Before we moved to Stockton, we discovered that the city had a special summer school program for junior high students. So we arranged to have the Logsden family in Grace Church take care of Paul until we moved, so he could start summer school on time.

He enrolled in a drama course presenting O. Henry's classic short story, "The Ransom of Red Chief". Paul was to play the rascally kid who was kidnapped by a pair of men, who found him such a handful that they desperately negotiated with the parents to take him back without any ransom.

Paul evidently proved to be a very good actor, but nobody except the teacher and the class got to see him perform. The young teacher decided at the last moment to cancel the show. Her reasons were flimsy. We surmised she didn't think it would be done well enough, or because her marital problems proved too overwhelming for her to handle the presentation.

Fortunately Paul behaved in real life very much unlike the O. Henry character, although he must have had a rather difficult adjustment to a new school and city.

Our introduction to the church was also difficult at first. The chairman of the Pastor Parish Committee, Don Evans, had resigned in protest over the Cabinet's high handed overruling of their recommendation to retain the previous pastor. The year before they had asked to have him moved, after he had been there only a year, but by the end of the second year they decided to give him a further chance.

So we arrived feeling betrayed by the Bishop, with a $700 a year cut in salary and a smaller congregation that was threatened with extinction because so many of the members were old, and new families were not coming in.

The Grace Church leaders, on the other hand, were unhappy over the move for their own reasons.

However, we started to work getting acquainted and doing whatever we could to improve the atmosphere.

One factor which proved to be important was that Chris Nichols, son of one of our children's teachers in Hanford, showed up as a freshman at UOP and we had him come to dinner.

The upshot of this connection was that he and a group of earnest Christian students, most of them members of InterVarsity, an evangelical campus group, came to our parsonage every Sunday morning for Bible study. Most of them went over from there to the church service.

Several of the group were students in Pharmacy, and they were greatly impressed to see the beloved founder of the Pharmacy School, Emmons Roscoe, as a faithful usher at the church door. Even those who didn't have the privilege of taking courses from him were aware of his name because the Pharmacy building was named for him.

Usually there were about 20 who came to the parsonage for Bible study. Carol worked out a routine of providing orange juice and sweet rolls for their breakfast, after which they settled down to running their own discussion around the extra large dining table.

Most of the furniture downstairs when we arrived had been a gift from a wealthy member years before. It was bulky turn of the century stuff, which was a serious headache to us especially when we were given the impression that it was a kind of sacred cow which pastors and their families had had to endure, and it would be impossible for us to do anything about it.

In desperation, we moved everything except the dining table and chairs up to the guest bedroom on the second floor. (Before we moved four years later, we had arranged to sell the collection at a nominal sum to the grandson of the donor, whose wife loved this kind of furniture, so my successors were spared this trial).

In 1975 we celebrated the 125th anniversary of the church's establishment in Stockton. We formed a committee to plan the event, including a sub committee to work on the historical book let. One of the committee members, Pearl Sweet, dominated the first meeting so completely that the rest quietly bowed out. I was left with the task of trying to get Mrs. Sweet to be account able to me or to someone else in planning this brochure. She wound up writing the text and assembling the pictures single handedly in a fashion that resulted in a much less attractive and less complete booklet than it might have been otherwise. We also produced a leaflet summarizing the church's history with text by Mrs. Sweet and sketches by Carol DeWolf. Recently on a visit to the church we discovered that leaflet is still being distributed.

Another notable event during that period was "burning the mortgage", retiring the debt on the building improvements. We had Bishop Marvin Stuart preach and officially preside at the celebration. I made a facsimile of the mortgage and soaked it in oil to make it burn when it was lighted. It made a spectacular picture, which was a great relief because this was one event which could not be successfully re enacted for the camera.

The two young girls who were our regular acolytes came out of the sanctuary after the ceremony with eyes shining, and one said ecstatically: "We did it!" Bishop Stuart overheard the remark, and commented very effectively on the fact that this was indeed a celebration by the whole congregation.

By the time we left Stockton, the congregation had stabilized and was beginning to grow. The neighborhood was also start ing to change. Younger families discovered that it was more economical and more satisfying to buy the older houses in that area and perhaps remodeling them, instead of buying the new cracker box houses in the outlying area where shade trees were small or non existent.

A few years later, under the leadership of a dynamic young pastor, Lee Hayward, the congregation became very "modern" in style, without losing many of the older people we had worked with.

In the midst of our fourth year, we were surprised to have the District Supt., Willard Rand, inform us that he was urging the Cabinet to send us to a larger congregation. This was both a reward for our faithfulness in dealing with the Grace Church and an effort to overcome the effect of the shock waves which rippled through the Conference clergy when they learned about our forced move to Stockton under Bishop Golden's orders.

We probably would have declined the proposed move except that Carol had been hired as a secretary in a special program to combat drug and alcohol abuse operated under the county mental health department.

Carol had taken the job mainly to fill out the number of "quarters" required for her to receive Social Security benefits. But after working there for months with constant promises that she would become eligible for Social Security coverage, she was told that she would not be eligible because her program was a special grant which the county exempted from such coverage.

The day after she got this news, the call came from the Cabinet offering us the church at Redding. We decided to accept.

On the Sunday when the announcement was made to the congregation that we were moving, Don Evans came down the aisle to the chancel with a fishing pole over his shoulder. The Evanses had become good friends soon after we arrived there, and Don was back as chairman of the Pastor Parish committee at the time we left. The fishing pole was to symbolize our transfer to the north part of the state which was a fisherman's paradise for many people.

Many of our friends in Stockton asked us why we were willing to move to such a hot place as Redding can be in the summer time. When we got to Redding, many asked how we stood the heat in Stockton for four years. It was the people, not the climate!