Tom Cabeen

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Posts by Tom Cabeen

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  501

  Warren Schroeder from Bethel on Freddy, Kline and the apostate books!

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  Tom Cabeen

  Hi Owen,
  
  Yes, Peter and I are great friends. I see him at least once a year, and we talk on the phone every few months. He is a wonderful man, whom I deeply respect. He has a wonderful family as well. I know nearly all of them. Peter and Janet still live in Rainbow City, Alabama.
  
  Tom
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  501

  Warren Schroeder from Bethel on Freddy, Kline and the apostate books!

  by Dogpatch in

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  Tom Cabeen

  Mulan,
  
  Thanks for the update. If you can, give Kory my best. Probably the best thing he ever did for his musicianship was to play with people who played better than me! I sure liked him, and have nothing but great memories of the time we spent together.
  
  Tom
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  501

  Warren Schroeder from Bethel on Freddy, Kline and the apostate books!

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  Tom Cabeen

  OtisBarker:
  
  Before we came along, no one used pocket protectors. We started the trend. We basically defined what "nerds" were. Silicon Valley stole it from us. Just like the WTS, we were major trend setters! Also just a bit delusional! :-)
  
  
  Warren:
  
  I remember Billy and the Blacks. I drove his grandma to the New York assemblies a few times in their big Lincoln, but I never got to know any of them that well. Shortly after that, I got married and was busy with other things like secret Bible studies and learning how to print with offset presses.
  
  I don't know how much I have changed since my Bethel days. I sometimes feel that I am pretty much the same basic person. But as my wife reminded me, at Bethel we were in an unrealistic environment. I had a lot to learn about life in the real world. I also had a lot to learn about true friendship (BTW, I wrote a song with that title, which I sang at Stan and Julie Weigel's wedding). I found that most of my friendships were not as solid as I thought they were. But I have no bad feelings about the JWs who shunned me. That religious perspective really inclines one toward mental illness, and I simply regard them as having a form of illness. I do not think I ever really had any enemies among them.
  
  JWDaughter:
  
  My heart breaks for you, my dear! It must have been so confusing and difficult for a young person to be encouraged to study regularly, then when you do, you get DA'd without a clue as to what was going on. And at such a young age! At least we were adults when it happened. I hope you have healed, and have met wonderful people who love you and have helped you understand what happened, and that you have freed yourself by forgiving those who did this bad thing, and have moved on.
  
  Tom
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  501

  Warren Schroeder from Bethel on Freddy, Kline and the apostate books!

  by Dogpatch in

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  Tom Cabeen

  To my friend Frank Toth
  
  Hi Frank,
  
  I admit that I haven't thought about many of these things in a quarter of a century. I just sort of put them away in the back closet part of my mind and moved on. But my healing was over many years ago, and there is no hurt connected with any of these memories. I am honestly having a ball walking down memory lane...
  
  Hope you are doing well, Frank. My best to you!
  
  Tom
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  501

  Warren Schroeder from Bethel on Freddy, Kline and the apostate books!

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  Tom Cabeen

  Hey! At least you could make out the tune, which you couldn't do when you read some of the the Watchtower articles that were out at the same time. And we had a heck of a lot more fun doing that than we did in service!
  
  Tom :-)
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  501

  Warren Schroeder from Bethel on Freddy, Kline and the apostate books!

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  Tom Cabeen

  Warren,
  
  Jim Petrie was another of my best friends. He was my assistant when I was operating Cottrell 16, and later he was a Floor Overseer in the Pressroom, like Randy. We were all very close. The song you remember was "You Done Stomped on my Heart", which was a sort of silly country/bluegrass standard written by Mason Williams (he also wrote "Classical Gas"). We first heard it on The Smother's Brothers Show in the sixties. Here is a video of John Denver singing the song. You will recognize the famous line "stomped on my aorta": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WHeYhE-k7kw (sorry, I still don't know how to properly insert a link on this board.)
  
