Perhaps of interest to educators the world over is the fact that the only thing I remember from the fifth grade is that, once a day, Mrs. Newton would read to us from a Nancy Drew mystery. I became absorbed in these stories even to the extent of checking some additional ones out of the library. It was probably the first time I had actually read anything in order to get information. I wanted to know what was going to happen next. I had to smile years later when I heard Supreme Court Justice O’Connor and Supreme Court nominee Sotomayor talk about how, as young girls, this smart, courageous young Nancy Drew inspired them with an example of a girl capable of doing great things. So it seems that Nancy Drew inspired Freddie Thompson and many young girls everywhere. Young Fred would have been mighty chagrined to know that. He didn’t think about the boy-girl stuff. He just wanted to know what was in the “old clock.”
While I was still in grade school I decided I needed to have my own “walking-around money.” I figured that a fellow never knows when he will run across a business deal that he can’t afford to pass up. Besides, I thought it was past time for me to be able to flash a roll of bills like they do in the movies. So I found a job as a carhop at the local Dairy Dip, the main (and only) drive-in hot spot in town. Although I was basically working for tips, the Dairy Dip, with its heavy traffic, could make me a killing, I figured. The only problem was that the Dip, as advertised, had wonderful hot dogs and shakes, and employees did not get a discount. You can see where this is going. So, although I made a few bucks every night in tips, I was eating more in hot dogs, shakes, and other stuff than I was bringing in. I had become not only an employee of the Dairy Dip but one of its best customers, and I was losing money on the deal.
Actually, that wasn’t the only problem. I worked the last shift at night, which meant that I had to pick up and sweep the entire lot clean every night after we closed—a job the early-shift carhops got to skip. After several weeks of this, I began to question my negotiating and business acumen. I believe that’s the first time the phrase “Surely there’s a better way” occurred to me. I left that job older and wiser (and fatter), with a bad taste in my mouth for hot dogs that lasted for about five years.
During my last years in grade school I may not have been raking in the dough, but I was racking up significant time in the principal’s office for an array of minor offenses. The principal’s outpost was manned by a middle-aged gentleman who always seemed to be remarkably cheerful. My daddy had always said that a man who walks around with a smile on his face all the time can’t possibly know what’s going on. Nevertheless, he was funny and I liked him. Besides, I didn’t want him to know everything that was going on.
At assembly one day during a magazine sales drive to raise money for the school (no, I didn’t sell any magazines), he got on stage and announced that he was not going to wash his feet until we met our sales quota. Everyone laughed uproariously. Great stuff. Unfortunately, he was also what we called “country strong”—something I learned the first time he paddled my rear end and lifted me off the ground. The man had leverage. I never could figure out how such a nice guy could hit so hard. But I knew I didn’t have much to complain about. They say that the professional criminal is caught only about one out of eight times he commits an offense. I figured that was about right.
Boyhood is a series of second chances. In Lawrenceburg it was not based on social or economic standing. It was based on who your parents were, which determined whether you were basically a “good kid” even when you gave every indication that you were not. One preteen night while our parents were visiting at my house, a buddy and I walked down the street and behind Dudley Brewer’s café. There was a big window fan in the back that cooled the café’s kitchen area. We thought it would be a great idea to fill a bottle with water and fling the water into the fan, causing those inside to get a shower. I was the gunner on this mission. I slung the water from the bottle and started running. I heard breaking glass but assumed that it was the water bottle breaking. We ran home, laughing about the now-wet café patrons. We sat down in my yard and were talking when Mr. Brewer walked up. The sound I heard of glass breaking was not the bottle, as I had supposed, but the window that the bottle had gone through. We explained and apologized, but Mr. Brewer was not amused. He gave us a lecture, and as he walked away my heart sank.
Over the next few days, I waited for the guy who owned and ran the restaurant where Dad had coffee every day to spill the beans. It never happened. Finally, my conscience got the best of me and I told Dad. He went to Mr. Brewer to make amends, and I never knew exactly how it was resolved, but since Dad never mentioned it again, my guess is that Mr. Brewer refused payment for the window.
Fifteen years later, Mr. Brewer still owned and operated the Blue Ribbon Café and was still the respected titular head of the Republican Party in the county. When I came back to practice law, he took me under his wing and gave me calm guidance and support. He didn’t remember that incident with the scared little boy to whom he had decided to give a break several years earlier. But I did.
I GUESS I WAS a “strict constructionist” at an early age. Of course, this term, when applied to the Constitution, means that the Constitution means what it says. It should be interpreted as much as possible according to the plain meaning of the document and the original intent of its framers.
In the Church of Christ, we wholeheartedly agreed with this concept. Except it was the Bible that was to be strictly construed. And the original intent was that of God Himself. It was pretty simple, really. You did what the Bible told you, and you followed the example of the early Christians. The scriptures told us to believe, repent, and be baptized. As a kid, while I had considerable difficulties with the English language in school, I learned at least one word of Greek—baptizo, which means “immersion.” When you got baptized, you were immersed in the water. The scriptures definitely did not refer to being “sprinkled,” a risky if not damnable shortcut. So, at the age of thirteen, without notice to my parents, I walked down the aisle one Wednesday night and was baptized.
