In the Spring of 1984, we were completing eight years in Redding, Paul was about to graduate from Shasta High School, and I was approaching 66. I told D. S. Don Cunningham that I was considering retirement, and was thinking of taking a small church on a part time basis. He assured me that if I retired, the Redding church would be the first one considered by the Cabinet, my successor would be the type to continue our style of ministry, and I would have first choice of part time appointments.

My past experiences should have warned me that such assurances were worthless unless they happened to coincide with the convenience and the ideology of the Cabinet members at the moment, but I was still trusting enough to accept them.

As it turned out, the Cabinet's choice as my successor was almost a carbon copy of my predecessor, with a similar record of trouble in most or all of his churches trouble arising from his stiff necked insistence that his views and authority were the only ones that really counted.

This was hard enough to swallow during the Spring. Along with it, I found that my appointment to the church in Farmington was being held up. The Farmington church had been yoked with the Escalon UMC under a pastor who was reputed to care more about his collection of antique cars than about his congregations. But when the D. S. tried to persuade him to move, he objected. In the end, his objections mainly prevailed and he was left with the Escalon Church on a full time basis. I was left dangling until my appointment was reportedly the last one made by the Cabinet, not the second.

In spite of these frustrations, we left Redding with a lot of fond memories and happy farewell celebrations. Part of the appeal of the Farmington situation was that the parsonage was provided, and we had no place of our own to live in. We had bought a mobile home on its own lot at the south end of Dunsmuir and had rented it all during the time we were in Red ding. But by the time we left Redding, we had decided against retiring to Dunsmuir, and later sold the mobile home.

The Farmington parsonage was somewhat larger than our Redding parsonage, and we were able to arrange our furniture rather conveniently. The air conditioning system had appeared to be quite adequate when we looked at it before the weather turned hot. But it proved to be totally inadequate until we finally got hold of the man who had installed it. He discovered that the dog owned by the tenants who had occupied the house had chewed on the copper tubing of the compressor unit, making holes which caused the refrigerant to leak out. With this and other defects repaired, we got along fairly well during the hot weather.

One of our parishioners also helped us to install a watering system for the vegetable garden we planted in the back yard, and we became backyard farmers for the first (and probably the last) time in our married lives. We wondered why our corn didn't look nearly as tall and uniform as the large crop of corn in the ad joining field, until we learned that the neighboring corn was the type used for feeding livestock, not people.

The vegetable garden was planted next to a sizeable lawn, and one of my chores turned out to be mowing this lawn and the front lawn with the power mower owned by the church. We might have hired a neighbor boy to do this, but I thought it was good exercise as well as an economy.

However, on the Saturday before the opening of school, I be gan to feel sharp pains in my chest while I was mowing. I was able to finish the job only by resting every few minutes.

Sunday morning was Rally Day, when the church school resumed meeting and the regular Fall schedule began. So I managed to get through the day without much discomfort.

But Monday morning I woke up with aches in my shoulders as well as in my chest. Carol tried to get our son Bill in Oakland to get his medical advice, but a foul up in the telephone system kept her from reaching him.

A young doctor, Tom Wallace, and his wife from Escalon had turned up at the church for the first time on Sunday. Carol called him and he urged us to meet him at the emergency room of Doctors' Hospital in Modesto, across the street from his office.

After a preliminary examination, I was admitted as a patient and began taking tests. These were inconclusive at first, and I might have been discharged except that I had sharper chest pains Tuesday morning. The doctors decided to do an angiogram which revealed that two of my coronary arteries were seriously blocked and the third was partially so.

Immediately after the angiogram, I was prepared for open heart surgery and wheeled down the hall to an adjoining operating room. Before we went to the hospital, we did not know that a team of specialists trained at Stanford had their offices nearby.

Dr. Wallace had consulted them from the beginning, so the team did four arterial bypasses. Within a week or so, I was back at home, and within a month I was preaching again.

An important part of my therapy was exercise, so Carol and I set forth to walk around the part of town adjoining the parsonage. The first day we were standing in front of the post office, a block from home, when a large dog suddenly jumped over the fence in front of his house and raced across the street toward us. Before I knew what was happening, the dog bit me in the backs of both legs particularly in the left leg from which the doctors had taken a vein for the bypasses.

The dog belonged to a family who were on the church roll but did not attend. Neighbors were well acquainted with the dog's past biting record, but evidently didn't want to take official action for fear of causing disruption in this very ingrown community. A few urged me to make an issue of the attack, but I finally decided to let the matter go.

In several ways this incident revealed the kind of town Farmington is. Although the church is physically in the middle of the town site, its relationship to the people who live in the area is more peripheral than central. Many of the strongest sup porters of the church live at some distance from it. Yet several of the leading families are descended from pioneers who settled the area several generations ago.

Like most of the Farmington people, we did most of our shop ping in Modesto, twenty miles away. The Modesto YMCA also provided water therapy classes which helped to speed my recovery. Farmington gave us a chance to see our son Paul from time to time while he was a student at UOP in Stockton, and some old friends. The Bay area was not too far away, although we found ourselves going there less often than we had expected to do.

All in all, the Farmington experience was a happy one. There is still hope that in years to come some new developments will bring people into the Farmington area, and that some of them will be grateful for the presence of the church, as the present and past supporters have been.