My brother says I have blocked out most of my childhood memories. He must be right because I've had to ask him about many things I couldn't remember. Lots of people have had unhappy experiences while growing up but apparently I didn't handle mine very well. In my high school senior year, 1943, I joined the Navy and reported for duty after graduation. I served for 3 yrs. and 3 months as an aircraft mechanic and gunner on a torpedo bomber.
While in the service, I skipped church until I married in September of 1945. Neither of us had made a commitment to Christ but Nita, my wife, did influence me to resume church attendance. I confess that "religion" and the bible were, and continued to be, mysteries to me for a long time. All that, what I considered "stuff," about blood and lambs, etc., simply didn't register with me.
Nita was from Oklahoma and wanted to be closer to her family than my home in a small town on Long Island, N.Y. I enrolled in Southwestern Tech in 1946 and tranferred to the OU school of architecture the next year.
Our first few years of married life were quite stormy mainly because of my immaturity. I had seen 5 divorces while growing up and Nita and I had agreed before marrying that, no matter what else happened, we would never divorce. That agreement was sorely tested and I give her all the credit for the ultimate success of our marriage. After graduation in 1951 we moved to Houston. By now, we had 2 children and one year in the big city convinced us to move to a smaller town, Lufkin, 120 miles north of Houston.
We had no idea what momentous changes were ahead for us. If someone had asked what had brought us to where we were in 1952, we probably would have shrugged and said it was the result of a series of choices and decisions we had made. On the surface that appeared to be the case. It hadn't occured to us that God might have had something to say about it.
God bless you
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