By the same token, the early Christians were told to sing and make melody in their hearts. There was no mention of instrumental music. So we had none. Neither did we have a choir. Referring to the invidious creeping in of modern technology that preachers often use nowadays, my wife, Jeri, once asked me where the biblical authority was for overhead projectors. I told her not to be a smart aleck.
Every Church of Christ was self-sufficient and independent. The elders of each church elected the preacher and supervised the flock. We had fellowship with other congregations but no centralized authority, regional council, or conference to answer to. It was the next step past “federalism,” I suppose—perhaps a little more like the Articles of Confederation.
When it came to personal conduct, the admonitions were equally straightforward. The Ten Commandments were featured along, of course, with the teachings of Jesus. I had no problems with the Ten Commandments. They didn’t seem to address anything that I wanted to do at that early age anyway. However, I paid especially close attention to other parts of the Old Testament. Clearly, God was someone I did not want to mess with.
At the First Street Church of Christ, the message from the pulpit was not subtle. For years I had no idea what the preacher was talking about, but I knew that it was serious business. Having picked up on the hellfire and damnation part, I remember wanting to be just good enough to avoid it. There was a Heaven and there was a Hell, and the preacher could explain in excruciating detail why Hell was not the better choice. Needless to say, from the time I was a small boy, the Bible teachings and the charismatic preachers I heard on Sundays made a distinct impression on me. I wanted to be a good boy and I most certainly didn’t want to go to Hell. The only real doubt I had about matters of religion, as a child, was the part about living forever when you went to Heaven. Since that is where I planned to go, I had to figure out what it would be like, and I could never get my mind around the concept of living forever. Living
in Heaven for ten thousand years was like you’d just begun, the old gospel song went. I dwelled upon “What is forever like?” and Mom did her best to explain. I suppose she wondered, “What kind of an oddball kid do I have on my hands here? He is not worried about dying or going to Hell. He is worried about going to Heaven.” I resolved this theological crisis in my own mind by deciding that when I got to Heaven, it would all be explained to me. And, anyway, I would be happy because that is what you are in Heaven.
Church doctrine also did not allow for dancing. The joke among the teenagers was that the Church of Christ kids couldn’t go to the dance, so they just had to go “parking” instead. There was more than a little truth to that.
My family was there every time the church doors were open. Sunday-morning Sunday school, then the main church service, then again on Sunday night. Then on Wednesday nights for Bible study. On Sunday mornings, I sat there bleary-eyed with stains of shoe polish on my fingers, in a white shirt with a collar at least two sizes too small and a necktie with a knot my daddy taught me how to tie—the half Windsor, the only knot I ever learned to tie and the one I use today. My eyes were usually firmly fixed on the clock on the wall, but I did pick up a few things. For example, in Sunday school I learned that the gospel meant “good news.” I kept waiting for it.
After services, while the kids ran, played, and occasionally fought in the yard in the front of the church, the men would light up and the women would visit. Whatever social stratification there was in town disappeared at church. I can recall one of Dad’s friends was always trying to get himself and his family invited over to our house for Sunday dinner after services, a notion that Dad was less then enthusiastic about. Half kidding, he’d invariably say, “Fletch, what are you having for dinner?” Dad would always reply, “Company.” And that would be the end of it.
At the time, what I thought was one of the most significant moments of my youth occurred after church one Wednesday night when I tangled with a kid from my Bible class. Joe Plunkett was one year older than I was and as tough as a nail. In high school, we played football and basketball on the varsity together, worked as lifeguards together, and off and on for those four years went at each other when the necessity arose. It seemed like the natural thing to do. That Wednesday night I received a black eye, but Joe cried. I considered that I clearly got the best of the deal, and more important, Dad seemed to think so too.
As I mentioned, I found it pretty easy to be a good boy because I had no interest in stealing, telling any (major) lies, or coveting my neighbor’s wife, whatever that meant—or even dancing, for that matter. Occasionally, I had reason to wonder if it might be harder to keep the faith when I grew up. Usually, it had to do with listening to some of the older boys behind the church after services were over. It was sort of a celebration that they had survived another church service, as they laughed and joked. For example: Moses came down from the mountain and said, “Boys I’ve got good news and bad news. The good news is I got him down to ten. The bad news is adultery is still in.” I laughed hard. And I secretly thought I should find out what the heck they were talking about.
Actually, the sins of the flesh were relevant in more than one way during my boyhood church days. I remember, as a very young boy, the hushed whispers about the preacher who had inspired my folks to join the church but later partook of the forbidden fruit in the form of one of the church ladies.
