What It Takes (66 page)

And in S.T., Oletha’s dad, the Nazarenes found a compleat churchman: raised on a steady diet of revival, schooled in the Nazarene Academy in Hutchinson, Kansas, where he later served as principal, then president—at age twenty-three. That was the same year he felt the call to preach, and so, in time, he was ordained, and as a pastor and educator, he served the church in another dozen jobs. After his presidency at Bethany College, in Oklahoma (where he wiped out the school’s debt in a single year), he was called to church headquarters, Kansas City—the First Church, the Nazarenes called it—to serve as general secretary, sixth in command of the church, worldwide. There, in comfortable circumstance, he raised his two daughters, Martha and Oletha. Meanwhile, he poured out a steady correspondence to Nazarene churches everywhere; he traveled widely; at home, he hosted a procession of visiting churchmen: deacons, parishioners, preachers, professors—and not just Nazarenes, but Protestants of all stripes. S.T. was surely the most outgoing and open-minded Nazarene in the top leadership. He was a neat man, a careful talker, strict in his doctrine, but considerate and friendly ... he always had a kindly word, and he enjoyed a joke, of the broad slapstick sort. He may have been the best-loved man of the church, and wherever there were Nazarenes, his girls had only to say their names, for someone to answer: “Ohhh! You’re S.T.’s daughter! ...”

Yes, a princess of the church was Oletha Ludwig, and determined to wear that crown lightly, with grace. At that point, at Bethany, she didn’t want to be singled out, even for honors. She was shy, actually—very shy with boys—and her vivacity was a shield to hide that discomfort. It was a ruse of long standing with Oletha, who’d developed a dozen tricks like that, through a childhood on display for all those years, for all those dinner guests, all those eyes looking down the table at her ... when she’d ask a dumb question (that she
knew
was dumb—see?), which made everybody laugh and pay attention in fond and fatherly ways to a little girl who always saw herself in second place.

Of course, to understand
that,
you’d have to know Martha, who was perfect—beautiful, petite, polite, smart, a musical prodigy—and five and a half years older than Oletha, who
never
thought she could stand as the equal of her sister. Oletha was so different: louder, big-boned, with her father’s social and organizational skills, but alas, little of the musical talent. Oletha felt gawky, clumsy (though she was actually quite athletic, once she’d grown into her form). She never thought she was as pretty as Martha, nor as smart. She certainly could not entertain, the way Martha could astonish and charm all those guests, at the piano in the living room, after supper.

What could Oletha do? Well, she could seek approval in a hundred other ways. She could, for instance, shine at school, which she did. It seemed she was president or secretary of everything in her high school, which was a large one: more than a thousand kids, in five grades. Girls did not often run, in those days, for student council president, but she could manage a campaign for a boy, so she did ... and then, next term, she got up the gumption, and ran herself—though she lost out, to a football hero ... but she served as vice president, and as a class officer, on the newspaper, and the yearbook, and the choir, and whatever else. ... On the playground, the kids nicknamed her Bossy—she always hated that, but she
could
organize—and she could chat a blue streak, amiably, volubly, to
anyone
, which Martha, after all, could never do. ... In short, Oletha became a very popular girl.

And when she got to Bethany College—a school no bigger than her high school, in a town much smaller, and less worldly, outside Oklahoma City—well, it was ... no big deal. Many of the students came from farm towns (like Ottawa), and she was from Kansas City—
First Church
. ... She knew more church bigwigs than any of the teachers, probably more than the college president. Their authority struck no awe in her. ... And she’d had all those honors in high school, done all those clubs, all that razzmatazz: she really didn’t have anything to prove. In fact, her one social fear was that people might think she was stuck up, because of her family and all. ...

So when she was named Freshman of the Year, in 1955, Oletha Ludwig said quickly: she had no
idea
why they’d picked her. She was
so
casual,
so
offhand about the honor ... it only increased her campus cachet: Freshman of the Year! And she just shrugged it off!

Of course, no one at Bethany had any idea what a complicated little shrug that was.

