CALLED TO SERVE, Part 5

This blog entry is part 5 of the entry of my Mission experiences.


I remember well a lesson taught to us at the Mission Home in Salt Lake City all those many months earlier. “Don’t expect that you can sit around your apartment everyday and have the phone ring with a convert baptism on the other end”. Well, that is exactly what happened. Elder Frear and I drove back to Yonkers and he immediately went to bed. He had been sick for quite a while, and at one point had spent a couple of days in the hospital. But as soon as he could get up, he was back out doing missionary work. He apparently did too much too soon and was back in bed. The Mission President told him to stay in bed for a few days, and he stayed for over a week. The DLs came over to visit us often, and to take me to the store to get groceries. But other than that I was in the apartment all day, every day for over a week. I read a lot and slept a lot. I couldn’t even telephone contact because we were on message units and each call cost a nickel per unit. Towards the end of my companion’s confinement to bed, we got a phone call. It was the Bishop of the Westchester Ward, the Ward we served in. He had received a phone call from a man in New Rochelle, NY who wanted to be baptized, so the Bishop called us. I took down all the contact information and we called to make an appointment. Nothing helps a sick missionary recover faster than someone calling on the phone asking for baptism!

When the appointed day and time arrived, we drove to New Rochelle and met Brother and Sister Cohen. Brother Cohen was Jewish and his new bride was an inactive member of the Church. The Cohen’s were in their late 40s or early 50s and both had been married and widowed. Sister Cohen was from Boise, but had lived all of her adult life in New York. She has stopped going to Church before she left Idaho. On their first Christmas together, they went to her parent’s home in Boise. There Brother Cohen picked up a copy of The Book of Mormon. Not having any previous contact with, or knowledge of, the Church, he had no negative opinion of The Book of Mormon. He picked it up and began reading. The spirit of the book touched him and after long conversations with his father-in-law, he knew he needed to join himself to this Church. His father-in-law suggested he contact the Bishop when he got home. He did. And the Bishop contacted us…just sitting around the apartment waiting for the phone to ring with a convert baptism on the other end!

Over the next several weeks we taught the Cohen’s the gospel. On the evening of the sixth discussion, they invited us to dinner before the discussion. The sixth discussion is on tithing and the word of wisdom. At dinner Sister Cohen offered us wine with our meal. Elder Frear and I looked at each other, then I explained briefly the word of wisdom and declined the wine. Sister Cohen, somewhat embarrassed, said she thought the Church had done away with the Word of Wisdom.

Brother Cohen was ready to be baptized, so we baptized him. Sister Cohen was already a member, but was much slower to coming around. Brother Cohen accepted the gospel enthusiastically and told the Bishop to put him to work. And he was put to work. Brother Cohen told us that his goal was to get his wife strong enough in the Church that when he was sick and couldn’t attend that she would want to attend without him. We hadn’t even taught them about the Temple! I am sure that as soon as she was ready, they went.

There was one family in the ward who decided to invite the Westchester Elders over for dinner. There were 4 of us serving in the boundaries of the Ward. The couple was Italian and was famous in the Ward for their homemade spaghetti. They had a quite the system. She made the spaghetti noodles from scratch and he made the sauce from scratch. We looked forward to the dinner. The evening of the dinner we rode together to the appointment. When we sat down they served baked chicken, a veggie and potatoes and gravy. We figured that they decided against the spaghetti. We finished and they took our plates. A few minutes later they came out with plates of spaghetti. So we ate some more. After the spaghetti they brought out dessert. She had made a lemon meringue pie and cut it in fourths and gave us each a piece. I have never been so sick in my life. It turned out that they had never fed the missionaries before and heard that missionaries ate a lot of food. They didn’t want us to go away hungry. We went back to our apartment and just lay on our beds.

Westchester County, New York is an interesting place. Located in the county is the town of Briarcliff Manor. Near the town is the Sleepy Hollow Bridge, made famous by Washington Irving in his story, The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. We knew the story of Sleepy Hollow from Walt Disney feature called The Headless Horseman. Our DL’s lived about a half mile from the bridge. I never saw any horsemen there, headless or other wise. Just north of Westchester County is the location of West Point, although I never got up there. The Westchester Ward was a cross section of the area. There were blue collar types who attended the ward, as well as white collar, professionals, and even members of the entertainment industry. One fellow in the ward was a producer or director for CBS Television in New York. He was in charge of many of the soap operas of the day. In those days it was all broadcast live. Another fellow was a chiropractor and the missionaries had a standing appointment with him every P-day. He had a good testimony, although he didn’t attend regularly. There were several medical doctors in the ward and they would give him a hard time because they thought his medicine was quackery.

