The tragedy of losing my father made us all the more eager to get to California. But we had already arranged to travel by way of Oak Ridge, Tenn., to see my brother Frank and Betty and their two children. Frank met us in Knoxville and brought us to their home inside the vast complex at Oak Ridge. We marveled at the size of the operation and noted the huge power lines, but did not have any notion of its purpose until we read the headline on Aug. 6 of the following year about the bombing of Hiroshima.

From there we went to Arkansas where Carol's sister Molly was working as director of a USO industrial project, and got a taste of country style living. Then we squeezed aboard the train to Tucson, getting a sample of "Jim Crow" segregation when we found ourselves in a baggage car with black passengers, due to the wartime crowding. In Tucson we visited with my "mentor" from St. John's, Cecil Hoffman, who was then director of student work at the U. of Arizona. From there we went to L. A., where we stayed with my uncle Don DeWolf and his wife Georgia in Beverly Hills. He was then chief engineer for NBC Radio in Hollywood, the largest broadcast studio in the U. S. at that time. Television, of course, was still in its infancy.

We expected to arrive in San Francisco and make our way across the bay to my mother's home, while she was at Wolfboro, the Berkeley Boy Scout camp, picking up my brother Dick. He was back at camp a year after getting polio there.

But when we got off the train, we were paged by the p. a. system, with a call from relatives in San Francisco saying:

"We have the wheel chair, and will bring it down to you, and your mother's on the way to meet you. How is Carol?"

"Fine," I said. "But what's the wheel chair for?"

"Doesn't Carol have a broken leg?"

"No. Why did you think that?"

Then came the story that Uncle Don had telegraphed his sister's husband Ted Rappley in Oakland, telling him that Carol had a broken leg and asking him to meet us with a wheel chair.

Ted had called my mother's number repeatedly, not knowing that she was on her way back from taking Dick to Wolfboro. He had finally gotten her late the night before. She had a load of wood in the car, having made a bed in the back seat for Dick on the trip to camp. So she had to unload the wood before dashing to meet us at the station—all of this a week after her husband had died, and having spent agonizing months caring for Dick with the Kenny Treatment, the best method then for treating polio.

When she came streaking across the station waiting room to meet us, Mother's eyes were on Carol's legs rather than on her face. Mother was both relieved and upset to discover that the "broken leg" story was untrue. She was relieved to know Carol was all right, but upset that anyone, especially Don, would create such a turmoil, especially under the circumstances. Several days later, after we had recovered from this traumatic experience, we worked out an explanation which proved to be correct: Don and Ted had played practical jokes on each other often, and Don thought it would be nice to have someone meet us. He also knew that Ted wouldn't bother to get up to meet us that early in the morning unless it was an emergency. So Don invented the emergency, never dreaming that Mother would get home in time to have Ted unload the responsibility onto her. However, this surmise was not confirmed until months later when Don discovered what had happened, and he was very sorry about it.

On our stopover at Tucson, we had learned from the Hoffmans that the Director of Christian Education at St. John's, Fred Stripp, had resigned to teach at U. C., and my name had come up as a possible successor. When we got to the Bay area, the offer was made officially, and after much deliberation we decided to take it. The war was still going intensely. Many of my friends were overseas (and some of them had been killed), but when the survivors came home, it was helpful to have someone tending the home fires. There were times when I was painfully aware that my civilian status was resented, especially by parents concerned for their sons in uniform and emotionally twisted by the war atmosphere. But we coped with that as well as we could.

I was familiar with the situation at the church in other ways. I used to say that I was hired because I knew where all the light switches were, in that rambling structure. But what was most important in some ways was that I understood the difficulty that anyone in my position had in working with Dr. Hunter.

He was so zealous and so work driven that he couldn't let go of the responsibility for any aspect of the church life, and he was constantly creating awkward situations even while he tried to recognize my responsibilities. A more egotistical man might have simply demanded that everything be cleared with him, and reduced the associate to a flunky's role. This would have been disastrous in that situation because many of the church leaders were zealous too in their involvement with the youth and children's programs. The experience of my predecessors had led to the establishment of a Board of Religious Education as a buffer between the director and Dr. Hunter, with the director officially responsible to them rather than to him.

Under the circumstances we did the best we could, and after many years of dealing with colleague and parishioners, I can see that the St. John's situation was far from being unique.

One new wrinkle, though, was that the church had bought the house next door to the church facilities, for use as a Youth Center. Carol and I moved into this large structure, having coped with very much smaller quarters because of the war time housing shortage.

At first, though, this large house threatened to be more of a burden than a delight. In promoting the purchase of the house, Dr. Hunter had let the notion develop that it would be a drop in center for anyone who wanted to use it at any time. Carol and I were able to establish the principle that it was our home, which we would gladly share as much as possible, but we were not to be merely the custodians of a hangout.

This proved to be a particularly important distinction after the following April 26, when Charles Morrison DeWolf was born. He was one of more than 20 babies born at Alta Bates Hospital during that 24 hour period. Some of the overworked nurses left me with a permanent emotional scar because they seemed to be taking out their frustrations and exhaustion on the fathers and even on the patients, instead of helping them to have the kind of joyful experience that birth should be.

Being new parents made us even more aware of the young families who needed support and guidance from the church. Many of my contemporaries from high school and college days were gone from the area, but several still remained.

In discussing their special needs, we found that many had felt a lack of training in the theological foundations for our faith. This has been part of the problem many theologically liberal churches have faced through the years. It was particularly obvious in wartime, when people needed spiritual reinforcement and looked to the church for it.

