chapter 19.
“look ma no hands”.
by the time the summer rolled around they decided to put me on the dryers.
"After 6 months he came back, very disturbed and completely changed for the worse."
Is this possible?
Yes, and has happened to thousands of guys over the years.
It's a "good old boy country club" And spiritually, fairest, kindness and love has nothing to do with being a member.
chapter 19.
“look ma no hands”.
by the time the summer rolled around they decided to put me on the dryers.
Chapter 19
“Look ma no hands”
By the time the summer rolled around they decided to put me on the dryers. It was hotter than hell in the laundry by then. Either the A/C didn’t work or they decide not use it to save money, it was anywhere from 110 to 115 degrees down there. Some of the brothers called it “The Hole.” Of course the dryers are the hottest job there. It was so bad down there many of the brothers were taking salt tablets. The person training me made the job even worse. I was instructed by this ugly Polish kid from Chicago, Jack Pachocko. He was probably the first person I met there that I didn’t like besides the snitch in the delivery department. He was a terrible instructor. He wasn’t kind and he was always hoping you would screw up, so he could bring it to your attention. He was perfect Bethel overseer material.
After being there six months there were things going there that just didn’t feel right. Things said and things done. Plus many of the guys who had been there many years just didn’t seem all that happy.
One day I came over to fold underwear on the table with a couple other guys. This short stocky guy, his nickname was “stub,” was there folding underwear too. He had been at Bethel for a couple years and worked on the home cleaning crew.
“Hey buddy, what are you doing here?” I asked.
“Well.” He said. “I turned my thirty day notice. So they told me I needed to go to the laundry for my last thirty days here. I guess they wanted to punish me for leaving early.”
Wow, I thought to myself. They told us that every job here was “A privilege of service.” Yet they obvious don’t really believe that. So, for me the laundry is “A privilege of service” but for him it is a punishment.
Less than a month later this fact was proven once again with Gary Kennedy.
Gary and his brother James (Jimmy) Kennedy were very interesting people. Gary and I were best of friends for over thirty years after Bethel, until I decided to leave the religion he was raised in.
His father had been in show business in Hollywood and had many celebrities as friends. He was also well connected at Bethel with the powers that be.
Gary and his brother were always doing crazy things before they got to the lord’s house. It didn’t stop when they got there either. They were always daring each other, egging each other on. Their last adventure got Jimmy killed. The words I would use to best describe the two of them, would be “Look Ma no hands.”
Gary told me how he and his brother would hop freight trains and see how far they could get in a weekend, back in Georgia. At the international convention in 1969 the brothers would read telegrams from all over the world basically patting each other on the back for a job well done. Gary told me how he and his brother sent a bogus telegram that was read in front of about thirty thousand people from some made up country.
Jimmy had brought a T bird up from Georgia to New York. All the Bethelites except Knorr of course had to park on the street at night. Parking places were very hard to find in the Heights. Some brothers had to drive around for an hour looking for a legal spot. The Kennedy brothers had different Idea. They stared to park illegally in front of fire hydrants or anyplace else they could find. So one morning they went to get there car and it was gone. They called the police and were told to go down to the city impound. It was there alright. All they needed to do was cough up $600 in back tickets and fines. They told them to keep the car.
When I first met Gary, I thought all the stories he told me were just that, stories. The longer I knew him the more I came to realize he had really had done all the things he said he did. Gary was the first person I ever saw who wore his baseball cap backwards, this was back in 1970. I really think he invented this. He was the Jerry Lewis of Bethel. He was a wonderful, wacky guy with a heart of gold. He was truly a free spirit. Looking back I would have to say he really taught me to be more of an extrovert. He was truly a free spirit. Oh, one other thing he was one of the hardest workers I saw while I was there, he literally could do the work of two people.
One big problem there, the last thing they wanted at Bethel were free spirits. Conformity is everything, the individual means nothing.
Gary had been at Bethel for about a year when he showed up in the Laundry. Gary had been on the waiter crew and destroyed a full cart of china serving plates and bowls, worth about $300 dollars. What he was doing at the time this happened was any ones guess. I guessed he had destroyed some other china on different occasions. The bottom line was the overseer of the waiters didn’t want him on the crew anymore.
I could never figure out why we ate on breakable china in the first place. Between the dish duties and the waiters thousands of dollars of fine china were broken every year. Even back then they did made a nice unbreakable dinnerware. So after I was there a couple of years, I was talking to the head waiter one day at Saturday lunch.
