Tag: Mom

River Ridge Baptist Church

My mother taught Sunday School at River Ridge Baptist Church in northwest Spokane, Washington. The church doesn’t exist by that name anymore. A church called the Cornerstone Community Church seems to be in the correct place and though photos show a cream-colored building (not the dusky red I remember), the structure of the building coincides with my youthful memory and the photo below. My family moved from Spokane when I was but eight. That I remember it at all counts for something, I guess. But I’m attempting to resurrect a time and place with which I can set memories of my mother, a supremely good-hearted woman.

River Ridge Baptist Church as I remember it. Spokane, WA. June 4, 1961.

Imagine it as I saw it on that day just before my birthday: a deep brick-red. The current building looks clad in maintenance-free siding. Imagine instead twelve-inch boards, rough-hewn such that little children easily could get splinters in their soft hands. I thought the roof had the typical white steeple one sees on a Baptist church, but if it did, it must be on the far hidden end. That would make sense since the sanctuary was back there. To the east side of the current church is a lawn surrounded by a cyclone fence. In the time I’m talking about, approximately 1957-1962, no fence separated the church from passersby, and the where the lawn spreads out a house stood: the parsonage for our minister. I can almost remember the name of the one who was serving when we moved away—he had dark blonde hair and a wife named Dorothy (I think). In the photo above the parsonage lies just out of the picture to the right.

It seems important to set the scene. Mom and Dad would dress themselves and us boys for church of a Sunday morning. My brother and I at this time wore matching medium-gray sports coats and black slacks extending down to our dress shoes. We wore ties, clip-ons to be sure, but ties nonetheless. Perhaps we only dressed that finely for Easter—the photo is only dated “April” but Easter was in April in 1961. I’m reconstructing this detail from several photos reclaimed when my parents died. Mom would wear one of her nice dresses and Dad of course wore a suit.

Dressed so fine for Easter Sunday. That’s me on the left, my brother on the right…and Baba Looey in the center. He was Quick Draw McGraw’s sidekick. Look it up. My brother loved him. April 1961.

I distinctly remember Sunday School from the time immediately preceding our move. Mom taught Sunday School for the primary grades (1-3), and my brother and I were both in it as first and third graders, respectively. One of Mom’s duties was to letter the words for our simple hymns onto lined, kraft-colored sheets which were hung by their tops on a blue frame. It remains one of my salient memories, marveling at the decidedly weird way she printed letters, so different than I was being taught in school. Do businesses or conference still use those pads with the easy tear-off sheets? The ones you can set on an easel? Usually the sheets wind up being placed all over the room as a group activity, likely an “ice breaker”? Our hymn sheets were that size. Two big rings were at the top of the frame and two holes in the sheets enabled one to hang multiple sheets. To sing a particular song, one simply flipped the sheets until you found the one you wanted. Hymns could be written on both sides of the paper—you just needed to turn the frame around. We children would gather around on the floor to sing the hymns. If you look closely at the church building, you can see it has a partial daylight basement level. This was where our Sunday School took place. Rugs were thrown on the concrete floor. Little wooden chairs, just big enough for childish derrieres were also used.

I’ve no idea what my father did while Mom taught Sunday School with one or two other women. I think he likely had a type of Bible study with other adults, because after Sunday School we would have a break, then everyone would troupe upstairs to the sanctuary for our worship service. Imagine this: the floor is covered in industrial-dark-brown linoleum tiles, one foot square. As with the current building, the windows are high on the walls, the better to minimize distractions while the minister is preaching! Putty-colored metal folding chairs (no cushions) would be arranged in rows. Mom and Dad both sang in the choir, and therefore sat behind the pulpit in the altar area. My brother and I, being ages six and eight, were seated in the front row, on either side of the center aisle. This prevented most misbehavior; being fully exposed to our parents’ gaze prevented the remainder.

