We had never heard a live band before. And certainly not one with guitars and a drum set.  But we could hear the beat long before dad shut down the car engine, even though we had to park a long ways off. That August evening as McGarrity’s tent meeting had drawn a huge crowd, the sight was impressive. T

Jay McGarrity had stopped by our house about 3 months earlier to see if dad would agree to a building project of epic proportions. He envisioned a 3 story dormitory with a large dining room and commercial kitchen,
Could we have it done in time for tent meetings?  He declared it to be “The Lords Work” and therefore he had no doubt as to its timely completion.  There would be no architectural drawings.  But he had crudely sketched out his dream on a piece of yellow ruled paper. It would all be constructed of rough green pine, from the local sawmill    Now a rough pine 2×4 is just that.  Not the shiny light stuff you see nowadays at Lowes. It’s full of water and sap and weights 3 times what a kiln dried board does.  How much would we need per hour? Jay inquired. Noting again how this was the Lords work.   Jay and dad finally settled on $6 per hour for dad who would act as the general contractor and My brother Glen, a strapping 16 year old, came in at $4 and I was sold down the river at a whopping $1 per hour. I’m not sure what the going rate was for 12 year olds in 1980 but that seemed really cheap to me.  The good part was that dad allowed us boys to keep 10% of what we earned.  I hoped to earn enough that summer to buy a new 10 speed bike, the kind with the mountain goat horn handlebars and maybe a new baseball glove from Big K, The only department store within 50 miles. .

So that Saturday afternoon, we loaded tools on the old faltbed dodge , Black and Decker brand, because we were poor . It wasn’t much.  A rickety sears table saw, a couple of squares, homemade wooden sawhorses, and hammers, no air compressor or nail guns for us . The last thing on the truck was an old, round top refrigerator. That weighed around 300 lbs. If I remember correctly.  Dad fastened down the compressor on the refrigerator so it would survive the drive and we headed to the house to study our Sunday school lessons.  Mandatory Saturday Evening entertainment.

Monday morning we were roused from our slumber long before daylight. After a hearty breakfast we roared off, up highway 21 to Ellsinore and then up V roadway to the gravel road lined with blackberry bushes. We pulled in beside a huge pile of cement blocks and started to unload the tools.  The birds stirred and started their morning calls in that damp cool morning air.

Jay came around the corner about then and declared in his booming voice, that we wouldn’t need to be bothered with footers. Every 10 square feet we would level the dirt a bit and set up 2 cement blocks, without mortar, and the building could set on that. I was designated to distribute the blocks, so all day, I lugged them to the spots marked on the ground, and by nightfall on Tuesday evening all the blocks were set

By the end of the 2nd week the floor was about done. No plywood was used, only rough 1×6 lumber. This  took a lot of hand nailing, which I enjoyed. The walls went up rather quickly as Jay had rounded up some free labor from fellow Pentecostals to help us out , and we were fast approaching the start of the roof which would be constructed of hand cut rafters. Trusses would have been way too expensive.  Now to put up the first set  dad decided to tie a wooden extension ladder straight up  at the peak,27 feet off the ground , and asked for a volunteer to climb up the ladder and nail the 2 ends together, and hold them until they could be braced,  I jumped at the chance to prove my worth and inched my way up, i was scared to death but after I was at the top off the shaky ladder for a few minutes, I loved the feeling of being up above the ground and nailed the ends together , and shakily made my way back down to safety. I grew up a little that day, I think, back on that gravel road North of Ellsinore.

The best part of that summer was the Coke machine over by the telephone pole, It was set for 25 cents, and had the glass door along the side, so for the glorious price of 25 cents, one could have a cool refreshing coke in a glass bottle.  I tried to use the round electrical knockouts the electricians left behind as quarters, but the machine would spit them back out or jam, and Raymond, Jay’s stepson, would get aggravated when he restocked the machine. But every now and then he would get generous and give us a round of free cokes while he had the door open.

We got all the rafters up and then the endless task of shingling a huge roof began. That August was one of the hottest, most humid summers I ever remember and by noon the shingles would stick together before you could nail them down. Every hour or so we would take off our shirts and ring out the sweat , and for a brief instant, we were cooler, but nakedness was strictly forbidden and we had to immediately put the shirts back on in case we would inadvertently cause a neighbor lady to lust , or some such nonsense . We would start shingling at the crack of dawn, and knock off 2-3 hours at noon until it cooled off enough for the shingles to separate. The only bright spot was when the redneck neighbor across the gravel road would come out to tinker on his truck, and would crank up some bluegrass on his 8-track nice and loud. We would try to keep time with the hammering, as Ricky Scaggs, and Bill Monroe sang us the ballads of lonesome trains and lost love.  It was a real treat, since we were not allowed to listen to any type of musical instruments at our home, and it made the work a bit more tolerable.