Out of this discovery came an adult study group which we jokingly called The DeWolf School of Theology. In trying to find a time when the members of the group could meet, we discovered that Saturday night was the one time during the week that was free for most of them, due to the wartime pressures of work. So we agreed to meet in our home one Saturday night a month, and the members took turns leading the discussion.

One night a young Navy chaplain named Bob Brown, then stationed at Treasure Island, turned up with his wife Sydney. He thought it was remarkable that a group of young couples were willing to give up a Saturday night of entertainment to discuss theology. It turned out that his mother was then in charge of the department responsible for promoting adult education for the entire Presbyterian denomination, and he wrote to her about this West Coast phenomenon.

We learned later that he was related to the pastor whose conservatism as minister of the First Presbyterian Church of Berkeley had led to the formation of St. John's Church by some more liberal lay people. His aunt, Mildred McAfee, had also been Dean of Women at Oberlin when Carol was a student there, and then had become the head of the WAVES, the women's Navy unit. Bob was also related to Cleland B. McAfee, who wrote the words to "Near to the Heart of God," which was a favorite of Dr. Hunter's and was pasted in the cover of the St. John's hymnal.

Later Robert McAfee Brown became a professor at Union Seminary, then went to Stanford where he was David's advisor in the Religious Studies Department, then to Pacific School of Religion. He was also a very popular writer of religious books and a leader in the ecumenical field with Catholics and Jews.

The other members of our study group did not become so famous, but many of them became leaders in the church and church school program. It was the first of many examples we found in our various churches that when people become motivated by a strong positive faith, they become far more effective leaders than the ones who passively carry out the minister's program, or who seek leadership roles because of their desire to dominate others and the church offers them the easiest arena for doing it.

Another innovation that Carol promoted was a Mother's Club for young mothers. We also persuaded the Women's Association to have a handcraft fair which was the nearest thing to a fund raising bazaar they had ever had. Previously they had frowned on any such activities as being too low brow for St. John's people, but they were helped to see that the project promoted friendship as well as fund raising. In later years, when we found ourselves involved in bazaars and other projects which tended to put too much of a premium on the financial goals at the expense of good will, we had to work from the other end of the spectrum.

One St. John's tradition we were able to encourage was religious drama, drawing upon my experience as a participant in St. John's productions and elsewhere. The pulpit platform lent itself easily to becoming a stage, the open beams provided space for spotlights, and various volunteer electricians had helped to develop a makeshift lighting system. It is gratifying to know that when the congregation moved down College Ave. into a new building, the old sanctuary became the Julia Morgan Theater—named for the famous woman architect who designed it as well as the original buildings at Asilomar, the Hearst Castle and other noted structures.

As the months went by, it became clearer and clearer that the war in the Pacific was coming to a climax. But the public was naturally stunned when it ended so abruptly and dramatically. The Berkeley Gazette had a later press deadline than the other afternoon papers, so on Aug. 6 it "scooped" its rivals with a big black headline and brief report announcing the dropping of an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. (We didn't have television then, of course).

As soon as I saw the headline, and before I read the story, I exclaimed to Carol,

"So that's what Frank was working on!"

At the time, the sense of relief overshadowed the horror of so many lives being snuffed out at once—relief that our friends who were poised for the invasion of Japan would not have to endure that dreadful prospect. The deeper significance of the bombings and the dawn of the nuclear age only sank in gradually.

Members of the Council of Churches had previously arranged for a joint service to celebrate the end of the war whenever it came. The service was to be broadcast over KRE, the radio station owned by the First Congregational Church of Berkeley.

Because the war ended so abruptly, there was no time to work out details among the clergy. Dr. Hunter was at his home at Lake Tahoe, so I represented our church. Each minister was supposed to speak or pray for five minutes, but several ran over their time. This left only a couple of minutes of the hour broadcast for the host pastor, Dr. Vere Loper. He graciously and smoothly closed the broadcast and dismissed the congregation. This impressed me as a shining example of generosity and humility, in contrast to the way some of his colleagues had tried to hog the show.

During the summer, I had spent a large share of our vacation time working on the sermons I had been scheduled to preach during Dr. Hunter's vacation in August. Their general theme was to draw upon our spiritual reserves for the long pull before the war ended. The abrupt end made me feel all of the sermons were suddenly made obsolete, for which I was thankful but confused.

Dr. Hunter sent word that I should preach on the Sunday after VJ Day as planned. But when Carol's uncle Luther Newhall learned this, his face became even sterner than usual, and as Clerk of the Session he called Dr. Hunter and made it clear that it was the senior pastor's duty to share the victory with his flock, regardless of Dr. Hunter's pacifist reservations about the war.

The following Sunday, Dr. Hunter told me he would give the pastoral prayer and leave the rest of the service to me. But his prayer took such an unusually long time, I felt that there was no time left for the sermon, but I went ahead with it anyhow. It was one of those memorable occasions when nothing one might say was memorable in itself, but the situation seemed particularly frustrating at the time.

On the whole, though, the experience at St. John's was a happy and personally rewarding time, and as the years went by we came to appreciate more sympathetically the strains that a pastor has to bear, especially with a large and varied congregation.

At the same time, seeing how a pastor can get bogged down after many years in one parish made us more vulnerable to the temptation to move when tensions began to develop in our own parishes. In retrospect, I feel that we might have been wiser to work our way through the problem instead, and as time went on we did stay longer in one place.