This exhausts most of my memories. I have snippets of running around the church after a service, of going to the sanctuary on a Saturday with Dad to do something and taking advantage of his careless supervision so that I could look at the full-immersion baptismal tank. I knew all about that because Dad’s father also was a Baptist minister, and had a pair of waders to prove it! I can slightly picture the parsonage and the minister himself. I remember some of the people because my family was very involved with the church. I can see the pink background that stretched up from the baptismal tank.

[this post will be updated as I find more photos]

Howard Bliss Pilcher: an introduction

Howard, 11 weeks; with his mother, Esther Dahl Pilcher. Lansing, MI, August 1925.

Howard Bliss Pilcher entered the world on this date 100 years ago. He died toward the end of 2013. In those 88 years, like most of us, he did nothing to affect the globe or any large portion of it. His impact, again like most us, accrued from those individuals he knew and perhaps from patrons of the two entities which employed him for 39 years. He most affected his wife and sons, Steven (my brother) and Kenneth (me). Seventy years later, to me he remains both enigmatic yet an apparently open book. Whether nature or nurture, his traits run through my being. Whether you knew him matters not. He might have subtly affected you too: every one of us amplifies his presence on humanity simply by interacting with more than one person and making an impression them; it ripples out to touch people we never knew.

Howard Bliss Pilcher—technically a Junior though never named as such—came into the world in Lansing, MI, on June 22, 1925. He moved with his brother and parents from city to city as his father, an American Baptist minister, moved from church to church. The younger HBP served in World War II, completed college, started his career, married, procreated, retired, traveled, and died December 16, 2013. He resembled thousands, millions of other men born around the same time. We each are unique, though, and this unique man fathered and raised me. If we are constituted from our roots, our times, and our experiences, then exploring those roots isn’t so much recounting their life as it is exploring our own. Therefore, we can’t call this biography. I haven’t the time or desire to research the nuances of his history, let alone the history of the times and regions through which he passed. (And thanks for that, too, Dad.) But there will be biographical elements to it, just as there will be aspects of memoir stemming from his inescapable impact on my life, and how the two remain intertwined even after his death. Perhaps reminiscence remains as the most accurate term.

A confession before we start: I’ve procrastinated all my life—a trait which will be explored through the telling of this tale—and this procrastination has left me too little time to complete this piece prior to deadline. My vision for it looms at far too many words to dash off in one or two sessions. Unlike the great gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson, I cannot lock myself in a hotel room for a few days, wire myself on pharmaceutical grade crank, and pound out a semblance of the piece this subject deserves. My physique won’t handle it, my psyche won’t handle, my marriage won’t withstand it, and I don’t see why after seven decades I should start caring about deadlines now. Okay. Let us begin. We’ll start with the thumbnail bio:

The senior Howard Bliss Pilcher, my grandfather, the one my grandmother called “Bliss,” came into the world in 1894 in Urbana, Illinois. The Pilchers traditionally lived in north central North Carolina in Yadkin and Surrey counties, up by the Virginia state line, but the “movin’ bug” ran through our branch of the family as far back as the early 1800’s. Bliss’s father, Wiley Pilcher (1861-1935), moved to Illinois where he fathered all three of his children. Wiley later moved to Fargo, ND, and finally to Libby, MT. All of this perhaps explains why, when he heard the call and enrolled in seminary, he became an American Baptist minister. American Baptists were at one time called Northern Baptists and trace church lineage through the Triennial Convention, the first Baptist convention in the United States of America. In 1845 a pro-slavery faction split off from the Triennial Convention to uphold the institution of slavery. It came to be known as the Southern Baptists. Without researching the topic, we may surmise that many Pilchers would not have been happy with my grandfather’s choice, particularly the majority of them still living in North Carolina. The decision to minister in that denomination reflects the equanimity which characterized my father’s upbringing, and which he instilled in me.

