In 1939 I was baptized and in June, 1940, on graduating from high school I immediately entered full-time service in witnessing activity. That year was a turbulent one for the world and for Jehovah’s Witnesses. World War II was under way, the work of Jehovah’s Witnesses came under governmental ban in several countries and hundreds of Witnesses were imprisoned; in the United States large numbers of children of Jehovah’s Witnesses were being expelled from school for refusal to salute the flag (viewed as a form of image worship); the Witnesses’ stand of neutrality toward war often inspired violent antagonism on the part of those priding themselves on their loyalty and patriotism; vicious mob attacks were starting to spread.
That summer of 1940 our family went to Detroit, Michigan, to attend a major Witness convention. A spirit of tense anticipation prevailed, a sense of being under siege. At the close of the assembly Judge Rutherford indicated that ‘this might be the last assembly we would have before the great tribulation struck.’ When the autumn of 1940 came and I put my summer clothes away, I remember thinking that I would likely never take them out again—that either Armageddon would have come or we would by then all be in concentration camps, like many Witnesses in Nazi Germany.
Mob violence reached a crescendo during the early 1940’s. In Connersville, Indiana, I attended a court trial of two women Witnesses charged with seditious activity (“riotous conspiracy”), simply because they studied Watch Tower publications as part of a home study group. The trial ran five days and on the last day, after night had fallen, the jury brought in its verdict of guilty. On leaving the courthouse, the defense attorney (a Witness named Victor Schmidt) and his wife were violently assaulted by a mob and were forced to walk, in a driving rain, the entire distance to the city limits. On the way the horror of the situation caused Schmidt’s wife suddenly to begin to menstruate.
I had in my car group a Witness representative (Jack Rainbow) who had earlier been threatened with death by some of these men if he returned to “their city.” On arriving at the city limits and there seeing Schmidt and his wife, followed by a remnant of the mob, I felt obliged to take the risk of picking them up and was able to do so. Another Witness had attempted this but only got a broken car window for his efforts. Schmidt’s wife broke out into hysterical screaming when we got her into the car; her husband’s face was bruised and covered with blood from deep cuts where he had evidently been hit with brass knuckles.9 To experience firsthand such raw and callous intolerance left a vivid impression on my young mind. I felt all the more convinced of the rightness of my course with those who were quite evidently the true servants of God.
Later, as a tactic recommended by the Watch Tower Society’s legal counsel, Hayden Covington, a large group of seventy-five Witnesses from the Cincinnati, Ohio area, including my parents, my two sisters and myself, traveled to Connersville in a “blitzkrieg” witnessing effort. With one exception, we all, men, women and children, were arrested and wound up in various jails, being locked up for one week until bail could be worked out. Still in my teens, it was my first time at experiencing the feeling that comes with seeing a massive metal door swing shut, hearing the bolt shoved in place and realizing that your freedom of movement is now taken from you.
Some months later I was in Indianapolis, Indiana, for a superior court hearing involving the Connersville events. My uncle, Fred Franz, a member of the Watch Tower headquarters staff since 1920 and a close associate of Judge Rutherford, was also there from Brooklyn as sort of an expert witness on the Society’s behalf. The local congregation asked him to speak to them one evening. During the course of his talk he began discussing the attitude of so many that the work of witnessing was nearing its end, just about finished. To put it mildly, I was stunned to hear my uncle speak to the contrary, saying that at Brooklyn they were not expecting to close down, that ‘anyone who wanted to send in a subscription for the Watchtower magazine needn’t send it in for just six months—he could send it in for a full year or for two years if he wanted!’
The thrust of his remarks was so contrary to the comments of the Society’s president at the Detroit assembly that it seemed clear to me that my uncle was speaking on his own, not presenting some duly authorized message from the Society. I actually felt like going to him and urging caution lest his remarks get back to Brooklyn and be viewed as disloyal, as having a dissipating, undermining effect on the sense of extreme urgency that had developed. Although then in his late forties, my uncle was a relatively young man compared to Judge Rutherford and I found myself uncertain as to whether to accept his remarks as proper or discount them as the product of an independent, somewhat brash attitude.
Leaving home that year to become the partner of a young fellow Witness in the coal mining region of West Virginia and eastern Kentucky, I found myself in an area where the threat of violence was faced almost on a daily basis. Some mining camps consisted of long wooden “row houses” strung along the highway. At times, upon reaching the last of such a section of houses, we could look back to the point where we had begun our calls and see men and boys excitedly running about gathering a mob.
At the “Octavia J” mining camp in Kentucky, our old “Model A” Ford car was surrounded by a group of angry miners and we were told to ‘get out of there and out of the State of Kentucky and not come back if we valued our lives.’ Attempts to reason only provoked greater anger. We did return a couple of months later and before we got out were shot at and pursued, escaping only by a ruse that led us over back roads and across a mountain until we could finally make our way home. More so than patriotic fervor, religious bigotry seemed to have been the force motivating the miners. Our disbelief of the teaching of a literal hell fire torment (causing young boys to yell out “no-hellers” as we drove by) weighed almost as heavily as our stand toward war.
