ABSTRACT
At the time of my birth, my father was supporting his small family as a Professór of Learned and/or Impracticable Studies (e.g., philosophy, psychology, New Testament Greek) at various small denominational colleges in the Midwest. With the coming of the Great Depression, however, the college where he was teaching collapsed and he had to support us, mostly from the meager pay that he received for pastoring a few small and impecunious churches in the vicinity. As for me, I grew up as best I could. I was a preacher’s kid and small for my age, with no known non-academic talents I can remember. I had no skill in music, athletics, or business. For example, when I tried to start a delivery route for Liberty magazine, the only people who subscribed were a few nice ladies from one of my father’s churches. Any exceptions were dependent on my ability with language-an illustration being the straight “A”s that I got in four years of Latin. In the non-foreign language area of education, the curriculum at the time consisted largely of verbalizations about biology or history or English or whatever, with the exam questions often in an objective format. This enabled me to earn a very nice four-year scholarship at a prestigious university, where I majored in government. It also put me in over my head, I’m afraid. I did manage to stay on the dean’s list, but only by taking a foreign language every semester. The unanimous word from my parents and my dean was that no one had ever escaped poverty by having majored in foreign languages. As I look back to the pre-job miasma of my early years, it occurs to me that I was looking for some combination of five things in a profession:
• a degree of economic self-sufficiency; • opportunities for witness; • a measure of intrinsic enjoyment; • a chance to be not permanently the lowest on the totem pole; • a credible, interesting answer to the question of the ages: “What do you do
for a living?”
