In this faded photograph, my father’s kneeling in front of a (heated!) revival tent, with his preaching Bible spread across an open palm. My father said his hands were anointed by God, as evidenced by the fact that when he pressed that open palm on worshippers’ foreheads, their eyes rolled back and their bodies went stiff as corpses. He called that being “slain in the Spirit.”
Revival Poster in a storefront theatre, 1955
This photograph pre-dates me, but not by much. Over time, the lettering has faded to the point where some of it’s illegible, but here’s what my father’s Pentecostal revival poster says:
COMING! Nation’s Leading Miracle Evangelists
Liberation Night! Demonology: What is demon power
Where are the 144,000? Predictions of Coming Events
I can’t identify the evangelist on the left, but my father’s on the right. Can you make out the line at the very bottom?
I know very little about my Great Aunt Eleanor, but these artifacts sure paint an interesting portrait!
Eleanor (“Nelly”) was born in Nottingham, England in 1887. She–along with many of my maternal grandmother’s family members–emigrated to West Brookfield, Massachusetts in 1916. Years later, Nana told us stories later about the WWI German submarines that chased their ship across the ocean, but at the time of their passage, the United States hadn’t yet entered “The War to End All Wars.”
People described Nelly as “high-spirited” and “adventuresome.” She and her husband, Allen T. Godfrey, were nothing if not enterprising. That’s what I heard tell.
When I steered my Nancy Drew roadster down bumpy roads, I found evidence of that.
The Golden Rule Lunchroom, about 1927 (via West Brookfield, MA Archives)
Whoa, Nelly!
She died the year before I was born, which makes me wistful in this remembering. I think we might’ve shared some things in common. And oh, the family secrets we could spill, over afternoon tea!
Allen and Nelly Godfrey, 1946
Although she fashioned herself a writer, Nelly didn’t leave to future generations any poems, journals or books. She did, however, enter lots of contests, many of which she won. “Duz Does It All” was my great aunt’s award-winning slogan for a laundry detergent company.
Wartime was hard for everyone, with more than enough hardship to go around. Gasoline and groceries were rationed, and money was scarce. Few people owned automobiles in the small town where she lived. But there were whispers down the lane about a certain relative who very much enjoyed rumbling through the streets of West Brookfield, honking and waving to pedestrians from the driver’s seat of a shiny new Ford. It wasn’t common, back then, for women to slide behind the wheel. But Nelly being who she was, I suspect she felt entitled, being the Grand Prize Winner and all.
I’m picturing all this in my mind’s eye this morning, and oh, what a happy portrait it paints!
1947 Ford, via OldCarAdvertising.com
Portland, Oregon Revival Meeting, August 1966
In researching my memoir, I oftentimes revved up my roadster and slipped into the role of my alter ego, Nancy Drew. I’ve gathered clues from the National Archives; I’ve explored the sites of former tent revivals and churches, long since demolished; and I’ve unearthed numerous artifacts, along the Sawdust Trail.
And so it is, that on this Throwback Thursday (#TBT), I’m recalling that other blogging meme, Thankful Thursday. I unearthed this classified ad in the Portland, Oregonian archives. Like so many other treasures I’ve collected, it could’ve been lost to time and decay, were it not for for the myriad librarians, genealogists and archivists who’ve devoted their time and energies to the preservation of our individual and shared histories.
Here’s another picture of my mother, since this is her birthday week. She’s sitting in the front row, far left, at her high school graduation ceremony. World-renowned evangelist O.L. Jaggers is at the microphone. (World Church, circa 1955. Picture courtesy of Larry Abernathy, O.L. Jaggers’s son, who contributed it to our shared family archives.)
My father’s just 29 years old in this photograph, taken well before my time and stashed among my sister Coral’s belongings for a good many years.. The canvas cathedral’s been lifted into place, and preparations are underway for a Pentecostal revival meeting in Johnson City, Tennessee. Coral is sitting on my father’s lap, eyes keened on the family dog, Chow-Chow, who’s shaking my father’s hand. My brother Roger is lingering in the background, taking in the entire scene as it unfolds.
We lived like nomads when I was younger, so it’s no surprise that only a handful of family heirlooms survived. But when my father died, I found that very hat in his belongings. Or at least, one that’s remarkably similar. It rests on my bookcase, next to my own Rebecca-of-Sunnybrook-Farm straw hat.
Happy Birthday to my father, Clifford Suva, who would’ve been 98 years old yesterday.
First up, some bizarre but really fun pictures of an “alien sighting,” via last weekend’s getaway to Palm Desert.
I love quirky stuff like this, don’t you?
Using the unfamiliar to instill fear, not so much.
This being Throwback Thursday (#TBT), I’m harkening back to a time when that happened. You see, alien beings aren’t a foreign concept for those of us who grew up in the 1960s, when the Space Race was at its peak and tales of UFO sightings ran rampant. It was then, right before President Kennedy was shot, that an evangelist stood at the platform of my father’s nondenominational church in Dallas, whispering conspiratorially to an enthralled congregation.
Dr. Frank Stranges first recalled for us Ezekiel’s prophetic vision of a fiery, whirlwind-driven, wheel-within-a-wheel in the skies–proof, he suggested, of ancient astronauts. Louder still, he spoke of extraterrestrials, come to earth. “The End Times are drawing nigh,” Stranges warned, and he illustrated that belief with a series of grainy black-and-white glossies of Unidentified Flying Objects, pinned in dramatic fashion to a clothesline he’d strung from one end of the platform to the other. “Read it for yourself,” he said, “It’s in the Bible. It’s also in my book.”
4th edition, via ResourceBooks, LLC
Dr. Frank Stranges went on to make a name for himself, in that he became something of a cult figure who authored several books. He also appears in my own book, CAN I GET A WITNESS? Memoir of a Tent Evangelist’s Daughter. Why, you ask? Because aside from that revival meeting in Dallas, Stranges was the assistant minister at a church my father owned for a short time in Oakland, California.
Oakland Tribune Classifieds (Friday, 13 March, 1959)
Say what you will about his theories, Frank Stranges was a great storyteller. He knew how to rub together two sticks of implausibility until they generated light and heat. And so it was that, after forging a link between ancient prophesies and “modern science,” Stranges whirled around the platform, hoisted his Bible above those 8 x 10″ glossies and brought the congregation to its knees with a fiery sermon about sin and redemption, the Rapture and Armageddon.
Did I fall under the spell of his stories? I hope you’ll read the answer for yourself someday…It’s all in my book. Which, by the way, I’ve just recently sent out on submission.