Loving every word of this thread. Cannot thank you enough Leolaia. Your post #17,440 really interested me. I am from WI and the James Bourne and Dean Bourne families were my parent's very, very best friends. I looked up this Reginald A. Bourne to see if there was some connection and found this juicy piece of info on Reginald A. Bourne......
IOWA v. BOURNE was a 1942 Iowa criminal court case which involved one of the WatchTower Society's "District Sales Managers". In September 1942, a WatchTower Society "Zone Servant", named Reginald A. Bourne, 30, was arrested in Des Moines, Iowa, while performing duties as Chairman at the then ongoing WatchTower Convention. Reginald Bourne was thereafter convicted of "Contributing to the Delinquency of a Minor". There was possibly even more to the following story. Readers really need to look at a map to see what I am talking about. First, Bourne parked his travel trailer at Indianola, Iowa. The case revolved around a 16 year-old boy named Wayne Emmons, whose home was in Iowa City. Emmons was allegedly attracted to the Jehovah's Witnesses, against his parent's wishes, through relatives (possibly paternal grandparents) living in What Cheer, Iowa. Despite the fact that Bourne initially denied knowing anything about Emmon's disappearance, Bourne eventually confessed to giving money to the 16 year-old so that, puzzlingly, he could travel out-of-state to Madison, Wisconsin, to attend a JW Convention that was going on the exact same time as was the convention in Des Moines. Bourne even drove Emmons from either Iowa City or What Cheer to a bus station in Ames, Iowa, of all places??? Interestingly, references to a JW leader named "Reginald A. Bourne" disappear after this conviction. However, there is "an" Allen Bourne who was baptized around 1936, and who "pioneered" until 1946, when he was selected to attend Gilead (WatchTower's Missionary School), and who then was sent to Honduras for only four years, before returning to the U.S., and settling in Ohio in the 1950s. There is also "a" Dean Bourne, who was baptized around 1939, and who served as a "District Overseer" in Wisconsin and Iowa in the 1960s, after first also attending Gilead and also being sent to Honduras.