One year after my grandfather married Esther Dahl, my father was born. Lansing, the capital of Michigan, had nearly quadrupled in growth from 1900-1920. Not only were these the Roaring Twenties but this sizeable city (about 67,000) boasted all the activity inherent to a state capital. Thus, he started life in the thick of it: the capitol building stood about a half mile from their house. Not that this would have had much of an impact since by age 3 the family moved to Edina, MN, a suburb of Minneapolis. In between was a short stint in Dover, ID, an unfathomably small and remote place for a minister to travel, perhaps explained because Bliss stepped up from being a youth minister in Lansing to having his own church in Dover. The family lived in Edina for ten years more. At the threshold of my father’s entrance to high school in 1938, his father accepted a call to Havre, MT. (I’ve started to wonder if the “calls” were based more on wanting to stay reasonably close to his father, Wiley. Edina lies less than 250 miles east of Fargo; Havre is 350 twisting miles east of Libby.) Four years later my father graduated from high school. He attended the local college, Northern Montana, for at least a semester, but the reality of World War II loomed. The U.S. Army drafted him, placed him in the Quartermaster Corps, and sent him back and forth across the Pacific guarding supplies.

Howard’s senior photo from Havre High School. 1942.

At least, that’s what I surmise. My father didn’t want to talk about his time in the service at all. We did learn he made some grade of sergeant, but I only called him Sarge once. Let’s just say he made it very clear it would be the last time I called him that.

Howard mustered out of the service, enrolled at Washington State College (now WSU), hired on with the Carnation Milk Company in Seattle, married Louise Bach there in 1952, and they had a baby in 1954…me. We moved to Spokane, WA, when the Carnation Company transferred him soon after my first birthday. My brother was born there. My father accepted transfers back to Seattle (fall of 1962) then to Los Angeles (the beginning of 1964) before he made his dislike of Los Angeles and corporate life known. The company allowed him to go back to the same job he had left in Spokane just two years prior. We will revisit that career-killing decision. Four to five years later, as I approached high school age, he went through a personal crisis, quit Carnation, emptied out his profit sharing account, and maintained the family on that while he searched for a new career path. When a close family friend needed to fill a comptroller position at Sacred Heart Medical Center, he thought of my father who then began a very nice career managing financial matters for the hospital. As his mentor ascended the ladder of responsibility, so too did my father, eventually boasting the title Director of Fiscal Services. He retired after about 20 years of service to this medical center founded by the Sisters of Providence, a Catholic order of nuns.

In retirement he tended roses and indulged the Pilcher penchant for wandering by undertaking numerous road trips with our mother. There were a handful of trips by plane, but he fought claustrophobia for much of his adult life and those weren’t comfortable trips for him. Two trips abroad (England and Spain), a cruise package to Alaska, and near-annual trips to Hawai’i for a while rounded out the travel. They celebrated 50 years of marriage in 2002, quietly marked 60 in 2012, and he died after a sudden trip to the hospital in 2013 which saw him enter the hospital on a Tuesday and pass on the following Monday morning.

What did people think of my father? “That weirdo”? A “super nice guy”? “Honest as the day is long”? I know that he was loved. I know he withdrew toward the end of his life, and one by one most of the people he knew and loved died before he did. I know he worshiped my mother yet had a condescending tone toward her (which I adopted to my detriment). I know many, many superficial things. What I don’t know is the man he truly was, and what force ultimately took over the final five years of his life, making him mentally miserable at times. I know, too, it lurks within me and whispers that it just may do the same when my time nears.

This has been but a snippet, a dry telling of mostly factual matters, an introduction as stated in the title. To explore the man through reminiscence requires setting the stage. Much like reading your playbill before the curtain rises, you’ve now gained the background to enjoy the show (hopefully). In subsequent posts we’ll explore in no particular order and perhaps not under these self-same titles:

  • Ebullience, Positive Thought, and the Eleemosynary Ethic
  • Accruing Guilt: Understanding What Your Father Meant
  • On Humility and Perfectionism
  • Math versus Arithmetic, or Why I Skipped the CPA
  • How To Raise Two Merciless, Teasing Sons
  • …and others which do not yet leap to mind…