REQUIEM FOR THE REVEREND

The last of my father Whitie’s brothers passed away last week. His name was Don.  He was the youngest of the four Newland Boys. He died of cancer. He had licked it once before, but not this time. The second youngest brother, Chuck, was the first of the four to go. Like his mother before him, he died of cancer in his sixties. The eldest brother, my Uncle Red, also died of cancer at seventy-five. And Whitie, the second-oldest brother, died at eighty, of cancer as well. You might speculate that it marks a hereditary trend.

With Uncle Don, near Apple Valley, Ohio, 2013, when he was 80. 

Reba Mae, my mother, always said that Don had been like a little brother to her. During World War II, when Whitie and his two other brothers were away in service—my dad in the Army and Red and Chuck in the Navy—my grandfather, Murel Newland, most surely at the behest of my grandmother, Alice Henry Newland, moved Whitie’s new bride out of the apartment she had rented “for the duration” and into their house in the four hundred block of North Defiance Street in Wapakoneta, Ohio, my home town. It wasn’t right, they argued, for her to be living alone as a newly married young woman. Her place was with her husband’s family while he was off at war.

Perhaps they thought she was too young—nineteen—too beautiful and too full of life to resist temptation for years on end. Or maybe they just couldn’t fathom how she could possibly be happy living alone when she was still so young. If so, they clearly hadn’t gotten to know her, because it was only with the greatest reticence that she finally went to live with them.

Don was the only brother still left at home. He was in grade school at the time. He went along with his dad to help with the preemptive move.  

My grandparents, and Don's father and mother, 

Murel and Alice Newland

Reba Mae came from a family with four siblings as well. She had an older brother, Gene, but she also had a sister, Marilyn, who was several years younger than Don, and a little brother, Kenny, who was a few years older. So she was used to being a bit like a second mother-type big sister, and Don was a quiet, likable kid who was content to tag along with her whenever she let him. My mother ended up living for three years with her in-laws while Whitie was overseas. She commuted fifteen miles each day to nearby Lima, Ohio, where she worked at the country’s most important military tank and amphibious vehicle factory, known as the Tank Depot. But having a kind, intelligent kid like Don around was a highlight in her home life when she was off work.

My Uncle Don was only sixteen years my senior. A generation of his own sandwiched between mine and my father’s. When you’re a little kid, sixteen years seems like a lot. But as you grow older, the relationship ends up being more like having an older brother than a young uncle. When he turned eighty, it was hard for me to imagine, even though I was already in my mid-sixties. I think it was for him too. Despite a string of health problems in his latter years, he always looked spry and fit and younger than his years. A few years ago, he told me, “You know, Dan, I’ve lived the longest of anybody in the family except Murel, a lot longer than poor Chuck, eight years longer than Bob (Red) and even a few years longer than your dad. The only one I still have to out-live is my dad.” He didn’t, but he at least tied. Both father and youngest son passed away at eighty-six, thirty-six years apart.

The family moved into that house on Defiance Street when Murel decided to leave the South End of Lima, where Red, Whitie and Chuck grew into their teens and thought of it as home. My grandfather moved the family to Wapakoneta after landing a job with the local office of the Western & Southern Life Insurance Company. For the older boys, it meant leaving behind their pals and their neighborhood and going to high school in a new place. But Don was almost fourteen years Red’s junior, so Wapakoneta was pretty much all he knew and became his home town.

Neil Armstrong's Blume HS senior photo

Don was a contemporary of Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon. That wouldn’t mean anything if Don were from, say, Butte, Montana, or Gnaw Bone, Indiana. But like Don, Neil was from Wapakoneta and they were, indeed, briefly at Blume High School together. After Neil landed on the moon, Red and Whitie liked to tell people that their little brother Don had played basketball with Neil in high school. And then as an aside, they would mutter, “Of course, Don was the team captain.” If you look at their birth dates, however, Neil was three or four four years older than Don, which means that if they did play together, Don would have been a freshman and Neil, part of the senior varsity. But it made for a good story and shows how proud Don’s two oldest brothers always were of him.

Actually, everyone was proud of him. In a family of rough and tumble hotheads, Don was different—quiet, soft-spoken, pensive, a reader, an intellectual, a deep thinker. There was a time when he was finishing high school that his mother began to worry about him. He grew even quieter than usual. He was preoccupied and sullen. And then one day, out of the blue, he told his parents that he’d had a calling and that he planned to go to college and to the Methodist seminary to become a pastor. My grandmother, who was a staunch Methodist, and my grandfather who was as well, but was also a member of the Gideon Society, couldn’t have been happier. It was not only that they were going to have a son who was a pastor, but also that Don would be the first in the family to go to the university.

I remember one summer when Don was at our house a lot. When I refer to “our house”, I’m talking about the house on North Defiance where Don and his brothers had lived when the family moved down to Wapakoneta from Lima. After the war, my grandfather sold that house to my father and built a much smaller one half a block away right at the corner of Defiance and Glynwood. So for Don, it was kind of like coming back home to come visit his older brother. I must have been about four and I can only imagine that Don was already studying at the university and was on summer break. Whitie had apparently talked his little brother into giving our house a much needed paint job so as to make a little “book money” for school. Don was handy and always enjoyed this type of work.