“So, are a lot of dishes broken here every week?”
“Lots.” He said.
“So why don’t we buy corning ware or something more sturdy?” I asked.”
He had a funny little look on his face. “Because Knorr likes china.”
“Oh, Brother Knorr likes china?”
“Yes.” He said with smirk on his face.
“I got an Idea.” I told him. “Let’s give Knorr his china and we’ll all eat on corning ware, we’ll save thousands of dollars each year.”
“Good idea but it will never fly.”
Gary was assigned to the Laundry which turned out to be the penal institution of the home. Gary had made a name for himself. Which is the one thing you never wanted to do at Bethel. Once you had name instead of a number, you were on their radar and Gary was on theirs. It seemed they wanted Gary gone. So after he was sent to the Laundry, Ken Doweling had a talk to all his key men there and told them basically to watch for anything Gary said or did that was against company policy. In other words it was snitch time and we all needed to report in.
Gary was on their radar from the beginning though.
It seems that if the brothers do find something in a laundry bag that is outlandishly worldly the brothers in the Bethel office are notified. A week after Gary had got to Bethel, the brothers in the Landry found these really wild pair of bell bottom pants, in his laundry bag. So he got his first “service talk” right off the bat, not good. They had laid these pants before him and asked him what he was thinking when he got them? He had told them that he was in a drama at the international convention (which turned out to be true) and had to play a “worldly kid” the district overseer there had told him to buy the most outrages set of clothes he could find to play the part. He told them he was going to wash the clothes and then give them away.
Remember what I said about defending yourself. By the very fact he was in the Bethel office he was guilty.
So that was his first strike. The dishes was his second. Gary was on thin ice.
chapter 18. my privilege of service.
it was moved there in the spring of 1969 from the basement of the 124. why is it that people like to put laundries in basements?
the 119 was the newest of all the society’s properties.
Chapter 18
My privilege of service
The laundry was in the basement of the 119 building. It was moved there in the spring of 1969 from the basement of the 124. Why is it that people like to put laundries in basements? The 119 was the newest of all the society’s properties. This was a state of the art laundry facility for its time. It had washing machines that could handle over four hundred pounds of cloths in one washing. Steam presses, cloths driers, a press that could iron sheets, the hanky press that did handkerchiefs and napkins etc.
Everyone is given a laundry bag that went with their room you were assigned. They would fill out a laundry ticket with the number of items that were put in the bag. You would lay out your clothes with shirts and pants first underwear and T shirts next and then socks last. It was all tied together and put in your bag and dropped down the laundry shoot in your building, once a week.
When the bags were brought into the laundry, they had to go through a process that was called “check in.” All the clothes were counted. Then any garments that didn’t have a tag were given one for identification. They were a yellow tags that was melted onto your clothes. So for example my tag on the front of my underwear would read 499-129-33. This was my key number, building number and room number. From there the clothes were sorted into different washes, whites, colored, dress shirts, work cloths etc. The clothes were washed, dried, pressed and folded and then went back to “check out” where hopefully everything went back into the bags they came down in. Your dress and shirts and bag of clean clothes ended up back on the top of your bed the next day.
The laundry room overseer was named Ken Doweling. He had three assistants under him. Ron Teleson, Greg Javens and Bob Rains. These three brothers had what were called “key men” under them, under the key men were the grunts and under the grunts were the new boys. There is a definite peeking order there and it was important that everyone knew their place.
I knew nothing about the laundry or taking care of clothes before I went to Bethel. All of my experience was working at restaurants and working in and around kitchens. It stated that on my application. The same week I went to Bethel, another brother got there and was assigned to the kitchen. He knew nothing about kitchens or food. He had worked at a commercial laundry and dry cleaners before Bethel.
They don’t want you going there with any ideas about how things should be done. They are going to train you the Bethel way, their way. Years later, I used to joke around with young brothers who wanted to go to Bethel. I told them if you want to work at the farm just tell them you had no farm experience what so ever. It worked more often than not.
However, if you were one of the very few that went to college and got trained in a skill they really needed there, you ended up with a really good job, right off the bat. So by doing what they told you to do about not pursuing a higher education you were punished with a shitty job, right off the bat. If you disobeyed them and got and a better education you were rewarded with a better job. “Catch 22”
The first few days there I was folding underwear. There were these big tables there with mountains of clean underwear about four feet high on top of them. There were brothers standing around the tables. They had rules on how fast you had to fold this underwear too. We had to fold a pound a minute. One day they put this short, fat kid from Alabama on the table, his name was Danny Stewart. So there we were in what they called “burn out” mode, which means we were working as fast as we can folding this underwear. Danny had two speeds, slow and stop. We were folding about four times the underwear than he was. So this one brother looked over at him and said.
