Page 19 - MLD Book

closet and helped him fix it. Burrell Farnsley deserves – and will get- a chapter all to himself, but in this context, he had amused himself turning all the lights on in the church for the candlelight service! Ben told him he couldn’t do that, so he got mad, left, and went out to Ben’s car and let all the air out of his tires. It was another freezing night. And speaking of candles, on Christmas Eve, we always had Ned Reiter to read the scripture about “In the beginning was the Word” in darkness before the service started, and so a candle was lighted in the balcony for that. It kept on burning but we forgot about it. After almost everybody had left, a lady called and said she had left her glasses in the balcony, could I go get them. Thankfully, I did!! They were there, and the candle was still burning! Those were the days when we did not have a Christmas Day service, so we all shudder to think what might have happened if that candle had burned on and nobody would be in the church for a few days. Or maybe there wouldn’t have BEEN a church!
I want to pursue the Christmas Eve theme a little more, with a memory of the choir dinners that were always a fantastic part of the dress rehearsal for Christmas Eve music. Over the years, we had numerous chefs, all volunteer, and all wanting to outdo what had been done previously. Milton Moore and John Dillehay had started that tradition about the time that Ben arrived in 1981, and they were wonderful gourmet meals. After they were no longer able, the Rev. Eugene Ward (clergy assistant and organ curator both!) combined with others to feed us well. David Broadhead masterminded the kitchen in some ensuing years, and his offerings were not memorable. Edgar Allen and some of the other choir spouses did some meals after that but I can’t recall anyone else who came in between. Laina Brown came on the scene in later years, and she was a real genius at producing tasty offerings. We did manage to do most of the rehearsing before the dinner, as we knew that the wine would make us think we were better than we were!! I am exceedingly grateful to all those chefs for providing a much-needed social gathering so we could show appreciation to the musicians who really had to work hard. Merry Christmas to all!!
Also in 1984, the powers that be were having a hard time getting people to run for the vestry, a recurring problem actually. So they nominated ME, and along with Whitney O’Bannon, I managed to receive landslide votes. So here I was on the vestry, and that tenure would go on for three terms, with the mandatory year off in between the first and second and third terms, of course. It was an interesting, boring, frustrating, nasty, and even fruitful time that lasted well into the 90s when suddenly a watchdog decided that no staff member was worthy of being on the vestry. Conflict of interest? Confllict for sure by someone interested? When the Erdman regime commenced, he insisted that staff had to be at vestry, but of course with no vote. A couple of years ago, Marion Six insisted that I be nominated again, and after controversy, I was put on the ballot. But a few veterans campaigned against me (I won’t name them here but I know who they were) and I lost!!! Bad ego time, and I never ran again.
I wrote a small booklet for Ben’s fifteenth anniversary in 1996 that is of inestimable value in this my personal epistle because it names each Senior Warden and has that person list what he or she felt were the highlights of their time. For 1983, Dade Luckett remembers that Calvary got its first COMPUTER! I remember distinctly Terry McCoy and Ted Isaacs exclaiming loudly that they had dragged Calvary kicking and screaming into the electronic age! I remember also that I wanted to have one, and as a full time staff member, I should have been given one. But there was perceived to be no money for me to have one, (what else was new) so like many times past and present, I bought one myself! And it wasn’t the last one either. Painfully I must relate that in 2012 I WASN’T EVEN ALLOWED TO TAKE MY