I liked watching him work, moving the ladder from one place to another, scraping off the peeling old paint and then brushing on smooth coats of pure white, stirring a powerful perfume of linseed oil into the air in the process. I followed him all around the property. Eventually, he said he had a gift for me. With that, he handed me a small, clean, but well-used trim brush, a peach can half-full of water and a short length of virgin wooden siding. He told me he needed me to “paint it” for him. He patiently showed me how, dipping the brush into the can of water and stroking it carefully onto the board, always with the grain, never against. As soon as it was dry, I was to brush on another coat. How many coats? As many as it took.

It was a ruse, I’m sure, to get me out from under foot, but I couldn’t have felt more empowered. Over and over I “painted” the wood, fascinated with how the water highlighted the grain, impatient for it to dry so that I could swab on another coat.

I think back now to how different his reaction was to that of, say, Whitie or my mother’s ever gruff father. Both of whom would have ordered me to get the hell out of the way and stop making a nuisance of myself. Don not only got me out from under foot but also made me feel useful and important in the process. When the day’s work was finished, he complimented me on the good work I’d done and said I could keep the brush. It was mine. I kept that brush in a little toy toolbox I got for Christmas or my birthday one year. I think I had it until I was in my teens.

That same summer, I believe, he promised my older sister Darla, who was about seven at the time, a trip to go rock-hunting. I tagged along. Darla was into rocks and insects right then. Her favorite insect was the praying mantis. Her favorite rocks were glassy quartz and smooth Ohio limestone. Don said he knew just where to find such stones.

Studebaker Champion

So one summer afternoon, he picked us up in a Studebaker Champion. I’m not sure whether the car was his or my grandfather’s because both men favored Studebakers for some years. Anyway, off we went on a road-trip, which to a four-year-old seemed like a great distance, but it was probably not far outside of town. At one point, we left the two-lane road and took a wide well-trodden gravel track that was flat for a time, but then steeply dropped and curved around until we were on the edge of a worked-out gravel pit. To me it looked like a wide, beautiful, bright green lake in the middle of a stark, lunar landscape. It was breath-taking and scary. On the other side of the water, I could see the old crew shanty. It had once, perhaps, been a tidy, neatly-constructed building, but it now was the stuff of ghost towns, the yellow paint peeling and powdery, the windows broken, the door standing open off its hinges. There could easily have been a picture of it next to the word “abandoned” in the dictionary.

While Don and Darla walked along the edge of the pit picking up a stone here and a stone there, rinsing the grey dust off of them in the green water, I stood alone, throwing pebbles in to hear them plunk. I eventually got bored and climbed back into the Studebaker for a nap. I awoke when Darla and Don came back to the car. I climbed down from the car and went back to the rear where they were standing and talking as they finished loading geological specimens into the trunk. Don’s patience and tolerance were again in evidence because he had let Darla take possession of every “pretty stone” she could find and the entire bed of the trunk was covered with rocks.

Now, Don, like his father before him, was already showing signs of becoming the heir apparent to the title of King of the Shortcut. And he said he knew one to leave the quarry by another route. He wanted to give us the grand tour. Only thing was, part of that shortcut went through the water in the shallows of the gravel pit and then up the other side to the road. For Darla, who was much more adventurous than I was, this was great fun!

Me, I was scared to death when the Studebaker rolled into the water and started moving across it. And my panic fully set in when the car, with the weight of the stones in the trunk, balked, hunkered down as if pulling through molasses, and then stalled out. Don tried several times to start it again, but it was no go.  In my own ever-dramatic mind, all was lost. This was the end of the line.

My confidence came back, however, when, without ever getting flustered, Don took off his shoes and socks, rolled up his trousers, climbed out into the shin-high water, opened the hood and began meticulously checking everything in the electrical circuit, blowing on this, drying that with his hanky, and finally, getting back into the driver’s seat and pressing the starter. The car ground then roared, to our gleeful cheers, and off we went through the rest of the stretch of water, up the grade and back onto the road home.

I remember attending Don’s first sermon. It was part of his applied seminary training. I must have been about nine or ten at the time. It was during a service at the Grace Methodist Church, downtown on West Market Street in Lima, that Ohio city’s main east-west avenue. I was impressed with church services as a little boy—the candles, the stained glass, the music, the images and the ritual—and this was only the second church I’d ever been in, the other one being the original, century-old First Methodist Church in Wapakoneta, located where the “new” Auglaize County Library stands today. Grace seemed like a vast cathedral by comparison and I was entranced. It was so thrilling to see my uncle, dressed in his vestments, come up the aisle from the back of the nave to the altar, his acolytes in tow, as the pipe organ made the entire sanctuary vibrate with the playing of the Prelude and Introit.

The whole family was sitting in one long pew. My grandparents, my parents, my sister and little brother, my other two uncles and their wives and kids. It was a major family event and we were all dressed in our Sunday finest. I think it was spring-time, or perhaps early fall. I only remember that it was a crisp, bright, blue morning full of diaphanous sunlight when we emerged and shook hands with Don on the steps of the church.