“Hey, Danny can you pick up the pace here. We need to get this load out!”
Danny, just kept folding the same way he had the last hour and said.
“Anything I fold, you don’t have to fold.”
“You’re just a ‘Jack’ Danny.” He didn’t seem to mind being called the worse name you can call a bethelite.
They trained me on quit a few jobs there. I went to the hanky press for a while and even did some delivery. Delivery was probably the best job in the laundry for many reasons. You were able to leave the hot laundry, with its overseers breathing down your neck. You were able to go all over the Bethel home delivering clean clothes. Speed was always the most important thing there too. One day I was waiting with my rack of clothes, in front of an elevator and happen to be talking to a young housekeeper. We talked for no more than a minute or two as I was waiting there. One of my fellow delivery boys came around a corner and saw me taking to her and that was the last day I delivered cloths.
Nothing was ever said to me back at the laundry but the next day I got a job change.
That day, I learned something they didn’t tell you in the “Dwelling together in unity” booklet. I learned that not only are there lots of brothers at Bethel but “big brother” was definitly there too. Yes, it was a snitches paradise.
Most everyone there was on a vigil looking for any minor or major infractions of the written or unwritten rules.
Why? For “Brownie points” of course. By going to your overseer with information about another, you are in essence saying. “See look at me brother overseer, I’m looking out for you and our department.” There were eyes and ears everywhere looking for just one wrong action or statement.
Ever wonder why they call it “Brownie points?” Because the color brown is the same color you would find on many people’s noses at lord’s house.
interesting observations i've noticed when visiting my uber elder cousin and his wife.
he just inherited a lovely home on the water on puget sound from his non jw dad who passed away earlier this year.
so they have spent many $$$ and months remodeling this house to their standards which are quite expensive tastes.
The only ones that want Armageddon to come quick are the poor witnesses. The rich ones hope Armageddon might drag it's feet a bit.
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.
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.
chapter 16. the tour .
my three days of housekeeping duty were over and i reported to the bethel office the next morning.
it was customary then get a tour of both the factory and the bethel home.
Yes, I know the work is ruff, I never have thought of myself as a writer. I did hire a editor on my first novel.I will definitely need a couple of people to look at it.
Thanks for all the wonderful input.
chapter 16. the tour .
my three days of housekeeping duty were over and i reported to the bethel office the next morning.
it was customary then get a tour of both the factory and the bethel home.
Chapter 16
The tour
My three days of housekeeping duty were over and I reported to the Bethel office the next morning. It was customary then get a tour of both the factory and the Bethel home. At the end of the tours they would give you your job assignment.
The tour of the factory was nothing short of amazing. Hundreds of brothers in different departments all working with only one goal in mind. There was the bindery in building three with the sewing machines, the end sheet gluers, the bindery lines, the gathers, the case makers and the trimmers. Building one with the hand bindery, the plate and linotype departments. The fifth floor ink room, where they made everything from ink to glue and even hand soap. Fourth floor job press for the smaller printing jobs. The third floor deluxe department and the second floor carpenter shop where the actually made all the furniture that was used at bethel.
The most impressive sight there was the pressroom in building one. The biggest presses there were on the six floor, they were the mighty Cottrells and two of these mighty beasts set side by side, press six and press seven. The noise was deafening as the “Watchtowers” and “Awakes” magazines were pouring out of them. I stood there speechless as the brothers stopped the press to change the giant sixty inch paper roll. It was a race to see how last they could change the role and get the press back on line. I have tears in my eyes as I write these words. This is the very heart of the factory and I would have given anything to be working there in the pressroom, I thought.
Then we went through the home with its many offices, we saw the waiter crews who spent hours preparing the tables for the next meal. The kitchen staff preparing meals for over a fifteen hundred people at a time. We toured the laundry where brothers sorted, washed and dried thousands of garments a day. They had their own dry cleans and even had a shoe repair shop too. The home was the support group for the factory workers. So the home was quite nice there but not as impressive as the factory, where the real action was.
There were six of us standing around at the end of our tour in the lobby of the 124 building. Brother Lang finally came down from the Bethel office with the news we were all waiting for. He handed each person a piece of paper but told us what it said before we could read it. Maybe he did this to see our reactions, I don’t know.
