I have read these very interesting comments and experiences about the GB members. My uncle was Lyman Swingle, who died in March, 2001. I didn't know a lot about him until my late teenage years; we didn't see that much of him in those days. My first recollection of him was at the 1958 international assembly at Yankee Stadium, the mother of all conventions. I was seven years old.
We had flown to New York and stayed with my other uncle, who was also a member of the Bethel family and who still lived in Brooklyn. We were all very excited about going to Bethel to see the factory. Apparently, I was very tired, and fell asleep in my aunt and uncle’s apartment on the couch. I was awakened by my returning family and realizing I missed the tour, was very pissed off. I remember bawling my head off and everyone trying to comfort me saying, “We’ll see it another time.”
In 1960 Lyman came to Salt Lake City, Utah, his hometown, to oversee the district convention. We met him at the airport along with some of the local press… a picture of our family with Lyman was in the Salt Lake Tribune the next morning along with a short article about the convention. I was nine or ten by that time, but I didn’t have much of a concept of who he was other than my uncle, and that he had some position at Bethel. (They were not commonly known as the Governing Body in those days, and they probably did not have the clout with Witnesses they have now).
We saw more and more of him in the during the late ‘60s and thereafter, he came to Salt Lake City to visit and vacation with us nearly every year. The red rock of Southern Utah was one of his favorite spots.
By 1968 I was starting to take the “truth” very seriously, I was a senior in high school, the draft board was looming on my horizon, and so I was making plans to get my butt into the pioneer work. Sometime that year I had thought about going to Bethel and I wrote him a couple of paragraphs asking him about Bethel service, why he decided to go, was it hard for him to leave home, and I also told him about my girlfriend, noting that leaving her behind would pose a big dilemma, and asked him for any advice.
I got a letter back from him within a few days, and it was not at all what I expected… he typed five pages of single-spaced comments, observations, and wrote a little bit about his decision to go to Bethel in 1930. (I found that letter the other day and read it again--it’s posted it on another ex-JW site). Ultimately, I knew I would never survive the rigors of Bethel life and decided not to go. I also broke up with my Witness girlfriend for about a year or so, and later we got back together and were engaged, although it didn’t work out.
Lyman really was a character. His wife was from Mobile, Alabama, and yes, he sometimes made comments about blacks and most other minorities. I honestly don’t think he was racist, but he occasionally referred to blacks as “n*****s,” something he would never get away with today. He also referred to Japanese people as “Japs,” Chinese as “Chinks,” Jews as “Kikes,” and Polish people as “Pollocks,” even from the platform. The local congregation he was assigned to in Brooklyn was made up entirely of African Americans, and others had told me that they loved him… he would sometimes take on their cultural lingo and speak to them as though he was black himself, referring to white people as “whities.” I never heard him make any judgmental comments about any race, although his wife did on occasion. My sister married a brother who was half Chinese, raised in America, and Lyman referred to their upcoming marriage in another letter he wrote talking about the “LeeChow-BillChow chopsuey merger.” His references were more for humor than anything racist, although I realize people will make their own decisions about that… I certainly don’t defend his use of racial nick-names… and no one in my family growing up ever used the term “n****r” if we wanted to live to see tomorrow. My father and mother hated the word and despised other people for their use of it, even though they were amused by Lyman’s comments sometimes.
I can attest to his swearing, he often swore around us, which in a way was sort of charming considering how many people virtually worshipped members of the GB. My mother had to cancel a trip to visit him and his wife in 1983--my first daughter was about to be born, and she told Lyman on the phone she had to be here for the birth. Lyman said, “Yes, by all means, you can’t miss out on the goddamned baby.” I think more than anything else, his swearing and sense of humor revealed a rebellious contempt of pretentiousness. During one of his trips to Salt Lake, my parents took him and Crystal to tour the LDS Temple grounds. Lyman was dressed like a slob, as usual, and he was wearing an old fishing hat replete with hand-tied flies. When they entered the Tabernacle, the tour guide politely asked if he would remove his hat. Lyman abruptly said “Why should I?” The tour guide said “we are in a house of worship…” and looking around at some of the renovation and construction work going on said Lyman said “Well, it don’t look like no church to me.” He left his hat on. My father and mother about passed out.
In many ways, he was genuinely humble. His wife Crystal once told us that he knelt at his bed at night and prayed. He said that was why Jehovah made knees. He was also very sentimental, he performed our marriage in 1974, and towards the end of the private ceremony, he began to cry. He delivered his own father’s funeral service in 1968, and his voice never quivered, although when he read aloud the words to “Keep Your Eyes on the Prize” we could see tears on his face. He also made a few jokes about gramps, at one point anyone might have confused his talk with a stand-up routine.
Whenever people asked him what he did at Bethel, he got very vague if he answered at all. “I operate a typewriter” was about as much as he would tell us, even his own family. He despised people sucking up to him, I used to almost hate to be with him at an assembly or at a special talk… he could be downright rude, especially when people would ask him about someone at Bethel. I heard him get really angry with the man married to my cousin when he asked him if he knew so-and-so; Lyman retorted “Now look! Bethel is a very big place… I don’t know everyone by name!”
