When I was eight years old, my parents sold their home and shops, built a small mobile home, and moved to Colorado to serve where the need was greater. We settled near Grand Junction, where my parents pioneered and worked part-time at farming and ranching. With Jehovah’s blessing and their zealous work, a congregation was started. There, on June 20, 1948, Father baptized me in a mountain stream, along with others who had accepted Bible truths, including Billie Nichols and his wife. They later went into the circuit work, as did their son and his wife.

MOVING AGAIN

When I was 19, Bud Hasty, a family friend, asked me to join him in the pioneer work in the southern United States. The circuit overseer asked us to move to Ruston, Louisiana, where a number of Witnesses had become inactive. We were told to hold all the meetings each week regardless of how many attended. We found a suitable meeting place and fixed it up. We held every meeting, but for some time, only the two of us were in attendance. We took turns, one presented a meeting part while the other answered all the questions. If the part called for a demonstration, both of us would be on the platform with no one in the audience! Finally, an older sister started attending. Eventually, some Bible students, as well as some inactive ones, began coming to the meetings, and before long we had a thriving congregation.

One day, Bud and I met a Church of Christ minister, who talked about scriptures that I was not familiar with. This shook me up a bit and made me think more deeply about what I believed. For a week, I burned the midnight oil to get answers to the questions he had raised. That really helped me to make the truth my own, and I could hardly wait to meet up with another preacher.

Shortly thereafter, the circuit overseer asked me to move to El Dorado, Arkansas, to help that congregation. While there, I made frequent trips back to Colorado to appear before the draft board. On one trip, some fellow pioneers and I traveled together in my car, and we had an accident in Texas that rendered my car useless. We called a brother who came and took us to his home and then to the congregation meeting. There they announced that we had had a mishap, and the brothers kindly gave us financial help. The brother also sold my car for $25.

We were able to get a ride to Wichita, where a close family friend, E. F. “Doc” McCartney, was pioneering. His twin sons, Frank and Francis, were and still are two of my best friends. They had an old car that they sold to me for $25, exactly what I had been paid for my wrecked one. This was the first time I clearly saw that Jehovah provided a necessity for me because I was putting Kingdom interests first. On this visit, the McCartneys introduced me to a lovely theocratic sister, Bethel Crane. Her mother, Ruth, a zealous Witness in Wellington, Kansas, continued pioneering into her 90’s. Bethel and I were married less than a year later, in 1958, and she joined me as a pioneer in El Dorado.