“Brother Casarona you are assigned the Laundry.”
I don’t remembered what I thought back then. I did know the laundry was a long way from the factory and the press room. I found out later that once you were assigned in the home odds of getting moved to the factory were extremely low. As fate would have it, years later I would be in the factory. Not only that, I ended my Bethel career in the press room on Hoe 10, Spanish Awake. Probably the only brother in Bethel history to start in the laundry and end up in the press room. It would be a long and strange road with many stops a long the way, in the sewing department, bindery and building one elevator.
Wherever they put me I was determined to give it my all and I did from the very first day at Bethel to my last, I did give it my all.
I think I was liked by some there and disliked by others, but no matter what you thought about me I wasn’t a “Jack.”
If you called someone a “Jack” at Bethel, it meant he was a lazy slacker. No one then knew where the term came from. It was used long before 1970 and is still used till this day. Just another thing passed down from one generation of Bethelities to the next.
Back then I wanted to please everybody. I wanted to be liked by everybody. When you are young you might think you can actually do this. But in truth, this isn’t possible and really should not be even wished for. If you are trying to please everyone, what do you believe in? What do you stand for? You want to be liked by all, really? Then you better get off this planet. It’s not possible.
Years later, I figured it out. I call it the Keith Casarona “80% 10% 10% rule” It goes like this.
Say, you met 100 people or even just 10 people. No matter how you act or what you say, one person out of the ten people, will love you to death. One person out of the ten will hate your guts for whatever reason. The other eight people won’t care about you one way or the other.
You just can’t please everyone if you are a real person.
There were many “brown noses” at Bethel back then. I’m sure there are many still there today. People willing to kiss anyone’s ass to get where they want to go.
In fact, one of old timers there told me that before he became president. Knorr’s nick name back in the old days was “Knorr the nose.”
The guy who had his nose up Rutherford’s ass would be our next president, what a surprise.
chapter 15. inwood.
it turned out that in 1970 there was a lot of changes being made at bethel.
one of the major changes was that a bethelite didn’t have to go to kings county or the brooklyn heights congregations first before getting assigned out to a local kingdom hall in the new york city area.
Chapter 15
Inwood
It turned out that in 1970 there was a lot of changes being made at Bethel. One of the major changes was that a Bethelite didn’t have to go to Kings County or the Brooklyn Heights congregations first before getting assigned out to a local kingdom hall in the New York City area. So instead of waiting six months I was assigned to the Inwood congregation in upper Manhattan.
I was assigned there with another new boy, John who came in the same week as me. John was a quiet kind of guy who always had a strange confused look on his face. His brother was a Bethel heavy there. It was always a good thing if you had some family there and John’s brother was a factory floor overseer. If you were going to make Bethel your career having family members there in positions of power helps. It didn’t help poor John, however. A couple of years later John had a break down and tried killing himself at the Watchtower Farm. Having a bunch of family around was good thing as long as you were happy. If you’re not happy and want to leave the lord’s house you got extra guilt and shame.
Daryl Christianson met us both in front of the 124 building and we headed to the subway station. The trip to our new congregation would take about an hour. Once on the train we met another brother who was going to the Inwood hall also. It turned out that it was going to be his last congregation meeting there. He had been at Bethel for four years and was leaving. Daryl had just hit his four year mark too but he was staying. My guess is, they had both came in together like John and I.
I couldn’t help but think to myself why would anyone ever leave Bethel, being so close to 1975? He didn’t say much after we were introduced. I found out soon enough that guys who had been there awhile didn’t have much to say to the new boys. They were in two different worlds. Just like the guys in Viet Nam that have much to say to new recruits. There was nothing you can tell them that they won’t figure for themselves eventually, if they didn’t get killed first. He just set there with his eyes glazed over looking at the bill boards and graffiti inside the subway car. It was one of his last subway rides and he looked numb setting there. I wondered what experiences he had while he was there. His last day was my first day the changing of the guard so to speak. After a few minutes I had to ask.
“So since you have been here for four years, do you have any advice to give a new guy like me?”
He set there for a few seconds and then looked at me with my shit eating grin. He said, with a blank look in his eyes.
“Yeah….Just do your work and keep your mouth shut. They don’t care about you here.” Then he turned and looked way.
Wow, I was dumb founded. What an attitude I thought. I will never be like this guy, I thought to myself.
