Carol has described in her memoirs how we arrived late at night when we moved to Dunsmuir, and discovered there was no way for us to get into the house. The yard between the house and the church was filled with debris from the repair work. I found a steel bedspring in the garage, covered it with a dirty piece of carpet salvaged from the debris, and slept on it. Carol, Charles and Tim slept (?) in the car. Bill and David arrived the next day with my mother.

Once we got into it, the parsonage proved to be roomy enough, although the dining room had to do double duty as the office. The kitchen was adjacent to the stairway which ran down between the house and the church. So people usually came to the kitchen door to see us rather than climbing two flights of stairs to the front door.

The house was heated in three ways: An oil furnace in the basement heated the first floor and two small rooms on the second floor. An incinerator next to the electric water heater in the kitchen provided heat by burning wood blocks which we got from the lumber mills in the area. (The blocks occupied a portion of the basement, and they had to be transferred by hand from the driveway after they had been dumped there at the beginning of the winter). We found that we also needed a third source of heat: electric heaters for the bedrooms which were on the second floor. Because electricity was expensive, we were constantly confronted with a choice between being too cold and facing a whopping bill.

One day we noticed that the snow had melted rather rapidly from the part of the roof over the bedrooms. When I climbed into the attic, I discovered the only "insulation" between the bedroom ceilings and the roof was the wallpaper covering the boards, and there were some wide cracks between the boards. This led to laying fibreglass blocks between the ceiling joists, a very tedious job Carol and I carried out by ourselves. But this made a big difference in the comfort and the electric bills.

Our second winter in Dunsmuir brought record snows to the whole area. The trains and highway were shut down for four days, and a transcontinental passenger train was marooned near Donner Summit for several days. We had six feet of snow on the ground at one time.

One Sunday morning while I was out of town for a conference on evangelism, the power went off at the parsonage. Carol discovered the line had been snapped by the snow, and the broken wires were buried in the snow near the kitchen door.

Fortunately, she was able to get in touch with the power company employees we knew, and she and the children were able to get out safely.

One of the first jobs we had in making it safe for the children to play around the house was to clear off a jungle of blackberry vines which had grown up on the area below the house and church. The house had been built on that lower lot, then moved up the hill when the church was built beside it. (The land is now occupied by the church building erected after we left Dunsmuir).

Carol and I hacked away at this tedious and painful job, with no offers of help from neighbors or parishioners, until it was feasible to set up the swing set which we had brought from Oakland.

Immediately the neighbor children swarmed to share in this treat. The slope of the hillside provided very little space for play. The street which ran below the lot was level, but it wasn't safe to play in the street with cars coming and going.

In the process of cleaning up the lot I discovered a water line which had not been disconnected when the house was moved. So I got the parts for a simple drinking fountain from the local hardware store. The only problem which ensued was that small children tended to delight in stuffing sticks and dirt into the spout of the fountain, and I had to keep cleaning it out.

After awhile, some of the neighbors got the notion to build a regular swing set out of pipe, with standard chains and seats. They also raised enough money to build a fence around the sides of the lot adjoining the street corner.

The only serious objections came from Mrs. Eachus, one of the pillars of the church who automatically objected to any new endeavor which threatened to cost money or which had not been submitted first for her approval. A former minister had been single for the first five years he served the church, and he lived with the Eachuses. When he finally married and moved into the parsonage, Mrs. Eachus paid no attention to the wishes of the bride in furnishing the parsonage, and I suspect this was a factor in his decision to leave the ministry soon afterward. For example, she insisted on having the kitchen sinkboard painted "S. P. yellow" (the drab color the railroad painted their stations and other buildings) because she could get the paint cheaper through the company, even though the bride wanted it painted green.

Mrs. Eachus also stirred up the family who lived across the street from the "playground," on the argument that it would be a neighborhood nuisance, although it was much less of a nuisance than the children playing in the street as they had done. The neighbors came to a church trustees' meeting, expecting to be able to vote although they had no connection with the church. When politely challenged, they said naively that they thought the church was a public institution like the city, where every citizen had a vote. (This showed how much exposure they had had to church life).

Everyone else seemed to be delighted that we could contribute in this small way to the needs of the neighborhood children, but it was an example of the way almost every effort to improve a situation is likely to stir up opposition from some quarter. If you wait for unanimous consent, you will probably wait forever.

