With the war over, Carol and I began to think about moving on to a parish of our own. One of the limitations of the Presbyterian system at the time was that there was very little ecclesiastical machinery for moving from one church to another. Large and/or wealthy churches could invite "candidates" to come and preach, then select one from among them. This had advantages for the prestigious churches and more ambitious or well known ministers, especially those who made a good initial impression with their manner or their preaching. The drawbacks included the fact that a congregation could split into various factions favoring one candidate or another, and the winner would have to spend valuable time at the beginning trying to patch these factions together.

Small churches and their pastors had to depend upon personal or denominational connections of one sort or another for making changes. As a graduate of Eastern seminaries, and as a staff member of a liberal Presbyterian church, I was at a disadvantage in finding a church in the West.

When I wrote to Cecil Hoffman in Tucson, he wrote back that the Community Presbyterian Church in Benson, 80 miles southeast of Tucson, was looking for a pastor.

So on Thanksgiving Day 1945, Carol and I took the train to Phoenix and the bus to Benson. The trains were still crowded then, and we had to stand in line waiting to get into the diner. As we waited, I noticed a young woman who seemed to be flirting with a sailor in uniform. When we were finally seated in the diner, we found ourselves facing this couple.

I decided to skip our usual silent grace while eating in public, thinking the other couple were probably antagonistic to such piety, based on their behavior in the corridor.

But the young sailor said: "You know, of all the days of the year when we should be saying grace at the table, Thanksgiving Day should be the one."

So we bowed our heads, looking no doubt much like a famous Norman Rockwell painting of that period. As the conversation proceeded, Carol and I discovered that the young sailor was going home to his folks and the woman was going to meet her service man husband, and what looked to us like flirtation was only friendliness within the military "family."

Benson proved to be a very small town, with only one Protestant Church and one Catholic Church. After conducting the worship service, the pulpit committee formally offered me the "call" to be their pastor, and after consulting with Carol, I accepted, as of January 1946. Looking back, it seems a very hasty decision. But we were full of youthful enthusiasm, and the prospect of being "on our own" seemed quite exciting.

We had our meagre belongings, mostly books, shipped ahead by moving van, and the van arrived before we did. So the unloading was supervised by a committee of women, including our next door neighbor.

Our double bed was so rickety, we decided to order a new frame from the mail order house. When it arrived, we mentioned it to the neighbor, who said: "Oh, we wondered what you were going to do about a bed." The remark made us suddenly picture the women watching the van being unloaded, with all of our worldly goods spread out on the lawn—a fitting introduction to life in a very small town.

The house was a small two bedroom frame structure which had been remodeled in a homespun way by the previous pastor's father, who was evidently a carpenter of sorts.

A washing machine did not come with the house, and having a small child in diapers made this a serious handicap. So Carol and I invested in a new fangled device called a Bendix washer, which loaded from the front through a sort of porthole. It required a more solid foundation to counteract the spinning motion of the washer than the floor of the house provided, so we had a square cut into the kitchen floor and a concrete foundation poured to support and anchor the machine.

The washer water drained into the desert sand outside, where a crop of weeds promptly sprang up. One weekend we entertained a visiting missionary who had hidden for many months in the hills in the Philippines during World War II when the Japanese invaded the islands. She looked out of our kitchen window at the weeds and commented, "I see you'll never starve." She explained that this was pig weed, which she and her husband had used as their main food in the hills. Carol and I were neither desperate nor adventurous enough to sample the pig weed, but it made us feel that we could have been a lot worse off.

The church building was located at the corner of a street known locally as Powder Row. The main industry in the town was the Apache Powder Co., which made explosives for mining and other industrial uses, and several of the executives lived along that street. Most of them were connected with the church and several were key church officers.

This connection was an asset in providing leadership and financial support for the church, but it was a disadvantage in enlisting the enthusiastic loyalty of rank and file workers and others not connected with the company.

During the two years we were there, a traveling Baptist evangelist set up his tent and tried to establish a rival church, but he didn't last long. As I recall from reports we got from friends or the local newspaper, one was established later.

Carol has vividly described in her memoirs how we were wakened one morning by a distant explosion from the powder plant. The powder was mixed in sheds located far enough apart to prevent an explosion from affecting other areas. Two of the four people in the shed that blew up were nominal Protestants, the other two were Catholic.

The local Catholic priest was Father Walsh, about my age. He and I became good friends as a result of this tragedy, and we would have had a joint funeral service if that had been possible in those days. But it was too long before Vatican II for that. I have often wondered how Father Walsh got along with the Establishment later, in view of his broad minded thinking.

As it was, the two funerals I conducted were grim affairs. Everyone knew that the caskets were weighted with rocks to compensate for the fact that only fragments of the bodies were recovered from the explosion. The cemetery was located on the side of a sandy hill above the level the water system reached, so there was no grass nor other greenery to relieve the bleakness. The visiting mortician had no device to lower the casket into the grave, so it was all done awkwardly by hand, with the dirt clods thumping onto the casket while the mourners watched and wept.

On another occasion, a body was shipped to Benson for the funeral and burial, and the family asked to have the body kept in the church overnight, because there was no local mortuary. I agreed to this before discovering that they expected someone to sit up with the body, like having a Catholic wake. There was a shortage of people willing to do this, so I sat up a good portion of the night myself. I can't imagine a young pastor doing such a thing today, and I wouldn't blame him (or her). But we were naïve (or dedicated) enough then to do many things that were not covered in the seminary courses on "practical theology."