The congregation you were assigned to could a big difference in your stay at Bethel. Some brothers got great jobs and shitty congregations, other brothers got great congregations and shitty jobs. Then the truly lucky guys got great jobs and great congregations. These brothers were called “Golden Boys.” Their stay a Bethel was like a walk in the park.
What constituted a good congregation? The first thing was there wasn’t too many Bethelites in it. Inwood had only four initially. Daryl Christianson, Larry Fisher, John and me.
At Midtown were I went to the memorial at, there was over sixty Bethelities at the meetings. The odds of getting invited to a meal out or getting any food from the local brothers and sisters was practically zone. Food was a big deal too. Because it took so long to get to our meetings there was no time for many Bethelites to go to the dinner at Bethel. We had leave work, clean up and head straight to the meetings. The wonderful sisters at the Inwood hall, would make up a brown bag full of food. We got the bags at the end of the meetings. So we had our dinner at about 10:00 p.m. at night on the subway train heading back home. We got back there at about 11:00 and up again at 6:30. Sundays after the meetings there was always a place for us at one of their houses for a home cooked meal.
Inwood congregation had about 50% blacks 25% Porto Ricans and 25% mixed nationalities. It was my first mostly black congregation. After fifty years and dozens of Kingdom halls, I must say the blacks have the best congregations. They are truly wonderful people. They are the real deal and if you are real too, they would do anything for you. However, if you are an uppity self-righteous white boy, they will stand clear of you. They saw lots of us, young white Bethelitites who were full of ourselves come and go. Some didn’t leave on the best terms.
We got two more new boys assigned to our hall in the next couple years, Dave Paro and Dennis Miller. Many a Bethelite would leave Bethel and marry a local girl from their kingdom hall. Dave Paro married a Porto Rican sister from Inwood.
Most of the available sisters in the New York area were either black or Porto Rican. Ninety percent all Bethelites were white. The few white sisters there were either very young or already snapped up by other Bethelities. So of course, there was a lot of mixed marriages. Which of course is fine. Except there was a few weird ones too. Like the nineteen year old, skinny white kid from Wisconsin, who married the forty two year old, three hundred pound black sister from the Bronx. She also had three teenage boys of her own. One of her teenage boys was the same age as him. I wondered what his folks thought when he left Bethel before his time and brought her back home to Wisconsin?
There was an old saying at Bethel. “They longer you are here the whiter they look.”
If you were looking for available white sisters over sixteen years of age, odds are you needed to get at least a hundred miles away from New York City.
Having just got there, girls were the last thing on my mind. It fact I was quite a jerk about it still.
A beautiful sister from Kansas wrote me a letter after I was there a few months. I think she was interested in me. I wrote her back a fiery letter stating “What are you thinking? I have made a four year commitment here, so please don’t write me anymore!” What a jerk I was.
Anyway Inwood was a wonderful Congregation. There was a few whack jobs there like any otherb kingdom Hall.
Sister Cornell would come up to me and show me her field service report. “Look at this Brother Casarona twenty two hours in field service, ten return visits, three books and nineteen magazines placed.”
“Very good Sister Cornell keep up the good work.” She was German and very overbearing. I felt sorry for her two teenage kids and her ex-husband who I never met. In her living room was a huge portrait of her father, dress up in his Nazis uniform.
Sometimes when you were giving a talk, the Black brothers or sisters would speak out with “Yes!” or “That’s right!” without been called on. Just like in the old tent revival meetings in the south. Can I get a amen!
I’m sure the strangest people there was us Bethelites.
in those three days there, i saw some really nice rooms.
i couldn’t help but ask.. “so how does one go about getting one of these nicer rooms?”.
“if rooms come up vacant, they go up for bid.
In those three days there, I saw some really nice rooms. I couldn’t help but ask.
“So how does one go about getting one of these nicer rooms?”
“It’s all done by seniority.” She said. “If rooms come up vacant, they go up for bid. You would bid on the room you want. Whoever has the most years of full time service would get the room.” That made sense, “brothers” being rewarded for years of faithful service.
Come to find out seniority just didn’t get you a nicer room at Bethel it solved most of the other problems there too.
The “Dwelling together in unity” booklet stated “Every member of the Bethel family, no matter where he is located in Jehovah's organization, should feel perfectly free to register a complaint if he is mistreated by another individual. These complaints may be registered with the branch overseer or directly to the president.” This sounds like the overseers and the president himself Brother Knorr were approachable with problems right? Well, I guess they forgot to put an asterisk in there. After the asterisk it should have said “If a “brother” has been at Bethel for four or more years.” I knew a half of dozen “brothers” with real problems who went to Bethel overseers with their grievances. The meeting usually went something like this.
