Band- I wonder to how many old timer families are still around, 3rd 4th generation types likes us with some still in some outside and having moved on.
My Family's Bible Student History
by designs 25 Replies latest watchtower beliefs
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amos77
Most interesting to see how "history" gets rewritten and sanitised. I believe the Egyptians did it as well. We have a 1874 volume of the Watchtower, the first Russell ever printed. Amazing how it reflected the times and the beliefs of those days. 1914 in those Watchtowers was calculated from various measurements from Egyptian pyramids! Another comment was made about how many waking paces from Grand Central Station. 1914 was to be Armageddon, The new Jerusalem to be established and all the jews would be restored to their homeland. What is truth?
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designs
Stand up sit down when where wha...
Junior High School was new and exciting and also this new religion we were learning. Stand when you say the Pledge of Alligence sit down through the National Athem unless you were standing when it began, do we stand or sit when a judge enters the room weeeaaa that's a lot for a teen to learn.
This is the time in my life when the anti-government anti-world association stuff took hold. All of the friends I had in Elementary School and at Church were now left behind, not in any mean way or with harsh words it was just that they were now absent from my life. In there place were hundreds of young JWs. Los Angeles and Orange Counties even the Inland Empire counties were now open to me, you had somebody to stay with or go to a party with every week.
The buzz on what would happen and where each weekend would start around Wednesday night and you better have your plans together by Friday night. From Friday night to Sunday night you pretty much ran from San Fernando Valley to Los Angeles to Orange County for these massive parties, 100 200 young JWs getting together and listening to the lastest Rolling Stones or Motown records. The surf crowd in Orange county, the Latins in East LA and Whittier, the Blacks in City Terrace and Watts, girls in the Inland Empire had their own horses and rode, nobody in High School with its Canteen Dances had anything like it. This was a cool world and my brother and I were welcomed in.
Our teen years are formative and challenging enough but when you throw into those years a controversial anti-establisment religion it really makes or breaks you. I remember getting called out in front of the entire school by the Vice Principal and Principal at School Assemblies for not standing for the National Athem, geez was that embarrassing, but it also gave me this certain hands off don't mess with him aura. I mean I stood up to the VP and the Principal how cool was that!
School and education were also taking a decided turn. I had wanted to be an Architect and design a whole new way of living (this was after my folks took my brother and I to the Mesa Verde Cliff Dwellings in southern Colorado). I had taken 5 years of Drafting and Architecture and I could see it was going to slip away from me as a career. In 1966 the Awake came out with its anti-college article and my hopes of going to a School of Architecture crashed to the floor. Many of my JW friends were taking only the most basic of classes in Math and English, no one was looking to a career.
At the same time the Vietnam War was building 63-67 and we had to make decisions about the Draft. Pioneering was the only real choice approved by anyone in the theocratic structure. Even Dr. Dixon who was our Circuit Overseer gave the party line on no college. And so my Pioneering life began after graduation. This pleased my mother and made my father furious and to this day I don't really know why the influence of my mother won out, maybe it was all of the friends I now had were exclusively witnesses. Had there been a balance of friends who knows who would have won that inner struggle. The Anti-War protests and the Civil Rights protests said something loud and clear that I wanted also. The 1960s proved to be a pivitol decade for anyone who lived through them. We were all changed by the events of that decade and for many of us we became very much a part of those events for the rest of our lives.
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designs
After my mother had been studying again with the sister who stopped by that day in 1960 we had a dinner party at the house and this sister her husband and daughter were invited. Now her husband's initials were JW, how strange is that, and he was a big gregarious guy with great stories to tell about his growing up on a ranch in Colorado near Vail. My mother who was born in Greeley Colorado and Jim had a lot in common and even my Dad chimed in because his father had been the engineer on the Pike's Peak Railroad and was married in Silverton back in the 1890s. One of my half sister's was currently living in Durango Colorado so the evening was a lot of fun with great stories everyone could tell.
Big Jim was also ex Navy and also All Navy Pistol Champion. He was also an electrician like my dad and he had his own electrical business. For a long time they never talked religion, I mean years, it was just being friends and occaisionally doing things together. But Jim began to ask my dad to help out with witness projects- construction on a Kingdom Hall, help out in the kitchen at Assemblies. One of the turning points in their friendship and in my growing up was Jim inviting us as a family to spend the summer at his family's old ranch near Vail on the Gunnison River. Do you remember the film A River Runs Through It, well that was our summer in Colorado on the ranch. Jim's family had owned the ranch and much of the valley for generations. It was rough and rustic. No electricity we used lanterns and candles. No gas we had a wood burning stove and you started a fire each morning for even the basics like coffee. Plumbing was some pipes that stretched out from the house across the yard to the Gunnison river a few hundred feet away and the water was gravity fed into the house. The bathrooms, well we had a genuine Outhouse and you could prop the door open and watch the river run. Showers were 200 feet of black hose curled on the lawn and one end run up a tree with a shower head. At 2:00-3:00 in the afternoon you went outside and had sun heated hot water for a bath.
It was on this trip that my brother and I learned to Fly Fish and hunt. On one trip to some Beaver dams we drove an old WWII Jeep he kept on the property as far as roads would let us then we hiked for hours into the back country to a valley with dam after dam stacking back up into the valley as far as you could see, and there we learned the skills of fly fishing. Jim taught us how to use rifles and pistols, saddle a horse, get a pack mule to just walk, animal lovers beware a 2X4 was used in the persuasion. The most beautiful country I had ever seen.
Jim and Dad became life long friends. Slowly over many years they began to talk about God and faith and ideas about life and what was in the future. Some 25 years after first meeting my dad was baptized.
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Band on the Run
You are a bit older than me. We never had any fun in Newark, NJ. No fun at all. I prayed for a JW friend -- one would be enough.
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LoisLane looking for Superman
Designs...What a beautiful life you have.
Thank you for sharing.
Just Lois