Old First Methodist Church in Wapakoneta

I also recall Don’s wedding to my Aunt Irma (née) Benny. It was the first wedding I’d been to. I was very young. But if I remember correctly, it was at the old First Methodist Church in Wapak. I can’t remember a great deal, but I do recall Don and Irma standing at the altar, exchanging vows and rings and then walking up the main aisle when the ceremony was over.

I also remember the excitement of the reception, which, I think, was held at the Wapakoneta Women’s Club—a former Presbyterian church and today the Auglaize County Historical Society Museum. There was a table with neatly wrapped wedding gifts on it, and another one bearing a small buffet. On the buffet table, there was a tray on which, among other things, there were English-type mint patties. They were white and pastel green and pink, and they reminded me of the silky gowns of the bride and the women in the wedding party. They were soft and smooth and melted in your mouth, and while everybody else was busy chatting, I ate so many that I spent the rest of the day with a stomach ache.

Soon Don and Irma were starting a family of their own and there were three new additions to our clan of cousins—Wes, Tim and Todd—who came in sequence after my little brother, Dennis James. That meant that we were now twelve cousins at every family event, since each of the four Newland Boys had three children, ten boys and two girls in total.

With Uncle Don and Aunt Irma near Apple Valley, 2013

Don’s missions as a pastor carried him to other parts of Ohio, always several hours by car from Wapakoneta, so we saw him, Irma and the boys seldom, but we always made up for lost time when we did, at Christmas, Thanksgiving and summer reunions. Christmas and Thanksgiving were always held at Grandpa Murel and Grandma Alice’s house, but the venues for the other reunions were set for someplace more or less equidistant between Wapakoneta and wherever Don happened to be pastor. As a result, we visited parks and picnic grounds in places none of us had ever known before and enjoyed each other’s company in novel surroundings.     

I doubt anyone was more studious than Don in his regular studies at Ohio Northern (a Methodist university) or later at the seminary. I remember him telling me once that his reading load in the latter part of his seven years of combined studies had been over two thousand pages a week. Although his brothers were fond of saying that their little brother was “a preacher”, Don was, in the truest sense of the word, a theologian. And his curiosity about not just religion and spiritual belief systems, but also about the world at large meant that he continued to be an absolutely prodigious reader throughout the rest of his life. The older he got, the more avidly interested he became in history, social injustice, civil rights, American politics, international relations, current affairs and science. And he did some very heavy reading on all of them.

My sister Darla and I were to become known as “the other liberals” in the family. Don was the first and unlike many Americans, his liberal mindset only broadened with age. Reba Mae always sought to steer the conversation away from politics whenever Don got together with older brother Whitie, because it was sure to end in heated debate.

Even long after retirement, Don still campaigned vigorously for the Democratic Party, often cold-calling door to door—something at which his work as a small-town pastor had given him a great deal of practice—to get people to get out and go to the polls. He and I shared a hardly unique admiration for John and Bobby Kennedy. But we also held the often unpopular opinion that Jimmy Carter was one of only a handful of truly great statesmen and diplomats of modern American history.

More than a preacher, Don was, indeed, a pastor. He was much more interested in his role as a spiritual and social counsellor than he was in the church ritual, and he had no interest whatsoever in the internal politics of the Methodist hierarchy. He was happiest working with youth and at his most uncomfortable with the projects of the local church authorities.

The church, to his mind, should be a vehicle for helping people with their problems and their existential doubts, not merely a Sunday venue in which to “practice” a certain cult within the broader Christian faith. He sought, above all, to demonstrate his humanity. He never waffled, never indulged in bullshit. In questions of faith, he knew that there were no absolutes except what each individual took in his or her heart as unquestionable truths. Religious dogma played no part in his relations with others. What he didn’t “know” from the standpoint of religious beliefs, he admitted, and he was quick to confess that he was as full of doubts as any other human being. The point of religion was to be of palpable help and comfort to the individual and to the community.  

The older he got the more, I think, church bureaucracy got him down. I recall once when I was back from Argentina on a visit, he had planned to get to Wapakoneta to see me. Pastoral duties kept him from it, so he called. We didn’t get to see each other often over the years, but whenever we did, we always had hours’ worth of topics to share. Even when the motives for our get-togethers were, as they increasingly tended to be, deaths in the family.  

He opened that call by asking me what I was doing.

“Well,” I said, “I’m thirty-nine and still trying to figure out what I want to be when I grow up.”

Don laughed and said, “I’m fifty-five and still trying to figure out the same thing, Dan. And I think what I want to be is retired.”

Like most true intellectuals, Don was also imminently practical and valued the benefits of hard work. Like Jimmy Carter, the former president that we both admired, Don developed considerable skills as a home builder and remodeler. He built, remodeled and/or directed the construction of several homes of his own as well as helping others, including two of his sons, build theirs. He learned a great deal about all facets of home-building and very clearly took pride and pleasure in a construction project well-done.

That was the kind of life he sought to build for himself and his family as well, a sound structure, built on solid ground, with the integrity to provide peace of mind and the resilience to last forever.