Page 45 - MLD Book

Susie Egger, Jim Hill, Ned, Corky, Joan Wempe, Jon Smith, Since it had been only slightly over a year, we were allowed to begin the process with stage 7. Dick Humke generously agreed to rescue Calvary once again, thank goodness. A Rector Transition Fund was established and we were off and running. And things went well under the steady hand of Dick. By now my job description was officially LAY ASSISTANT. All was well.
walked into the Loft one Monday afternoon and announced that he was going to move a piano belonging to New Performing Arts into the church and begin playing it for the middle service! Just out of the blue! Although the first thing that popped into my mind was a long history of piano music enabling the quality of sacred music to be drawn to a lower level of campy songs, I had enough background to know that first and foremost we needed to keep Dick Humke as long as we needed to in this interim period. So I was not in favor of the idea. One of Dick’s stipulations had been that he only wanted to do two services, 8 and 11. Callie had been facing some parental agitation to institute an abbreviated middle service again, and the compromise had been a morning prayer type service run by lay people. With Steve touting his concern for young people and his great ability on the piano, he wanted to push for a complete service. The honest truth was that he needed a place to store the piano. Melvin suggested Parker, and both Dick and I thought that was settled. Suddenly within 5 days of his initial bombshell approach to me, he writes a letter to the entire vestry accusing me of wanting the middle service to fail and depriving children of a musical education!!! He wrote
that I had been openly hostile and unapologetically
autocratic! And so, after a period of 6 months calm after
Polk, here it began again, with me the bad gal and
everyone involved. Ultimately, we both had to
apologize and Steve wrote another letter saying how
wonderful I was and he hadn’t known all the facts. But it
was a two month ordeal, and bookended the beginning of 2002 with all of the Polk stuff with things that should
Throughout many of the years, a strange character named Debbie Smith has challenged, amused, and frustrated us, especially Dick Humke but ALL of us! She is not all there, having been kicked in the head by a horse, or so she says. She pushes a loaded cart all over downtown and lives at the Puritan, and frequents or calls Calvary VERY often. Still does! He favorite entre is “What can I worry about today?”
In November, Steve Wogaman
have been the job of a few to fix and not everyone else’s
business. And thus began a period where Steve did actually play for a while, until other things became more attractive and they left town for greener pastures. How ridiculous and how very typical of church crises that became mountains instead of molehills.
Although many pleasant things did happen in 2002, the above were two overriding things that colored the whole year in a negative way that would not be surpassed until 2012! I