My father and my other uncle got into a discussion with him about the 1975 fiasco. They told him that it was wrong for the Society to make all the statements they did about the date and the 6,000 years of man’s existence. Lyman half-heartedly defended the Society by saying that it was the idea of only one or two men (meaning Fred Franz). My other uncle told him that it didn’t matter who said it, came up with it, the brothers around the world viewed it as coming from the Society. He said very little about it, but his wife told us (when Lyman was not present) that 1975 was the biggest blunder the Society ever made, and it was all caused by Fred Franz. About six or seven years later and after I had lost my faith, I found CoC in the library at the U. of Utah, and was shocked to find out that Lyman really didn’t seem to buy into the whole “Gentile Times” ending in 1914 at all. Shortly thereafter, I got in contact with Ray Franz by phone one night (we corresponded a couple of times), and I asked him why Lyman hadn’t been more assertive about his own beliefs since it seemed to me like they had a lot of similar opinions. Raymond told me that Lyman had been at Bethel since he was a very young man, had known nothing else in his life, and when it came right down to the wire, he was faithful to the Organization. I knew Lyman had also made a trip to Georgia to visit Ray after the charges of apostasy had been raised at headquarters, although he never spoke about it, Crystal said that Lyman felt Ray should have been disfellowshipped, but I honestly don’t know how credible Crystal’s words were, she was a lovely lady, but she enjoyed whatever spotlight was pointed in her direction.
Lyman knew I had stopped going to meetings and had lost my faith as far back as the late 80’s, but he was always kind to me, in fact, he seemed to go out of his way when he was here to have a conversation with me. He sometimes invited me into a room where it was just the two of us, and although I was ready to pee my pants when he did that, he never once asked me about it, just wanted to make small talk with me. He knew I was studying computer science at the U. of Utah, where my grandfather had been a professor of pharmacology for several years (1914-1925 I believe) and he wanted to hear about what I was learning. He shared some stories about the programmers who wrote the MEPS system at Bethel, and confessed it was all a great mystery to him.
The last time I saw him was at a dinner party my sister and brother-in-law had for him and my aunt, his full sister. They were both very old, Lyman’s wife had recently died, and his sister was in the first stages of Alzheimer’s, but she had us roaring in laughter with her sharp-as-a-pin stories about my cousin Steve and me when we were growing up. We both smoked in our early teens, before it was ever a disfellowshipping offence; we would sometimes climb up on his roof because it was the safest place for us to smoke without my aunt catching us. She had made up a song about us which she sang at the dinner table that night:
Stevie and Davie
Sitting on the roof
Smoking their cigarettes
And saying:
“We’re MEN and
Here’s the PROOF!” [she pantomimed taking a drag from a cigarette then pursing her lips blew out an imaginary cloud of smoke].
The first time she sang that song to us we were still teenagers, and we nearly died. We had no idea she knew we smoked—and she never scolded us or disciplined us for doing so.
She and Lyman, especially, had a hard childhood, their mother (my grandpa’s first wife) died in the Spanish Flu in 1918. Lyman was seven or eight years old, his sister Betty was only about five or six. Grandpa married my father’s mother three years later, and she did not get along with Lyman at all. He was very mischievous as a child and teenager, he nearly drove her mad. He used to steal chemicals from his father’s drug store (he became a pharmacist after he stopped teaching at U. of U.) such as sulfur and potash and some other secret ingredients, and put little piles of his concoction on the railroad tracks, then stand nearby when a train passed by, detonating the powder under the train’s wheels. One night he loaded up his father’s car with a bunch of girls and rolled it over in a ditch speeding through town. He was often at the mercy of my grandfather’s razor strap, and the racket from his disciplinary sessions with my grandfather only added to my grandmother’s intolerance for the situation.
Lyman applied for Bethel in 1929, but was not accepted. He applied a year later when he could afford to pay his own way to New York, his letter of acceptance arrived on Saturday and he was on the bus the following Monday. He didn’t know if he would ever see his family again, but he was eager to go eastward. He didn’t get back to Salt Lake City until 1941, whereupon he walked into gramp’s pharmacy and sat down at the soda counter. Gramps finally came over and waited on him, not recognizing his own son, and they had a brief conversation before he asked his own father what his name was. Doc (as everyone called him) replied: “It’s Swingle.” Lyman said “What a coincidence. That just happens to be my name too.” When Doc realized he was talking to his oldest son, he began to weep.
Lyman didn’t always get along well at Bethel with the powers at the top. He had been writing articles for the “Golden Age” for a time when he was suddenly assigned to the ink department, evidently for some misstep he had made, where he nearly worked himself to death. He developed a heart murmur shortly after that, and then he was mysteriously given the assignment of editor of the magazine. He once told my father that he had “been to hell and back” at Bethel, but we never knew why, and he would never say. In his early years, he was severely chastised by Rutherford for his dress… he began wearing Bermuda shorts to work everyday, and for some reason, he didn’t see the harm in doing so. In 1945, he became a director of the Pennsylvania Corporation, and in his later years he served as the Society’s Secretary Treasurer and overseer of the writing committee.
I have mixed feelings about him… I loved him as a man, as my uncle, though he was not very much a part of our family when I was growing up. He could be cross and impatient, but most of the time he was just “Uncle Lyman.” He was a great teller of jokes, which sometimes frustrated other people who had been invited to one of our family events—they expected to hear some inside information, new light, or whatever secret project the Society was working on. Instead, they would get only a riddle like: “Why does a can of Campbell’s Pork and Beans only have 239 beans? Because if they added one more bean, it would be two-farty.”
My other uncle was with him the day he died at Bethel. At his memorial service, the speaker said that Lyman had attended his last Governing Body meeting only two weeks before, and said that one of his favorite sayings in life was that “If you must die, then die with your boots on.” We still miss him.
I hope I didn't hijack a great thread here, but I just wanted to add some of my thoughts and memories, thanks so much if you managed to get all the way through it.
David Swingle
