say, from time to time, "Daddy, why don't you get some nice gray spats, like Audie's?" He would answer, "They're not for me." And he was right. Audie could have been the model for Meredith Willson's Music Man, except that he never found the right product. He had a remarkable collection of gadgets that he had tried to sell over the years. He was the kind of person who sought out the ads in the small-print section of salesmen's magazines ("SUCCESS IS POUNDING DOWN YOUR DOOR! THE WORLD IS WAITING FOR THIS PRODUCT! NOT A MOMENT TO WASTE!"). It was Audie's misfortune that he found it easier to be sold to than to sell.

And he was sold on the Drake Estate, no doubt about that. Each cablegram that got to him fourth- or fifth-hand was fodder for his portable typewriter. He'd type up the sacred message with numbers of carbon copies; the ones we received were usually dim enough that it was hard to make out the message, but we sought it out as carefully as a team of scholars studying the Dead Sea Scrolls. These were our irregular portions of manna, reassuring us that our investment in the Drake Estate was near fulfillment—yea, at the very door. Then it would be no time at all before we would be filthy rich. Only, we didn't use the word filthy; rich was something so far removed from the world we knew that we wouldn't have thought of associating it with filth.

So let me tell you about the Drake Estate. There may still be time for you to get on board. Oscar Hartzell, who once ran for sheriff of Des Moines, Iowa, claimed to be heir to the estate of the first Queen Elizabeth's hero of the seas, Sir Francis Drake. We didn't know how Mr. Hartzell made this genealogical claim, but we never doubted it. He also reported that he had gotten hold of some sort of will, by which he was staking his claim.

The estate was said to be twelve blocks in the heart of the city of London that Queen Elizabeth had given to Drake out of her affection for him and her gratitude for what his conquests had meant to England. By the early l930s, when Mr. Hartzell began his project, the property was estimated to be worth $22.5 billion. And that was long before the dot-com days, when no one knew what a billion dollars was.

But there was a problem. Mr. Hartzell had to prove in the courts that he was the rightful heir, and he needed money to wage this legal battle. That's why we folks in Iowa, Nebraska, and South Dakota were privileged to have such an historic opportunity. By investing in Mr. Hartzell's valiant effort, we could get a share of the proceeds. Oscar Hartzell made clear that his heart was dedicated to the common folks, so he sold shares in the Drake Estate at just one dollar each. At first he promised that the payoff would be at least a thousand dollars a share, but as time went by the promise of return went up.

We waited passionately for Audie's carbon copies of the Hartzell cablegrams. I still remember the cryptic message, "IT'S ALL OVER BUT THE SHOUTING." When Dad showed the tiny slip of paper to my brother-in-law Gene, he danced a little jig on the sidewalk in front of our house. My brother-in-law Tom was always more reserved; he simply shook his head in astonishment at the kind of money that would soon be his.

I think it was on the occasion of this particular message that my mother said, "Oh, Daddy, we ought to invest something more!" Dad smiled in the apologetic way that characterized him when all eyes were on him. "Well," he said, "when Audie and Esther showed me this message this afternoon, I went to the finance company and borrowed fifteen dollars [this was before he had lost his job, so fifteen dollars was a week's salary], and bought fifteen shares right away." Everybody in the room praised his foresight. No one suggested that it might be a foolish investment. How could you go wrong, at a thousand-to-one payoff, and probably more—and especially with the end so near that it was "all over but the shouting." In truth, that summer night we were shouting already, out there on the sidewalk.

Mother and Dad never lost faith in the Drake Estate, nor did Audie and Esther and hundreds of others. Oscar M. Hartzell was brought to trial in federal court for using the mails to defraud. The people in our little world were sure that Hartzell's trial was a result of big money interests and government corruption. Some weeks before the trial, while Mr. Hartzell was out on bond, he came to Sioux City to visit with some of his investors. My parents were among the privileged few who got to meet him. They were in awe. When they returned home that evening, they gave me a word-for-word report of the conversation. I remember Mother's special word of praise: "He's just as common as an old shoe." You might think this a derogatory statement. In truth, ordinary folk can pay no greater compliment than to say that someone of true distinction (like an heir to Sir Francis Drake) made no pretenses.

Hartzell was found guilty and went to prison for several years. Nearly twenty-five years later, reminiscing about those Depression years with my father, I referred to the Drake Estate as a hoax. I learned immediately that it wasn't a hoax in my father's eyes. By that time I had gone to college, to graduate school, and to theological seminary, and my father—almost always a soft-spoken man—nailed me with the strongest language I was likely to hear in our working-class home. "You're getting too smart for your own good," he said. This was very possibly a true judgment, but I don't think my attitude toward the Drake Estate was the best evidence.

Like everything else in our lives, the Drake Estate had to get some verification in the Bible. My parents, and most of the people with whom they associated, were simple, pious folk. In some ways I suspect they weren't that different from medieval Catholics in their attitude toward God and life. This is not to say that they were perfect in conduct, but only that their faith was a constant element in their lives. So when they got involved in the Drake Estate, they were delighted to find a reference (an exceedingly thin one!) in their King James Bible.

It was in the front of the Bible, in the eloquent dedication the translators wrote to their patron, King James: "For whereas it was the expectation of many, who wished not well to our Sion, that upon the setting of that bright Occidental Star, Queen Elizabeth of most happy memory, some thick and palpable clouds of darkness would so have overshadowed this Land, that men should have been in doubt which way they were to walk; and that it should hardly be known, who was to direct the unsettled State ..." The translators' dedication goes on to praise God for sending them King James at such a perilous time, but that's not the point of my reporting. My parents and vast numbers of other earnest folks felt that the passing reference to Queen Elizabeth was evidence that the Bible was making reference to the Drake Estate. After all, wasn't it Queen Elizabeth who had sent Sir Francis Drake on his adventures? Nor did they distinguish between the Bible itself and the dedication written by the translators. It was in the Bible, and that was enough.

You can add this story to the thousands of other instances where people recklessly and sometimes artfully have used the Bible to suit their purposes. I suspect I've even seen such scriptural manipulation in sermons. I remember the afternoon the deaconess from our little Methodist Church stopped for a visit, and my mother took out our Bible to explain how the Drake Estate had a place in Holy Writ. It is much to that deaconess's credit that she gently avoided a showdown with my mother; the error wasn't likely to affect her salvation, and I doubt that the deaconess could have convinced my mother to see it another way. When one has so many dreams riding on a point of view, one won't give up that point of view without a fierce, angry struggle.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from What I Learned When I Was Tenby J. Ellsworth Kalas Copyright © 2006 by The United Methodist Publishing House. Excerpted by permission of Abingdon Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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