Chapter 17
Just pee with it for four or ten years
As, I said earlier some of the tables you set on were a lot more fun than others. My first table assignment was in the upper dinning. I set on Houston Robert’s table. It was what is called a “dead table.” Not much conversation and definitely no humor there. People ate their food and got out of there.
Houston was the floor overseer of the Linotype Department. I set to the left of him and across from his girlfriend of many years. I say many years because at the time the policy at Bethel was you needed a total of 14 years of full time service before you were allowed to get married and stay at Bethel. Houston had ten years in and his girlfriend had just three years in, she was short one year. This was the policy Knorr made up. The number one reason most Bethelities left Bethel was to get married.
Houston looked like total Bethel geek poster boy, with really white skin, big lips and glasses. His girlfriend was a cute little brunette, I forget her name. A strange looking couple for sure. I wonder if they are still together. I didn’t know about Knorr’ policy when I got there, so I started asking the couple all kinds of questions about it. Houston’s face got beet red. His girlfriend informed me it was time to be quiet and eat my food. After that, I did just what she said. I ate my food and got out of there.
Could there be a more sexually repressed people than Jehovah’s Witnesses? I don’t know.
There was another new thing that started with my group of Bethelities. It was called the new boy talks. I’m sure they were called something else but is what everyone called them. For the first eight weeks after the Watchtower study on Monday nights, eight Bethel heavies, would talk to us new boys. They were having a lot of problems back then so these talks were designed to get the new brothers on track right off the bat.
Each brother got a different subject. George Couch, the Home Overseer talked about our rooms and activities around the Bethel home, like table manners. Doctor Dixon talked about health and hygiene. Knorr’s subject was sex at Bethel, or I should say how to deal with the lack of sex at Bethel. He talked about some other of his pet peeves also. e talked about HI was at the very first new boy talk that Knorr’s ever gave on sex. I would have given a thousand dollars, if I could have recorded that talk. Because no one would believed it. The the stuff that came out of our presidents mouth about sex was strange to say the least.
There was about eighty brothers and three sisters there. Knorr talked about our vow of celibacy. No sex and no marriage for four years. We couldn’t even touch a sister he said and we definitely didn’t couldn’t touch ourselves. I remember one of his quotes was. “I only want you to pee with it for four years.” Masturbation was Satan’s tool to insight the body parts. He went on and on about not getting tempted by immorality. However he said “Once you did get married and have sexual relations it was no big deal. Sure you would have sex but afterwards you get up and painted the walls or go to work.” A strange thing to say, I know few people who paint their room after having sex.
For Knorr homosexuality was a big problem at Bethel. He had kick out dozens of homosexuals in 1969 a few months before we got there, so of course that subject came up. This was a sin worse than any other so he read us scripture after scripture about the abomination of “men sleeping with men.”
Homosexuality happens with thousand guys living together. So the subject came up a lot there. There was a lot of NPGs there too. I roomed with one for a while, though I didn’t know what they were at the time. Non Practicing Gays
After his talk was over the next few months and years it was obvious that Knorr really didn’t even like the Bethelites. They were a necessary evil to him, they gave him nothing but grieve. I can’t remember even one time in four years that he even thank us for our sacrifice for being there. I do remember a time when he thanked a bunch of elders for the sacrifice they had made for giving up two weeks of their lives by having to be away from their wives and families, just so they could attend ministry school. The difference of course was we had to be there and they didn’t.
On the other hand he loved the Gilead students. The brothers and sisters who were being trained for foreign missionary service. Of course, when they screwed up they were thousands of miles away and not at his house.
When someone was dismissed from Bethel for one of the many sins Knorr had listed in his new boy talk, “We had them for breakfast.” This meant that after the text comments and before breakfast, Knorr would name this person and their transgression. He would then rip them a new asshole at the breakfast table. This talk could last anywhere between ten to forty minutes depending on how worked up he was. Many times he would go into graphic details on the nature of the sin. I literally saw foam around his month one time. The sisters set there squirming with red faces. There was silence in the dining hall at the end. No one really wanted to eat the cold food that was served to them after he was done.
It got so bad, that on one of his many trips to the South Pacific he got a big surprise when he got back home. He always took these trips in the winter time, what a surprise. Around 1973 the governing body voted him off the text table. So even the governing body, were sick of his tirades. They decided the position would be rotated and all the governing body would all have turns at leading the text comments, including him.
When he got back to Bethel, you could tell he was pissed. The next week was the Gilead gradation. While he was making his announcements he informed the Bethel family of the new change at the text table. The non-smiling Knorr said and I quote “I decided to let them have it!”
Funny, I was told before I went to Bethel that all the Bethelities there called Brother Knorr papa. In the four years I was there, I never heard one brother call him that. On the other hand, I did heard many call him King Knorr.
At the end of Knorr’s new boy talk he asked if anyone there had any questions. Everyone set there stunned for a few seconds. I raised my hand. Knorr pointed his bony finger at me.
“Yes son.”
I stood up.
“I think I speak for everyone here. We just wanted to thank you brother Knorr for taking this time and sharing this important information with us.”
Let the ass kissing begin.