As Carol noted in her memoirs, Mrs. Eachus fought tooth and nail against the campaign to build the new church. It was ironical that the first funeral held in the new building was for her husband—her children refused to let her prevail in her crusade. In later years when we vacationed in Dunsmuir, she came out to see us as if we were her very best buddies, and I was glad that I never blasted her verbally in the way I was so often tempted to do.

The prevailing mood among the railroad people in Dunsmuir was pessimism. We have been told that this tended to be characteristic of railroad people in general—a combination of rootlessness because of moving from place to place and/or irregular hours of work, plus the general economic trend away from railroads. This attitude was compounded in Dunsmuir because its chief reason for existing was that extra freight engines and crews were needed to boost the long freight trains over the mountains. The diesel engines which were being introduced in the 1950s were so much more powerful than the steam engines that everyone could see the diminishing role of places like Dunsmuir.

But in the face of this pessimism, we were able to raise the money and develop plans for building a new church building. The original plan has never been carried out fully, but the sanctuary and office unit has been a real improvement. If the town ever revives as a viable community, the building will be even more appreciated, I'm sure. In fact, the congregation might not have survived if they had not had the inspiration of a really worshipful sanctuary. (The old sanctuary collapsed from the combination of snow and rain on the roof while electric power was cut off, not long after the new unit was built, and the entire building was demolished).

To facilitate raising money for the new building, we hired a professional fund raiser. He came with a collection of office equipment and efficiency expert techniques, and held nightly meetings through the week with the solicitors. During the week I missed my first pair of glasses, and struggled through the week trying to read the fine print on the progress reports.

As the fund raiser was gathering up his belongings at the end of this whirlwind campaign, I noticed that one of his several pairs of glasses looked like mine. In fact they were mine—he had swept them up after one of the meetings, thinking they were his, and he apparently had not tried them on later. I decided at the time that some types of efficiency are more useful in the long run than others!

One of my most memorable projects in the Dunsmuir parsonage was bringing a set of water pipes up from the basement to the kitchen, so the automatic washer could be installed there. With all of the washing needed for a family of two parents and four small boys, it was a real chore to haul the laundry up and down the narrow, precarious steps between the basement and first floor. The plumbing job seemed simple enough even for me to do, so one afternoon I started the final process of hooking up the lines.

Unfortunately, the water pipes had been twisted under the house when it was moved up the hill, so they made an eccentric circle when they were coupled or uncoupled, and there was very little room under the house to maneuver. In the process of hooking up the new pipes, I broke the union which tied the main line together. By this time, the hardware store was closed, the chicken dinner Carol had prepared was cold, and there was no way to turn on the water again in the parsonage until the broken joint was fixed.

Through this process, I kept telling Carol that I would be through in another ten minutes—a remark which became a family byword in similar crises. Finally I gave up in despair, went over to the church to clean up in the rest room, ate my cold supper and went to bed exhausted.

The next day I got a new union from the hardware store, finished the job in short order, and from that time on the clothes were washed in much greater comfort. The experience made me more cautious about tackling a job without proper preparation, tools and parts. But it also helped me to overcome the indoctrination I had gotten in my childhood that I was hopelessly incompetent to do any sort of a mechanical job.

In terms of our long range future, a much more significant development was that Carol was asked to teach in the Dunsmuir Elementary School. Hartsel Gray, the principal (officially the superintendent) was a pillar of our church, and at the time he was having a hard time getting teachers to come to this small town at the similarly small salaries being offered.

After a lot of discussion between us, Carol decided to take the job of teaching 4th and 5th grades. This involved getting a teaching credential through the Chico State extension program which was held in Mt. Shasta.

What made the added responsibilities easier for all concerned (mostly the boys and myself) was that we were able to get Marian LaPlante to look after the children between the time they got home from school and when Carol did. Marian was living with her husband in a mobile home in the Deweys' park at Cave Springs, and she was delighted to have something significant to do. As Carol described it in "Whither," this proved to be a fine arrangement all around.

Before we left Dunsmuir, Carol had been "promoted" to teach junior high, under the same administration. (The buildings used by the school were later torn down and a new set of buildings put up on a nearby hillside. The former location was deemed unsafe because it adjoined a major highway).