COMMENTARY

Simply a good man

(Editor’s note: The columnist had intended to offer a Father’s Day tribute in the newspaper Sunday. But he chose at the last minute to write instead about topical and tragic events in Charleston. Tributes to fathers are timeless, though, and this is only three days late.)

For years J.T. would not go to church.

He’d dutifully drive my mom and sister and me to Sunday School and he’d reliably be waiting for us in the car after the church service—once, I recall, to announce as soon as we piled in: “They shot him.” Who? “Oswald.” Who shot him? “They did.” Where? “Right there on TV.” When? “Just a few minutes ago.”

He never ventured inside the church building. He said there were hypocrites in there. Correctly, I’d add. And his everyday language was of a colorful Marine-trained variety.

From the letters he sent his sister, who lent them to me, I glean that, as a Marine, J.T. spent his down time cussing, drinking, fighting, playing “hillbilly music” on the harmonica, playing cards and dominoes and, after the war in the occupation of what was then Peking, wondering where all the people went at night and somehow giving a young Chinese woman the idea she was going home with him.

In time his sweet and pretty young wife won him over to the church, perhaps with the help of his two kids who’d been baptized. Perhaps I should mention that some would argue that Jesus had something to do with it.

One afternoon J.T. and Mom proudly announced to us as they picked us up at Baseline Elementary School that they had gone downtown to the East Side Church of Christ on Scott Street earlier in the day and that J.T. had let the preacher baptize him.

My mother told me later that J.T. had first asked the preacher whether he could be forgiven for killing on Okinawa.

The preacher said sure.

Life changed. J.T. spent his free time reading the Bible, or the New Testament only. He said he didn’t have time for any “old Bible” that didn’t affect him.

He pretty much quit cussing. And he practically took over that little congregation, handling its maintenance, preparing the weekly communion, doing the attendance count and arranging for men to lead prayers and serve communion.

In a couple of years the little congregation, which had not had governing “elders” because it didn’t think it had more than one man who was scripturally qualified—and that one man couldn’t properly act alone as boss—decided it had three men worthy of installation.

On a Sunday night the three men were submitted for eldership installation. The preacher presented them one at a time.

He first offered up the man who’d formerly served until the other elder died. He told of the man’s extensive resume of previous eldership and in business. Then he mentioned the second elder, a retired police officer and veteran songleader and lay minister.

Then he presented the third elder, J.T.—“Brother John” to the congregation, though his legal name was J.T and he’d chosen John and Thomas when the Marines told him he had to have names to go with those initials. And the preacher said only of J.T.: “You know him as a good man.”

I sat there, 12 or 13 years old, and humiliated. My dad had no resumé like the other men. The only thing the preacher could think to say of him, it seemed to me at the time, was an obligatory and hollow reference to his being a “good man.”

I don’t suppose he wanted to say he’s hauled your garbage and painted your houses.

I now know, of course, that J.T. had been introduced with the most lofty, relevant and genuine credential of all.

And I want to offer that profound public introduction again, a half-century later, on the occasion of Father’s Day.

J.T. was a good man.

A side note: There was a formal objection filed that mid-1960s evening to J.T.’s installation as an elder. A man in the congregation presented a letter saying J.T. was ineligible. He said it was on account of the scripture outlining qualifications—by the fundamentalist dogma that was applied. That passage referred to “tired old men,” the letter stated. The objector said J.T. was no tired old man—though the other two were.

Actually, the scripture referred to church elders being “tried,” not tired.

A rainy foxhole on Okinawa, trying to make a living with seven years of one-room backwoods schooling—I suspect J.T. had been sufficiently “tried,” and perhaps he had a right to be “tired.”

Oh, and I might add that those supposedly scriptural commandments for eldership eligibility mentioned having “believing children,” which meant J.T. was no longer eligible after one of his kids went bad. There was the firstborn who left church and was lost to newspapering.

It didn’t much matter. The little congregation was soon to die because of a schism over whether to invite the black people living all around it.

J.T. was for integrating. He had read Acts 2:38 and the reference to going into all the world to preach the gospel. He thought maybe the east side of Little Rock was part of “all the world.”

So J.T. and his family, except the boy lost to the newspaper, helped start a new church in south Pulaski County. Starting a new church was right up J.T.’s alley. There was roofing and drywall work to be done.

A few years later the preacher got up in that church and extolled then-Gov. Frank White for providing a great Lord’s victory that week by signing the bill requiring the teaching of creation-science in school. But the preacher warned that there were those about who were doing the devil’s work. Why, just that morning, he said, a man named John Brummett—“no relation, of course, to the fine family of Brummetts here”—had written a front-page article seeking to embarrass the governor and legislators who had favored the measure.

The preacher apologized that evening—for not knowing of the relation.

J.T. came to my house that afternoon for lunch, told me what had happened and sat by attentively as I got on the phone and chewed out the preacher.

What I’d done was write—as a reporter, not columnist—that the legislative sponsor of the creation-science bill had said in an interview that, yes, he was motivated by religion in advancing the measure. And I had quoted legal sources explaining that such an admission would be a matter of important evidence in the inevitable trial. Which it was, when the law got declared unconstitutional.

“Johnny Ray didn’t do nothing except say what other people said,” my dad said to my mom after I hung up the phone.

That’s how he offered support—indirectly, by referring to me in a comment to his wife that I could overhear.

I’m not sure J.T. was ever quite as gung-ho about church after that, which is not to say he was any less gung-ho about being a good man. I don’t think he could have changed that if he’d tried.

John Brummett’s column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at [email protected]. Read his blog at brummett.arkansasonline.com, or his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.

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