The lesson of the need to separate the man from the message stood me in good stead years later when we learned that the preacher, a good friend of our family who had married my high school sweetheart and me, was convicted of transporting stolen tractors across state lines. (I also recall that my telling her straight-faced that his conviction invalidated our marriage fell pretty flat.) It seemed that we were getting a little more than our share of public virtue and private vice right from our own pulpit. It occurred to me later on, however—what better preparation for politics?
A lesson the political class could have learned from our church’s elders was the policy of rotating out our preachers every few years. On one occasion when one of our preachers was told by the elders that his services would not be retained the following year, he got up in the pulpit the next Sunday morning and basically said, with a quivering voice, that the Lord and most of the flock wanted him to be in Lawrenceburg and therefore he was refusing to leave. This of course was heresy, but he did have many supporters enamored of him—we called it “preacheritis.” There were angry exchanges among the parishoners and threats of fisticuffs in the churchyard before this would-be revolution against the elders was put down. However, it did result in a split in the church, with the preacher and his followers forming a new church closer to town. As far as we were concerned, this kind of preacher was memorialized in a song by Charlie Daniels years later when he sang, “Jesus walked on the water and I know that it’s true. Sometimes I think that preacher man would like to do a little walking too.” Soon our little congregation, having been purified though diminished in size, was back to normal. Some of our friends in the more “sophisticated” Catholic and Presbyterian churches, with whom we carried on constant good-natured, if serious, arguments over doctrine, referred to our congregation, after our split, as the poorer of the two congregations. One of their more clever blasphemers was heard to say, “Their church is so poor that their members have to bring their own snakes on Sunday.”
Actually, the policy of rotating the preacher every few years seemed to work quite well. It kept the congregation from becoming too attached to any one personality, and it kept the preachers on their toes, knowing that they’d need a good recommendation for their next job. This was my first encounter with term limits. And it made good sense to me. The fact that neither politicians nor preachers seemed to like the idea also appealed to me.
Mom and Dad enjoyed having a good time, and people especially gravitated to Dad’s humor. Preachers were no exception. (Perhaps the possibility of getting a good deal on a used car didn’t hurt the relationship, either.) For the most part, these preachers were good men having to move their families from pillar to post in order to preach the gospel. Many of them were exceptional orators, which Dad admired. Several even had a good sense of humor. They and their families were often at our house for cookouts and ice cream made from a hand-cranked freezer. They would match my dad story for story, recounting tales from their days on the road, like the time one preacher was invited over to a family’s house for Sunday dinner and saw Grandma, who was carrying a lower lip full of snuff, inadvertently drop a big load of it into the batch of coleslaw that she was preparing. He said he hadn’t had coleslaw since.
As I look back on those early Lawrenceburg years growing up in what some might call a fundamentalist church, I am struck by how much has stayed with me and become a part of the way that I view life, even after my “enlightened” years as a philosophy major in college and my sojourns in Washington, Hollywood, and New York. It doesn’t have so much to do with doctrine, and it certainly did not always keep me on the straight and narrow path. But my early lessons had penetrated pretty deep and had an irritating way of reasserting themselves at inconvenient times.
On a more fundamental level, the notion of sin and redemption sums up the story of mankind. We can rise to great heights ethically and morally, and we can achieve great accomplishments. There are hard-and-fast rules that we can hold on to in a constantly changing world, but we are prone to err and “miss the mark.” We must constantly work at doing the right thing.
The most important things that you learn as a child are the things that you don’t realize that you’re learning. And in my case, in later years, much of this had political significance for me. Man’s weaknesses made necessary the checks and balances our founders were wise enough to see were needed in our system of government. This insight also gave us our system of federalism. Power in the hands of man must be dispersed. One does not have to be sold on the concept of original sin in order to conclude that we should all be m
ore than a little modest with regard to most human endeavors. Mistakes, miscalculations, and corruption have too often accompanied the ambitions of individuals as well as governments. The nature of man and the principles that had survived the ages seemed to me to be a much more reliable yardstick than the fads and intellectual brainstorms of the day. For me, this was the essence of conservatism and still is.
Perhaps surprisingly to some, having political views based on childhood religious influences does not necessarily translate into approval of a lot of the political activities of some religious groups. In our church, we drew a clear distinction between the responsibilities of church and state. This was not a legal concept. It was one based upon scripture: “Render unto Caesar …” Jesus and the apostles were not social activists or community organizers. They were in the business of saving souls and changing hearts and minds. I found no historical evidence of the early churches organizing to change any law. To the best of my knowledge, no fund-raising scrolls have been unearthed. Their goals were much more important than that. In all those years growing up, I don’t recall hearing one political reference ever coming from the pulpit. Members could do what they thought they should do in politics, but that was not the role of the church. Neither did the church, as such, have social welfare responsibilities. Oh, to be sure, helping one’s fellow man was encouraged, but it was an individual’s responsibility. As one old-timer put it, “If you want to join the Lions Club, they’re down the road. We’re about something different here.”
Teaching the Pig to Dance Page 4