Your Great-Grandfather was a Preacher - Stories for my grandchildren

Pardon me while I tell my grandchildren about someone they need to know more about.

Your grandmother Babi's father, Walter Allen Brown - "Allie" to his friends - was a preacher. His congregations were in small-town churches, primarily in South Texas. The custom in those days was for preachers to move often, and from his records, we can find twelve for sure, possibly fourteen different congregations where he was a paid minister, over a career that started in Alice, TX in November, 1943, to his final full-time pulpit in Three Rivers, TX, ending in January, 1986. Forty-one years, two months. I have no idea how many gospel meetings, lectures, camp sessions, vacation Bible schools, guest pulpits, and speaking engagements there also were in that time frame. A lot.

Son of a Missouri-Pacific railroad engineer and a one-generation-removed German immigrant mother, Allen was preaching by the time he was 15. He graduated from Corpus Christi High School, where he played on the 1938 State Championship football team (a team that thrashed my Breckenridge Buckaroos, by the way), married his sweetheart Alice (secretly) while still in high school, briefly attended Abilene Christian College, began a full-time preaching career with an interruption while he served in the Navy during WWII, spending the duration at the Naval Air Station in Norman, Oklahoma, where he apparently also attended the University of Oklahoma and served as a volunteer (and possibly with a stint as a paid) assistant minister with high school and college students at the church in Norman. His first preaching job paid $50 a week, and the records suggest that he never made more than $175 a week in his entire career.

The family ventured out of South Texas twice; once to Silver City New Mexico, and once to Crosbyton, Texas. Allen had held meetings in both places and he went to Silver City to try to put a divided church back together, one that had split into two congregations in a town of only 8,000 people. He was successful in bringing the two factions back into a single church, but the patient died, and he resigned, citing as his reason III John 9 - "I wrote to the church, but Diotrephes, who loves to be first, will not welcome us."

On the way back from New Mexico, he stopped off in Crosbyton, on the South Plains of Texas, for three years, then returned to his roots in South Texas. Twice during his career he took non-preaching positions, but never stopped preaching; there was a period when he worked for a family friend in Laredo, filling the pulpit for a tiny church that could not support a paid minister and had no plans to do so, and later in Corpus Christi as the administrator for a retirement home the Ayers Street Church was trying to get started. During that period he drove to the community of Ingleside on Sundays and preached without pay. Neither of these two churches are listed in his journals, but they are part of the record, nevertheless.

I began dating your grandmother during the time Allen preached at Lindale in Houston, from 1959 to 1961, and I married Barb while he was preaching at Port Lavaca from 1961 to 1967. Port Lavaca sent him to a mission church in Columbus for just over a year, and then he spent eleven years in Bay City from June 1968 to June 1979 - the longest stay at any one place. Ask your Mom, Jericho and Jacob, and your Dad, Luke and Grace, about the trips from Bay City to Matagorda Bay and playing on the beach there.

There were three more congregations: two years at El Campo, five years at Three Rivers and part-time at Randolph in San Antonio after retirement, but his health was beginning to fail. His brothers Tom and Ed were already gone - Tom at age 46 and Eddy at age 35. In only seven more years he joined them, at 72 years of age. Alice died seven and one-half years later.

Jericho, Jacob, Luke and Grace - you never met him, but I'm confident he prayed for you. Every morning, without fail, he prayed, by name, for every one of his children and their spouses, and by name, every one of his grand children, and I'm pretty sure that from time-to-time he probably prayed for his yet-to-be born great-grandchildren. Because that was just the sort of man he was.