My Father's Son: The Quest for Vernal Morin

It is the mid 1930s—deep Depression. The Vernal Morin family is trying to get by on rented farmsteads outside Terre Haute, Indiana. They plant acres of tomatoes in the hope of gaining stability; the Terre Haute canning factory doesn’t take their produce and they are forced to move—again.The story of this family during dark days, told by one of Indiana’s best known Methodist ministers, is My Father’s Son: The Quest for Vernal Morin. (Hawthorne Publishing ISBN 978-0-9841456-5-2 softbound $15). Jim Morin, the father’s son, has written the book as a part of his own personal search to understand the father he lost when he was a boy of fourteen. Vernal Morin died in 1937, “worn down” by failures at hard-scrabble farming and being laid off from the Terre Haute power-generating plant, where he was an engineer.Reverend Jim Morin has told his family saga tale through a series of vignettes which reflect the life the family lived in the series of farms and homes in which they lived, the Fourth Avenue Methodist Church in Terre Haute and other familiar scenes in Vigo County. The theme is a search for the true personality and character of his father, who had remained an enigma to him all through the years. Morin’s struggle to understand, and relate to, a father taken before true connection can be made is a universal theme but his religious faith plays a large role in the book.Morin, now in his eighties, served for forty-two years in the ministry in large city and small-town churches in the state. He is still answering the ministerial call on occasion and remains remarkably active.