I found that close-minded bigotry appalling then. I was happy to be part of an organization free from such intolerance.
The summer of 1941 came and, contrary to my expectation, I found myself attending another assembly, held in St. Louis, Missouri. I still remember seeing crowds gather around as Judge Rutherford was driven up to the assembly site in a large car with Hayden Covington and Vice President Nathan Knorr, both men of large build, standing on the running boards as bodyguards. On the final day of the assembly, Rutherford had all the children from five to eighteen years of age seated before the platform. After his prepared speech, he talked to them extemporaneously.
A tall man of usually stern appearance and stern tone, Rutherford now spoke with almost fatherly persuasion and recommended to these children that they put marriage out of their minds until the return of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and other faithful men and women of old who would soon be resurrected and would guide them in their selection of mates.
A free copy of a new book entitled Children was given each child. As a vehicle for developing the material, it presented a fictional young Witness couple, John and Eunice, who were engaged but who had decided to postpone their marriage until the arrival of the New Order so near at hand. In the book, John said to Eunice:
I was then nineteen, and today in my eighties I can still remember the inner emotional stirrings, a strange mixture of agitation and depression, those expressions generated in me. At my age back then, to be confronted with statements of that kind that, in essence, called upon me to make a decision and set aside interest in marriage for an indefinite time, had an unsettling effect. I could perhaps appreciate better what young men contemplating entering the priesthood of Catholicism experience. Of course, the force of the Watch Tower president’s urgings lay in the shortness of time till Armageddon. As the September 15, 1941, Watchtower magazine in describing the occasion later said:
Receiving the gift [the book Children], the marching children clasped it to them, not a toy or plaything for idle pleasure, but the Lord’s provided instrument for most effective work in the remaining months before Armageddon.11
Years later I learned that Judge Rutherford was at that point dyi
ng of cancer. He had been separated for many years from his wife, who was also a Witness and who lived as an invalid in California; his one son on reaching adulthood had shown no interest in the religion of his father. My uncle, Fred Franz, said that the Judge’s failing condition, coupled with his strong desire that the “end” come while he was still alive to see it, motivated many such expressions as those made in 1940 and 1941.
I have thought since that, had the couple in the book been real instead of fictional, their engagement period would have been rather long, in fact, would still be in effect. All the young girls present at that assembly would be well past the childbearing age now, being at least in their late sixties or early seventies. Some of those who were then present as children, however, did loyally follow through on the counsel heard and remained single through what might be called their normal marriageable years on into bachelorhood and spinsterhood.
In 1942, a “special pioneer” assignment in Wellston, Ohio, brought other experiences.12 Another young Witness and I lived in a small trailer house, a homemade “box on wheels” six feet wide and fourteen feet long (1.8 meters by 4.3 meters). It had no insulation whatsoever in the walls and our small coal stove held a fire for at most a few hours. Many wintry nights saw the water in the pail inside the trailer freeze over and it was not uncommon to awaken and then be unable to get back to sleep because of feet throbbing with pain from the cold. We could afford nothing better since, aside from our share of the contributions people gave for literature, we each received as a monthly allowance from the Society a maximum of fifteen dollars.13 During the better part of a year, our main meal of the day usually consisted of boiled potatoes, oleomargarine and day-old bread (half the cost of fresh bread). My partner had an old car but we rarely had the money to put fuel in it.
In this town, too, animosity flared. At one time or another young boys broke every window in the trailer. One night I returned home to find it thrown completely over on its side. I again experienced arrest and spent a night in the local jail. The place literally crawled with bed bugs and, unable to bring myself to lie on the jail bunk, I spent the entire night sitting on an empty tin can someone had left in the cell.
In 1944, an invitation came to attend a missionary school, the Watchtower Bible School of Gilead, for a five-months course. Upon graduation and while awaiting a missionary assignment, I spent a year and a half in traveling work, visiting congregations in a “Circuit” that took in the state of Arizona and a large section of California. When visiting congregations in the San Diego, California, area I spent five nights at “Beth Sarim” (meaning “House of Princes”). This was a large home built by the Society and said to be ‘held in trust’ for the faithful men of old, from Abel onward, to be used by them upon their resurrection.14 Judge Rutherford, who had had some lung problems, spent the winters there during his life. I recall that the place gave me somewhat of a sense of unreality. San Diego was a nice city; the home was a fine, upper-class residence. But I could not see why the men I had read about in the Bible would have any interest in being placed there; something did not seem to fit.15
Assigned first to France as a missionary, I was unable to go due to the refusal of my draft board to grant me permission to leave the country. (Though I had gained exemption from military service as a “minister,” they justified their refusal on the basis of my still being within the age limit covered by the military draft.) Thereafter I was assigned to the island of Puerto Rico (viewed as still within the USA). Before leaving, in 1946, Nathan Knorr, now president of the Society (Rutherford having died in early 1942), talked to a group of us, all young men being sent out to do supervisory work in different countries as “Branch Overseers.” Among other things he strongly stressed that if we wished to remain in our missionary assignments we should avoid anything that might lead to courtship and marriage. The policy was: Loss of singleness means loss of assignment.16
In Puerto Rico it was not long before our “missionary home” group in San Juan consisted of one married couple, seven young girls in their twenties and me, all living in a two-story, six bedroom house. Though I followed Knorr’s counsel and kept very busy (sometimes conducting more than fifteen home Bible studies a week), the announced policy on marriage and the circumstances in the close quarters of the home created pressure that wore ever more heavily on me. Bouts with dysentery, then a paratyphoid infection with its intense spasms of intestinal pain and passage of stools of blood, and later a case of infectious hepatitis did nothing to help. (I worked in the office right through the cases of dysentery and paratyphoid infection and was off only one week as a result of the hepatitis, though I felt so weak I could hardly climb the stairs to the office.) After eight years the combined strain brought me near to a nervous breakdown.
