Editor's note: A version of this column was first published online-only in 2015.
For years J.T. would 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.
If any two words applied to him, they would be "dutiful" and "reliable." A man once told me he could set his clock by watching my dad go his route.
J.T. declined in those early days to venture inside the church building. He said there were hypocrites in there. 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 during and after World War II--on Okinawa and then in Peking for the occupation--J.T. spent his down time cussing, drinking, fighting, and playing the harmonica, cards and dominoes.
One afternoon J.T. and Mom proudly announced to my younger sister and me 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.
J.T. practically took over that little East Side congregation, handling its maintenance, preparing the weekly communion, doing the attendance count and arranging for men to lead prayers and serve communion.
In a few years, the congregation, which had not had "elders" because it didn't think it had more than one man scripturally qualified--and that a lone man couldn't properly act as the singular boss--decided it had three men worthy of eldership.
On a Sunday night the men were submitted for installation. The preacher presented them one at a time.
He first offered 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., of whom he said only: "You know him as a good man."
I sat there 11 or 12 years old and humiliated. My dad had no resume like the other two men. The only thing the preacher could think to say was an obligatory "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, more than a half-century later, on this Father's Day.
J.T. was a good man.
The little congregation would die in a few years because of a schism over whether to invite the black people living all around it.
J.T. 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."
J.T. and his family, except his firstborn lost to newspapers and worldly thought, helped start a new church in south Pulaski County. Starting a new church was right up J.T.'s alley. There was drywall 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, the preacher 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 (or presumably being able even to imagine it).
J.T. and my mom and sister came to my house and told me what had happened. J.T. 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 that, yes, he was motivated by religion in advancing the measure. I had quoted legal sources explaining that such an admission would be a matter of important evidence in the inevitable trial--as it was when the law got declared unconstitutional.
"Johnny Ray didn't do nothing except say what other people said," my dad explained to my mom after I hung up.
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 a good man.
I don't think he could have changed that if he'd tried.
------------v------------
John Brummett, whose column appears regularly in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette, is a member of the Arkansas Writers' Hall of Fame. Email him at [email protected]. Read his @johnbrummett Twitter feed.
Editorial on 06/17/2018