One lady who stands out was Melva Niles Barborka. She was a Broadway performer and was in many plays in the 1940s and 1950s. She was a soprano and sang beautifully. To a 20 year old, she was old, but as I think back, she was in her early 60s. Brother Barborka was a movie producer and I have seen his name in the credits of some church movies over the years. Melva loved the MOTAB and she loved hymns. She made an album of hymns she recorded with Robert Peterson, another Broadway singer and member. They sold the albums as a building fund project, but gave one to me, autographed. See the following website.

http://www.heartrisemusic.com/Artists/PetersonR/ThingsLovely/index.html

We baptized a lady, and for the life of me, I cannot think of her name. She was an older lady and was French, although she was from Belgium and not France. She was a widow and really quite well to do, but she was working as a housekeeper for a family in Scarsdale. After her husband died she went back to Belgium for a visit. While there she got very sick and had to be hospitalized. In the hospital she was treated with morphine for pain and became addicted to it. So they had to leave her in the hospital to get her off the meds. She was in the hospital for several months. While there she ran thru all her available cash as she was there nearly a year longer than she had planned. She had a lot of real estate holdings and other investments in Illinois, her home. Communications being what they were in the 60s, and being an older lady, she was not up on technology, such as it was. She had no idea how to access her money. Wanting to return to the United States, she met a couple form Scarsdale who happened to need a housekeeper. They agreed to pay her passage back to the United States if she would work for them for a year. And since she had worked hard all her young life in Europe, she took the offer. Upon returning to the US, she went to Illinois and got her affairs in order and returned to Scarsdale to work out her contract. The Elders met her and taught her the discussions. I got there in time to baptize her. She loved the Church and the Missionaries and took the Elders to dinner every Thursday night. We always went to a fancy restaurant. Elder Frear and I felt bad that she always paid so much for dinner. So one night we suggested that we go to a Chinese restaurant. We walked in; she walked out and took us to an expensive French restaurant.

After dinner we took her to a new members fireside that was held in a member’s home every Thursday night. After the fireside she took us to Nathan’s World Famous Hot Dogs for a late snack. Usually I had a roast beef sandwich or one of Nathan’s famous hot dogs. She loved Nathan’s hot dogs. It was the only place she would eat that didn’t cost a fortune.

The Stake Mission President was in the Ward and held an investigators fireside at his home every Sunday evening. He had developed a 12 lesson cycle for investigators and new members to be involved in. You could come in anytime and never be behind. There was no starting point, no ending point. It was a pretty effective tool. He wrote it all up and submitted it to the Presiding Bishopric, suggesting that they think of coming up with something like that for the whole Church. Don’t really know if it had anything to do with his proposal, but a couple of years later the Church came out with the new member lessons. The original new member lessons were twelve in number.

Shortly after my arrival in Yonkers there was a blizzard of major proportions. It literally shut New York down for the day. It was also transfer day, but we had been told the day before that we had no new Missionaries coming to our area. A new bunch of Missionaries had arrived and normally would have headed out to their areas of assignment later that day. Our Zone had no transfers, and since we couldn’t do any Missionary work we decided we would go see a movie. We wanted to see “Is Paris Burning”. (We rationalized that it was appropriate because it was about a true event and contained actual news real footage.) In the end, though, only Elder Frear, Elder Riding (DL) and I wanted to go. A phone call told us the theater was open and the start time of the movie. The DL’s junior companion, Elder Webb, didn’t want to go. The other Elders in the district were going over to the Church to play basketball, and he wanted to do that. So the other Elders were going to stop by and pick him up. We waited and waited, but they never came. We finally got a hold of them and they were going to come and pick up Elder Webb, but they had been delayed because they had to dig their car out of the snow before they could go to do their laundry. If we were going to make the start of the movie, we needed to go. So we coordinated with the other Elders to be sure to pick up Elder Webb; and then left Elder Webb at our apartment, waiting for his ride, and went to the movie. When we returned later in the afternoon, Elder Webb was at the apartment waiting for us. What he told us made our blood chill. Right after we left, the Mission President called. He asked for Elder Frear. When Elder Webb told him he wasn’t there, he asked for Elder Pritchard. Not here. Elder Riding. Not here either. Then who is with you Elder? Elder Webb then told the story of our going to the movie. The President praised Elder Webb for upholding his principles and not going to the movie. Then Elder Webb told him he was waiting for the other Elders to go play basket ball. The Mission President had wanted us to come into the Mission Home and pick up some of the new Elders to put them up for the night.

The next day was transfer day and we ended up having to go into the Mission Home and face the music. We got there expecting the worse, but nothing was ever said to us. As it turned out, other Elders had committed a greater infraction of the rules. These Elders, including a former AP, decided to tour the mission and visit members they knew, before they headed home. All were short timers. These Elders were in Connecticut and had left the previous Sunday right after Church. One of the Junior Companions refused to go, so they left him alone, with instructions not to answer the phone. When the phone rang he answered it. It was President Eldridge. He had called to inform the ZL that transfers had been postponed and not to come into the City. The lone Elder spilled his soul to the President. The traveling elders made it to the Mission Home, braving the elements of the blizzard. The former AP told me that when they entered the Mission Home that the staff avoided eye contact with the Elders. He then turned to his fellow travelers and announced, “Brethren, we’ve been found out”. All the missionaries were transferred to New Jersey.

By the time we made it into the Mission Home, our infractions must have seemed minor to what the President was dealing with the preceding day, plus trying to get all these new Missionaries out to the field. I figured I would never be a DL, but time heals all wounds and I was later called to be a District Leader.