When Gary Hartpence was named Freshman of the Year, he wasn’t sure why. He didn’t feel like a Big Man on Campus. Even on a little campus like that. In fact, when he came, he had no idea whether he’d even make the grade ... how could he know?

He felt, in fact, that he was a nobody: his father wasn’t a minister, or a churchman of any kind, and he came from a town no one knew—there were no other kids from Ottawa there. And he wasn’t handsome, or well dressed, or rich—didn’t have a car ... and shy was too mild a word.

But his name got around after the entrance exams: everyone knew everything about everybody in the tiny world of Bethany ... and Hartpence aced the tests—
clobbered
the tests. Of course, the faculty knew that first, and that’s why Prescott Johnson came after Gary.

Dr. Johnson was head of Bethany Nazarene’s philosophy department: tell the truth, he was the department—he and a half-dozen students who were his coterie, whom he’d picked out for their raw smarts, which he meant to turn into a capacity to think. Johnson went through those entrance tests like a major-league scout, culling from each new crop the boys and girls (mostly boys, in those days) who had the talent to make his league. In his league, the game hinged on the fundamental questions of Western thought. Prescott Johnson was a quiet and unassuming man, but a serious teacher of serious subjects, and he meant to make serious students of his boys. He meant to make philosophy at Bethany something more than multiple-choice learning (
Which of the following analogies is found in Plato’s
Republic? ...). He meant to make theology more inquiry than rote.

Of course, that made him something of a subversive at Bethany Nazarene. Oh, everybody recognized that there had to be philosophy—three credits were required. But it shouldn’t interfere with the business of the school, which was propounding the truths of the faith. And here was Prescott, spurring his boys to consider: In what did salvation really consist? ... What was a personal relationship to God? ... What had that to do with religion? ... What was the soul? How might we know? ... What certainty was that? ... How were those assumptions defensible? ...

For Heaven’s
sake
! He was chewing at the foundations of the church!

Prescott was always willing to challenge assumptions—even his own, especially his own. That was the essence of his method, that questioning. And although he was a man of faith (he preached at assemblies, once or twice a term), his practice and profession (and perhaps his profoundest belief) was about rigor in inquiry. So his own readings, and those of his boys, ranged far beyond the safety of the Aristotle-to-Aquinas axis, and into dark, provoking modern realms: Heidegger, Jaspers, Sartre, Kierkegaard. ... There were times when Prescott’s boys could be
seen
leaving his office, carrying Kierkegaard’s slender and dangerous book:
Attack upon Christendom
.

Lord, help us!

Of course, Prescott knew how he was regarded by much of the faculty, and certainly by the administration. There was one time
he
was carrying
Attack upon Christendom
down a school hallway, and he came upon a dean with the Dickensian name of Ripper. And as he passed, Prescott held the book before him with two fingers, like a dirty diaper, murmuring past Dean Ripper: “I am unclean ... I am unclean ... I am unclean.” (Prescott’s humor didn’t much help him, politically.)

But there was no way Gary Hartpence could have known all that when he stood in the registration line and a small man with wire-rimmed glasses and slicked-back hair presented himself:

“I’m Professor Johnson, head of the philosophy department. I’m your adviser ...” (In fact, Prescott had rushed right over when he saw Gary’s test scores—two national tests in the ninety-ninth percentile, a third in the ninety-eighth percentile. Gary was supposed to have another adviser, but Prescott meant to swipe him.)

“Just thought I’d come by,” Johnson said, “see if you need any help.”

“Well, uhm ...”

“Let’s see what you’ve got there.”

So Hartpence showed him, and Johnson began shaking his head. “No, no ... what
you
want is some
philosophy
.”

So by the time Hartpence got to the head of the line, Johnson had him signed up for twenty-one credits in philosophy—the first year. Gary was going to be one of Prescott’s elect.

But even Professor Johnson could not have known how ripe was this lad for election. What Johnson wanted were young men who would dive into things, take them apart, proposition by proposition, testing all assumptions, to the
root
, where knowledge stopped and belief must take over ... or doubt: Johnson was not averse to honest doubt. And that was always the way young Hartpence went into things, bearing down with that diamond bit, toward the center of the earth, to the rock of inarguable fact, or a truth so self-evidently solid that he could build a mountain of belief upon it.

