Page 21 - MLD Book

1985 also saw our first woman Deacon in the person of Paula Jackson!!! What a wonderful breath of fresh air and a whirlwind cyclone all wound into one she was! Her first act was to remove the flags from inside the sanctuary, and she never looked back. She supported, enabled, and did hands on work with the food closet and the food bags we gave out jumped to 677 in one year. She learned our process so well that when she was ordained and subsequently moved to St. George’s and then to be Rector of Church of our Savior in Cincinnati (a post she still holds after 25 years!), she modeled her outreach food efforts on what had been done at Calvary. Today we communicate often on the ever-increasing need both parishes are trying to meet. Paula even named the OMS refrigerator MARGARET! (I gave it actually!) She did a little bit of everything at Calvary and even managed to be the first priest in the diocese to have a baby! She also attended the class I taught at the University of Louisville on church service playing, and even outdid some of the organ majors in her quest to learn all she could about liturgical music and service playing literature. Today, she has spearheaded the restoration of an historic organ in her church that will be a model for organists to make music on for years to come. And this in a bilingual parish in a depressed area of Cincinnati. Bravo, Paula – we got you started and you took off!!
FOOD CLOSET!!! It’s the title of this epistle, or FOOD PANTRY, as everyone now persists in calling it!!! Whatever it is called, it is the thing that is now my principal link to Calvary. Soon after Ben came, Calvary became heavily involved in a group of seven churches that had banded together in the seventies called the HELP OFFICE. It arose in an effort these seven downtown churches made to streamline the assistance that they could offer to the poor all around us. Ben became president of the consortium and I was elected the secretary. Even after Ben retired, I was still the secretary. Calvary became the FOOD ARM of the Help Office, as it remains today. As the Food Arm, it was Calvary’s task (privilege) to offer bags of food designed to last for a couple of days and tide over those who couldn’t quite make it for the month. From a few hundred in the first years, it expanded to 677 in 1985, and steadily grew. Who would have thought that in 2020, we would give out that many bags in three WEEKS,
as the covid19 has overtaken our lives? More later on all that, but back now to where we were in 1985.
This year of 1985 saw the new hymnal finally emerge into the pews, although it was labeled Hymnal 1982. Although not agreeing with having to say goodbye to some special ones like the Dogs with friendly faces we sang on Derby Sunday every year, by and large it’s a good hymnal and it did not create the turmoil that the new prayer book did. Many of us
were disappointed in service music now included, for there wasn’t much that was singable. I had written settings
the