After the  was done and the kitchen portioned off, Jay started to move in kitchen appliances , among them a snow cone maker and a bunch of flavors. Glen and I would load up the ice crusher when Jay was gone and sampled every flavor of ice, and then started on mixing the flavors, or poured Coke over it. We always cleaned up afterward and no one ever questioned the disappearing shots. We would fry up hamburgers on the range for lunch and heat up leftover casseroles mom sent up with us  in the oven as we tackled building dorm rooms, and bathrooms.

We finished up the screens on the dining rooms as campers and vans of pilgrims started pulling in for the week of meetings. We loaded up the saws and refrigerator and pulled out, thinking that was the last we would ever see of the McGarrity’s.  I earned just short of $30 that summer, and the next time we went to Poplar Bluff, I headed for the bike aisle , only to discover that the cheapest 10 speed was $59, so I settled for a softball glove, and bought a used bike at Hoss Conner’s auction house along B highway one evening for $13  It was a 3 speed , locked in 3d gear for all eternity, but it was orange, and it was all mine, bought with blood and sweat by my own 2 hands and that felt good, real good.

 

Later that week dad announced at the breakfast table that we would be going to McGarrity’s tent meeting, just to, “Check It out”.  We dressed up in our Sunday best and all 7 of us piled in the 67 Plymouth Gran Fury  and off we went, windows open so the lucky ones setting by the window could catch a breeze and the rest of us sweated. You could smell the honeysuckle and pine trees as we went up the now familiar road,  Excitement built as we got closer.  We walked up that dusty gravel road toward the most marvelous music beat I had ever heard,  and sidled into one of the back rows of folding chairs  as the band jammed to “I’ll fly away”  I counted at least 4 guitars on stage, and a banjo, keyboard , and huge drum set. And it was LOUD! Delightfully so, I couldn’t stop smiling as I felt the pulse of the bass in my pant leg, I figured dad would be horrified at the evil beat, but he was smiling, and seemed to be enjoying the show. Folks around us were clapping and dancing and generally having a good time, which was so foreign to our church services, which were so quiet and formal you could hear a pin drop.  One rather large lady got to dancing up the aisle, with her beehive hairdo almost grazing the rafters, and the song ended about the time she got to the front.  I leaned over to Glen and asked if he could imagine Sister Arvada doing that at Grandin Mennonite church, and we both had a good laugh.  They sang and clapped and danced for a good 5 or 6 glorious old gospel songs and finally Jay stood up and got everyone calmed down, and  welcomed everyone and stated that there was someone in the crowd that needed introduced, “Brother Yutzy, would you come up front and share a few words?”   I figured dad would herd us all back to the car but he walked briskly to the front and spoke into the microphone,  “You know when Jay first asked us to build the dorm I didn’t think it could be done,” He said, “ It was only by the help of God that it was completed in time for this meeting”  There was thunderous applause, and dad beamed as he walked back to us.

I did not understand the risk he took at the time, taking his family to a worldly meeting like that was serious offence in our church setting. If Brother Troyer, the Bishop, would have found out, dad would have been summoned to a meeting with the church leaders, and at the very least he would have had to  stand up on a Sunday morning   in front of the congregation and confess and promise to never repeat the  sin of attending a service where musical instruments were involved. It’s likely they would also have put him on something called “proving” which meant he would have been banned from communion and holding any office in the church for a period of 6 months.  Basically the Mennonite version of Probation

Jay got back to the business at hand, passing around the offering baskets. As the buckets worked their way to back, the band played “I give it all to you, Lord; I give it all to you.”  And Jay declared that he could feel the Holy Spirit descending down over the crowd just like it did the day of Pentecost 2000 years earlier.  I listened, enraptured by the enthusiasm and joy,  and soaked it all in.

With the money safely collected, Jay announced that we would have a special treat for the visiting evangelist that night, he would be speaking thru a microphone, covered in 18 caret gold.  All eyes then turned to the rear as 2 men walked in carrying a red velvet cloth, and on top, a gleaming gold microphone, which they carefully carried to the front and replaced  the ordinary mic with the shiny new one.  Glen tried to calculate what it would bring at Gearhart’s pawn shop if we could swipe it after the service but it was gone before the band played the last verse of Amazing Grace.

We quietly walked back to the Plymouth in the dark as the whippoorwills sang their love songs, each of us kids lost in our own thoughts. As we  piled into the car and pulled out, following the long string of taillights back to the blacktop road, I could hear the words of that never before heard song, “I’ll fly Away” echoing through my head and I sighed continentally as we drove back  to our white frame rancher  on Highway 21..   It was a welcome respite from our mundane, anxious life on the farm, and us kids never forgot that glimpse of joyous Christianity, that sultry August evening in Carter county Missouri.