  Jim and I used to play guitars (with me sometimes on my 5-string banjo) in our rooms and at Pressroom parties. We also played with two other guys, Kory Tideman (pronounced TEED a mun), a very talented musician who played mandolin, and Kenner Dull, who played guitar. We had a lot of fun together. At the time, bluegrass was hot and we were heavily influenced by The Nitty Gritty Dirt Band's recently-released two-album set called "Will the Circle be Unbroken" One time we tried to learn to play that song ("Circle") by sitting back to back in a circle (four of us), with our arms sort crossed, each of us plucking one instrument with our right hand, and fingering another instrument with our left hand. For example, I would sit with Jim on my left and Kory on my right, and Kenner behind me. I would hold my banjo to my left and pick it while Jim fingered it. Meanwhile, Kory would hold his mandolin to his left and pick it with his right hand, while I fingered it with my left. It was crazy and we never had enough time to get it down well enough to perform in public, but we had a lot of laughs practicing it.
  
  Jim and the other two guys played at Gloria and my wedding. We also played at the first Bethel Family Night. I was the MC. It was Dan Sydlik's brainchild. I have some pictures of the guys at both occasions, but don't know how to post them here. If I find out how to do it, maybe I will scan and post a couple of pictures.
  
  Tom
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  501

  Warren Schroeder from Bethel on Freddy, Kline and the apostate books!

  by Dogpatch in

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  Tom Cabeen

  That's him.
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  501

  Warren Schroeder from Bethel on Freddy, Kline and the apostate books!

  by Dogpatch in

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  Tom Cabeen

  Jookbeard
  
  They all went in service, don't you know?
  
  The joys of service are truly grand!! Or maybe...
  
  Oh boy, here comes another story...
  
  When I was rooming with Bill Wilkenson in the late 1960s (BTW, I would love to find him, anyone know of his whereabouts? I heard he was in Virginia somewhere, but haven't been able to locate him.), when he was still a Gilead Instructor, all the Branch Servants (this was before the days of Branch Committees or Branch Overseers) were called to Brooklyn for several months of training (their poor wives were left at home!). One of them, the BS of Sweden, I think his name was Abrahamson, came to our room with several other BS's (unfortunate initials, those). He told us a strange story. He had been talking to Knorr about declining sexual mores in Sweden.
  
  Knorr told him that while he was in New York, where no one knew him, he should go to Times Square (at the time, it was famous for adult movies, girlie shows and the like) he should visit a few of those places so he would know what temptations the brothers were up against. He resisted strongly, to his credit. He felt that he knew as much as he needed to know about such places without visiting them. I always respected the man for his decision.
  
  But it sure made me wonder what Knorr did when he visited Sweden and other places where he could walk the streets without being recognized.
  
  Tom
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  501

  Warren Schroeder from Bethel on Freddy, Kline and the apostate books!

  by Dogpatch in

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  Tom Cabeen

  No, but Mary says Hi!
  
  Better make that Chris! Ha Ha. You guys are brutal! No slack! Where did you learn this...oh never mind. I know...
  
  Tom
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  501

  Warren Schroeder from Bethel on Freddy, Kline and the apostate books!

  by Dogpatch in

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  2. friends

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  Tom Cabeen

  Hey Warren,
  
  I sent an email to Christ and Norma about a year ago, but got no reply. Maybe I have an old email address.
  
  I still have the pictures from that get together at Greg's. I think I brought my son, Matt, who was going to be a senior in high school at the time. He is now married and expecting our first grandchild, a little boy in October. I will send you a PM with my phone number. Give me a call when you get a chance.
  
  How well I remember Carl Johnson! Give him my best regards and my phone number. I would love to hear from him also.
  
  This thread has brought so many funny stories to my head. So many crazy things happened while I was there, and I met so many wonderful people. I worked hard, but I had fun, too, and laughed my head off so many times. I had a ball with the Pressroom guys when I was Overseer there. Guys like Randy Watters actually ran the Pressroom (in the sense of doing actual work), once we got the thing running well. After that, it was mostly my job to take the heat when the guys did something to get unfavorable notice from the Factory Committee.
  
  I learned a lot at Bethel, too. Maybe not what I (or my family) expected I would learn, but it turned out to be very useful in the long run.
  
  Tom