Upon writing the president, I was relieved of my Branch responsibilities (I had not requested this) and was given the option of returning to the States to do traveling work there. I asked to be allowed instead to remain in my assignment in Puerto Rico and was transferred to another town. Though the town, Aguadilla, was one for which I felt no attraction, I had requested it since it seemed the need was greater there.
Within a year or so I was assigned to do traveling work, visiting congregations in the island and in the neighboring Virgin Islands (lying to the east of Puerto Rico).
An added feature was that periodically the Society asked me to make trips to the Dominican Republic where the work of Jehovah’s Witnesses had been banned by the government of dictator Rafael Trujillo. The purpose was primarily to smuggle in copies of Watch Tower literature.17 I did so a number of times and then, in 1955, was asked to try to deliver a petition personally to the dictator. Knowing that people who incurred his disfavor had a way of simply disappearing, I accepted the assignment with a measure of apprehension.
Dominican Dictator Rafael Trujillo
Arriving in Ciudad Trujillo (now Santo Domingo), I sent a telegram to the Generalissimo presenting myself solely as a “North American educator with information of great importance to you and your country.” The interview was granted at the National Palace and I was able to deliver the petition into his hands.18 To my surprise I was not expelled and continued to make my periodic “smuggling” trips without being apprehended.
Then in 1957 all the American missionaries of the Witnesses were expelled from the Dominican Republic in the wake of a wave of violent persecution, many local Witnesses being brutally beaten and imprisoned. A major issue had been the refusal of male Witnesses to do “marching” as required by military training laws, but there was also considerable religious opposition expressed, priests and others making inflammatory statements in the newspapers.
The Society asked me to go in and check on the conditions of the native Dominican Witnesses. I had been in just shortly before to deliver instructions to the missionaries and had brought out detailed accounts of the harsh persecution and these were prominently featured in Puerto Rican newspapers. As we learned from a source close to him, this adverse publicity enraged Trujillo.
Feeling like a marked man, I recall that my first night at a hotel in Ciudad Trujillo I was given a room on the ground floor with French windows right next to the bed. My sense of real danger was strong enough to move me to rig up the appearance of a form on the bed while I slept on the floor behind it. Again, however, I was able to make it in and out without incident and made other trips in the following years.
Later the Society changed its policy on marriage and, thirteen years after arriving in Puerto Rico and now approaching 37 years of age, I married. Cynthia, my wife, joined me in traveling work. Economic conditions in the islands were poor, considerably beneath today’s level. We lived with the people we served, sharing their little homes, sometimes with running water and electricity, sometimes not; sometimes with a measure of privacy, often with very little. Relatively young, we adjusted, though my wife’s health was due to be seriously affected.
Only a few months after our marriage, while serving in the sma
ll island of Tortola my wife fell ill with a severe case of gastroenteritis, evidently from bad water or tainted food. The home we were staying in belonged to a fine West Indian couple with lovable children. Unfortunately the house they were renting was overrun with roaches, a creature that inspires near panic in my wife. At night we regularly checked our bed for any roaches before letting the mosquito netting down. Suspecting that a large box in a corner containing clothes was the creatures’ headquarters, one day I took some insect spray and went to the box and lifted the top garment. I quickly let it down, for the box was alive with what looked to be hundreds of small roaches and I feared the spray could send them everywhere. For added measure a large rat each night entered the kitchen (next to our room and next to the only bathroom), its size being enough to make the tins of food on the shelves move.
In these circumstances my wife now began to experience the gastroenteritis, developing extreme diarrhea and regular vomiting. I was able to get her to the island’s one doctor and an injection temporarily stopped the vomiting. Late that night it began again and this, coupled with the constant diarrhea, brought Cynthia to the point of dehydration. I ran about a mile in the dark to rouse the doctor from sleep and we carried her in his jeep to a little clinic. Her veins had nearly collapsed and the nurses tried again and again before they could finally insert a needle to administer saline solution. She was able to leave a few days afterward but her health was never quite the same. A later parasite infection (whipworm) added to the problem.
We continued in traveling work until 1961 and then were transferred to the neighboring Dominican Republic. The dictator Trujillo had been assassinated shortly before our arrival.
Crisis of Conscience Page 3