Saints in Newport Tenn and Bethany in Gaffney; Bethel and Bethany

   Come back to this next week as it will need some edits and refinement.

       Couple weeks ago I turned up the obituary for Paul Rufus James of Newport Tenn. Goodgle it up for background of this blog. He was a choir director for 70 years, four of thos at my dad's first church in the Baltimore community of Parrotsville and Newport Tennessee. I was born there in 1953 when Steve Spurrier was in the fourth grade on the Hill at Newport Grammar School. James was a lifelong friend of my dad coming to his birthday party in 1997. My Dad 's first baptism was his son Freddy who became principal of Cosby High School, made famous in Cormac McCarthy;;s last novel, the Passenger where the protagonist Bobby Western toys with going off the grid to Cosby. 

    INez Thompson,  served Kool-Aid for 10 years or more vacation Bible school at Bethany Baptist on Wilkinsville Road in Gaffney where my Dad was pastor from 1962 to 1978.   we had this two week 10 day vacation Bible school. This memory celebration of two saints   is provoked in part by the cook the goose  ecumenical conference in NE cranny of North Carolina of Virginia and Tenn in the New River vicinity annually for the last seven years  on a farm. Kevin Heffner, the Kidney doctor in Arkansas who has a pine forest and a nice home . His father of Plain Dealing LA father work for the Sunday school board is Todd‘s brother. They’re big fans of Justin Cox, a preacher who interned with Jack Causey in Statesville so there’s that connection to Gaffney though it’s a little bit of a reach 

    I went by the Thompson house last Friday on KNOT T St.. It’s hard to find it. It was closed off two different ways and you can’t get to Jackie Simmons and Chip Sheffield. Can’t get on that street anymore. It’s got a bit tough hill, but it was in that yard my fourth grade , a Sunday,  the fifth grade they invite us over for a very modest charitably, house on that street they invited us over for lunch and we get there and some of their extended families cause of such a big spread. We’re invited up from Pacolet. They hadn’t gone to church that morning when I one of their cousins in law  smoking his Marlboro with his cigarettes wrapped up it is His sleeve and his T-shirt. First time I heard the word politics registered with me as it was an earnest conversation. and then I became enamored with upstate politics with Roger Milliken and his Gaffney associate  John Hamrick and textile Mill workers 

   Paul James  came over to Newport from Warren Wilson school learned that in the obituary in . Later moved his letter from  Bethel Church to  English Creek, he was choir  director song leader for 70 some ideas. He was a good man. He got into local politics on the county commission and his obituary speaks for itself.   Carlyle Marney, the great Baptist Wiseman and intellect came down to Gaffney from Charlotte in 1978 two years two months before he died to speak to ministers and I crashed it and I think Mike Hammett was there but somebody was talking about integrity just a few years after Watergate and he was talking about all the scandals in church life in here and there and somebody ask him so where is integrity in America these days.   and he said he said you preachers see it every Sunday morning when you look out in the congregation, all your churches have five or six people, families that hold it together that tithe give 10% of their income they show up for the services. They have a prayer life. They read their Bible. He said that’s where it is And so it was with Paul James and Inez Thompson, James Broome and Esther Dawkins, and there’s all kinds of others in mom’s hometown I don’t know if he does his daily Bible reading or not but Thomas Barksdale is a good man in the mold of Paul James and Jeff Graves. is a good man and and my friend on the water board in Momma's Hometown of Collinsville Alabama where I lived for thirty years. Peggy Weaver the good Methodist wife of a high school All American quarterback is in the Lamb's Book of life as well