Another example of this: it was taken for granted that the pastor was responsible for producing the printed bulletin for Sunday services. An ancient mimeograph was in the church office, but I typed the stencils on my own portable typewriter. During the winter, I had to turn on the heat in the poorly insulated office well before I wanted to run the stencil, to thaw the mimeograph ink. In the summer, the room was so hot, the ink ran like kerosene. But I learned to turn out fairly respectable sheets, and it made me all the more grateful for good church secretaries and better equipment in later years.

One more example: It was much easier to get officers to carry on the church business than to recruit capable church school teachers. So I found myself teaching a class of 7th and 8th grade boys in the church kitchen.

A fat kid named Jimmy Schmalzel tended to disrupt the class in various little ways. One morning I decided to call a halt to this, so I said calmly, "Jimmy, I think we've had enough of you this morning. You can just go home."

Jimmy lived only a few doors from the church, so I knew it was safe to dismiss him without risking his physical safety. But I also knew his mother was overly sensitive about her child. So I wasn't surprised when she refused to answer the door when I called, and I learned through the grapevine that she was determined to run the upstart preacher out of town.

What did surprise me was that Jimmy showed up for class the following Sunday, behaving beautifully. I learned that he had defied his mother's orders to stay home. He and I became great pals after that, and the experience encouraged me to stick to my principles in disciplinary matters, even though conflicts were not always resolved as successfully as that.

The two most memorable aspects of our time in Benson had to do with precious acquisitions: two more children, and one new car. The first acquisitions prompted the second, although they tended to be financially contradictory.

We came to Benson in 1946 with a 1932 Chevrolet which had been bought from the director of Westminster House in Berkeley, Dr. Lewis Hillis. It took us to Berkeley in the summer of 1946 when Charles was a year and a half, and Tim was on the way. It also took us over the mountains 50 miles to Bisbee when Tim was born, and we made it to the hospital with little time to spare. But it also left us stranded out in the desert, miles from home, a couple of times with our two small children. The second time we had to leave the car in Willcox, 30 miles from Benson, to have the connecting rod repaired for the second time. This proved to be very costly as well as time consuming.

A college friend of Carol's stopped in for a visit with her husband shortly after that, and the husband diagnosed the problem as a defective oil pump, which nobody had detected before.

When Bill was born in Benson, our little car was obviously too small. My mother came through in this crisis, as in many others, with money to help us buy a new Chevrolet. Cars were just becoming available again after World War II, and we felt doubly fortunate to get one. Needless to say, the children were much more precious than the car. But having dependable transportation greatly reduced our sense of isolation and anxiety in living out in the desert.

Carol has described the births of Tim and Bill very colorfully in her memoirs, so I won't repeat the information. But the circumstances made their arrival seem even more wonderful and miraculous than they might have seemed under more conventional conditions.

The pastor of the Bisbee Presbyterian Church, Wendell Newell, had been the Benson pastor before becoming the Dean of the Indian School in Tucson, operated by the mission board. He had gotten into trouble with some of the faculty, who could be described as old maids of both sexes.

According to his description, the faculty tried to pen up the students emotionally with all sorts of prissy regulations, as well as cooping them up physically in the school except when they went back to their reservations in the summer.

When he interceded in their behalf, some of the faculty members tried to undermine him in various subtle ways. Even after he resigned and took the Bisbee church, he felt his "enemies" had tried to prejudice the other pastors of the Presbytery against him.

Once while we were driving together to a meeting, he shared his dream of starting his own boys' school and getting out of the ministry. I pointed out that he would run into rivals and critics in any sort of secular work too.

"Yes," he said, "but at least they wouldn't pray over me before they stabbed me in the back."

At the time, his state of mind seemed rather paranoid. But in later years, I often thought about his remark when I felt that I was the victim of an unholy combination of pompous piety and dirty politics.

His attitude also seemed more plausible after Carol and I had experienced the snobbery of the wives of other pastors, whose churches were self supporting. The Benson church received $25 a month from the National Missions Board, which meant that I had to fill out a tedious monthly report on attendance, finances, and other information. The local church could easily have done without that support. But the old timers remembered when the amount was much larger and more crucial, and they were afraid of cutting it off for fear it might be hard to get it back if local support dwindled again.

Carol and I felt we were being rather noble and self sacrificing to serve such a small church out in the hinterland, and certainly did not feel inferior to my colleagues or their wives. But the "pecking order" syndrome cropped up here as it tends to do everywhere. One pastor's wife seemed to feel we should bow and scrape to her and her husband in particular, because he was chairman of the Presbytery committee on missions.

It was obvious that she had some serious hang ups about her self image. But it didn't encourage us to become more involved with our Presbyterian colleagues, and our one attempt to get aquainted with our Methodist colleagues in Willcox was a dud.

Having three small children didn't encourage any sort of socializing outside the town anyhow.

All of these negative factors pushed us into thinking about getting back to California. Through Dr. Hunter we were able to get invited to "candidate" at Elmhurst Presbyterian Church in Oakland. Mother wrote that she had "cased the joint" (I'm quoting her words) and was favorably impressed. So we came up, and decided to move once again, this time to more familiar territory.