“So brother, you are here because you have a problem with Brother Arrogant?”
“Yes sir.”
“So tell me Brother New Boy, how long have you been here at Bethel?”
“Three years sir.”
“Really three years. Well, Brother New Boy, Brother Arrogant has been here for over twenty two years. Thanks for coming by.”
They really didn’t want to hear what you had to say. Not only that, you were now “marked.” Good luck on making Bethel your career now.
It wasn’t just new boys, this happened to three Bethel elders who were also ex circuit overseers who all had well over twenty years full time service to their credit. This was called “Black Thursday.” There will be a whole chapter about this sad event at god’s headquarters.
Come to find out, you were not really considered to be a part of the real Bethel family until after your four year contract was up. At that time in the early nineteen seventies, 95% of all Bethelites left Bethel at or before their four year commitment was over. So they really thought of you as just passing through until then. When you were no longer under contract you were now considered in the real Bethel family.
So the biggest percentage left back then. A few who liked the military life style with a “1984” caveat, stayed. Some stayed because they were weird. They couldn’t or didn’t fit into the outside world where they would have to relate to real people. Some stayed because they were afraid. Armageddon was coming soon. They thought they would be safe at the lord’s house. There they would be saved from the “coming great tribulation,” that the Bible had prophesized about. Some wanted to leave but couldn’t because they had truly become like “Red” in “Shawshank redemption,” they were an “institutionalize man.” Brooklyn Bethel was the mother of all institutions. So you had worked there for many years. Every day they fed you, washed your cloths, made your beds, and even gave you a small allowance like a child every month. You are in your forties or fifties now with little or no job skills. Where are you going? The outside world looked scary as hell and it got scarier every year you were there. I saw many like that there. Couples who were plugging away who had gave up their possibilities of having families or children. They gave up a normal life, to stay at Bethel. You could see it in their faces they were tried and should have left years ago but it was too late now.
The last group that wanted to stay there, were the scariest of them all. These were the people that saw all the bull shit there and still wanted to stay. They were going claw their way up to the top of the organization. They got something there they couldn’t get on the outside, and that was power. They had a name for these people, they were called “Company men.”
chapter 14 .
the new boy.
the vast majority of the “sisters’ at bethel are married.
Chapter 14
The New Boy
The vast majority of the “sisters’ at Bethel are married. They called very few single “sisters” to Bethel. The reason being twofold. One, a “brother” could do more jobs physicly than a “sister” could do. The second reason why few “sisters” were invited there was because of sex. The new single “brothers” took a vow of celibacy for four years. Thus having a munch of good looking “sisters” around only created problems. A couple would met at Bethel, fall in love and leave before their contract was up. So the joke at Bethel was, sure they call in a few single “sisters” to Bethel but only the ugly ones.
It is a male dominated organization and a trip to the world headquarters will make this apparent. “Sisters” there would never have a job of any major oversight over “brothers.” Of course they are quick to tell you. “We are all equal in god’s eyes.” This of course is true. It just isn’t true in their organization. One more “Catch 22” between things said and things done.
It didn’t matter if you were the wife of a Gilead Student, Special Pioneer, Circuit or Distract overseer. The job you got there was based on how liked your husband was and were he was at in the peeking order. Favoritism ran rampant there, as is true in most their congregations around the world.
All of the housekeepers at Bethel are “sisters” and most of the “sisters” there are housekeepers. A few “sisters” worked in the factory but most worked in the home.
When a housekeeper got a new boy assigned to them, it was one of the few times a sister could tell a brother what to do. Of course we got all the jobs they were not fond of doing, like cleaning the bathrooms and toilets. New boys are feeling high and mighty and needed a little humility training anyway. We were shown how to take what was left of same bars of hand soap and squish them together to make one bigger bar of soap. We were taught the importance of saving money and not wasting precious resources.
She showed me how to make a proper Bethel bed. Bethelites got one new bed sheet a week. The old top sheet became the bottom sheet and the new clean sheet became the new top sheet.
The majority of the people there were single “brothers” under the age of twenty five. Since it was a sin and totally unacceptable to masturbate and a few of the “brothers” weren’t big on taking showers or hygiene, the smells and sights of what we found in those sheets were….. Let me just put it this way, I wouldn’t want my future wife to be a Bethel housekeeper.