Even Johnson could not have known how willing Gary was to dispense with the common wisdom; how even as a boy, in Ottawa High, he always had to know
why
.

Nor could Gary have known that in this “prof” (as the students called the teachers in those days), in this adult (who must have looked in the eyes of an eighteen-year-old like a finished being, a man possessed of the truths of life), in this
adviser
, he had found a man who was working off the certainties of his own strict church upbringing, who was wrestling with his own doubt, and his growing contempt for the unexamined dogmas of the Nazarene establishment.

What Gary did know (once he got back to the dorm that night) was that no one else had a schedule like his, so the next day, he went to Prof Johnson’s office, to ask:

“Uhm, do you really think I can do this?”

And Johnson, who was anxious to get out of there, to tuck in an afternoon’s work on his own dissertation, snapped at this crew-cut kid who didn’t even know what he had between his jug-ears: “Of course you can, with a mind like yours. So shut up ... and get to work!”

So he did. Gary Hartpence dived into philosophy as he had into every study in his life, whole hog, to
know
. And he hung out among Prescott’s boys, the most brilliant one or two from each class in the school. There was Don Conway, the sharpest wit among a thousand kids; and Dale Tuttle, the drama star, the campus’s leading man; and Tom Boyd, who was such a dynamic speaker that he was already featured, at age nineteen, in revival meetings in towns nearby—Tom could draw a thousand souls to his
Sunday school
class.

And they all hung out with Prescott, who was the chief character, so deliciously, unflappably individual ... driving through town with his wife and two kids in his ’38 Olds, an old whoopee of a car, which Prescott maintained lovingly, in mint condition, by his own labor. He was not a man of wealth, after all, and he had better things to do with his small salary than to buy new cars ... or new suits. He only had a couple of suits (an old-fashioned double-breasted navy blue was his standard), but he
dressed
—coat and tie, all the time. And then, there was his music. He was always running off to Oklahoma City for the symphony ... his students would baby-sit. But then, too, they were welcome in his home any evening, or he’d come with them to their hangout, Ned’s Pizza, and happily spend his evening helping them work through a philosophic problem. Prof Johnson always had his own ways—and his own opinions, which he shared without fear, no matter how subversive.

He didn’t mind asking aloud why so many cigarette lighters were sold on campus. No cigarettes were sold, of course. No tobacco, no smoking allowed. That was one of their precious rules, which they substituted for personal faith ... so why were they all buying lighters? “It’s not for lighting candles, I don’t think,” he’d say to the chuckling young men at his side. “Last time I looked, we had electric lights.”

He did not mind standing alone—and he was alone, a pariah to the powers—against the theology of the whole college ... which was almost solely devoted to making sure these young men and women were
saved
. That was the shame of the college, at the time, and the Nazarenes generally: from a movement to make a difference in men’s lives, to
change the world
by the power of faith, the doctrine had dried down to a barren set of rules, meant to insure
personal
salvation—as if God were the Great Hall Monitor, making sure the faithful carried their notebooks neatly, lest they plunge forever into the Fires.

The ministerial students were the worst—they were maybe one-third to one-half of each class, and this was their trade school. They came to learn the right words, all the proper formulae ... which they wrote down and memorized from the lectures of their profs. (Woe to the student who tried to mouth those comfortable truths back to Prof Johnson: “How do you know that?” he’d demand. “What does that mean?” ... “Can you support that?” ... Of course, most students got through without attending a single class with Johnson.) The idea was, these students would emerge, to live out perfect, and perfectly unexamined, lives ... until they earned their just rewards in Heaven.

Prescott Johnson could not abide the safe hypocrisy of it. It was selfish. It was obsessive. It was
sick
. For him, as for young Gary Hartpence, ideas had to have force in this world. They had to make a difference in people’s lives—otherwise, what was all the talk about? What did religion mean? What was it for, save to make the world better?