I had two rooms there T-211 and T-240
Since they made 198 million off of it I'm sure they will want to send me a check for the 4 years I spent there, when they only paid me .05 cents an hour.
lol
http://www.brooklyneagle.com/articles/2017/11/1/jehovahs-witnesses-sell-towers-storied-brooklyn-heights-hotel.
jehovah's witnesses sell the towers, a storied brooklyn heights hotel.
the jehovah's witnesses have sold the towers, a storied brooklyn heights hotel.
I had two rooms there T-211 and T-240
Since they made 198 million off of it I'm sure they will want to send me a check for the 4 years I spent there, when they only paid me .05 cents an hour.
lol
chapter 38 .
norma’s hope.
my mother favored my daughter over my son.
Chapter 38
Norma’s Hope
My mother favored my daughter over my son. She would send a box a presents to the house. Nine gifts for my daughter and one for my son. Looking back she never really liked or trusted the men in her life. I think it started with my great grandfather who took advantage of her as a young child.
I really don’t think she trusted anyone with a penis. My father, my son and me, all felt the distance in her fake smile. So my sister and daughter were of course blessed. There are many families were one gender is more favored then the other.
The last time I saw my mother alive, she stormed out of my house and never said good bye to me or my children.
She had invited herself up to visit my daughter Kelly for her “Grand Parents Day” at her school. It happened to be a circuit assembly weekend. Our house only had one bathroom at the time. She as usual my mother played martyr and let everyone use the bathroom ahead of her. Needless to say she didn’t have enough time to get ready. She set in our car on our ride to the assembly hall totally pissed off. Her hair looked like the bride of Frankenstein. Once there she ended up setting with other people and not with us. That night after the meeting we all went out for pizza with some of her and my friends. She set at the far end of the table telling my friends what a disappoint I was. We drove back to the house. She went in got her bags, turned around and left.
“Bye mom.” There was no reply.
Three months later we got the phone call. She was dead.
She died at her fortieth high school class reunion in Kansas. There was only nine people in her graduating class. One guy who lived across the street didn’t even go to it. Even though she hadn’t lived in Kansas in forty years she told everyone she wanted to be buried there. She got her wish.
You could say she killed herself. She had a heart valve replaced. After the operation she was required to take Coumadin as blood thinner. She stop taking the medication. She said it made her arthritis flare up. She said herbs would work just as good as any blood thinner. This time when she was wrong it killed her. She got a blood clot to the brain and died. You couldn’t tell my mother anything. My father used to tell us when German babies are borne they would open up their head and take the brain out and pour in concrete.
Meryl Freeman gave her funeral talk. Like all Jehovah’s Witness funeral talks they spend about five minutes talking about the person that died and thirty minutes talking about “Norma’s hope.” Yes five whole minutes to describe a person’s whole life. The society never misses an opportunity to plug it’s believes to a captive audience. The speaker even gets to “counts his time” giving this talk as if he was going door to door. No wonder so many non-witnesses walk away from theirs funerals shaking their heads.
She was buried in a small pioneer cemetery in the middle of nowhere. There was only one house visible from the grave site. There were cows inside and walking around the old lime stone farm house, with its roof caved in. They told me my mother had been born in that house fifty seven years earlier. It has been said, that life is a circle. This circle started and ended just a few hundred yard from each other.
I didn’t cry at her funeral not because I didn’t love her. She was devoid of empathy. I know it’s tough to have empathy if you weren’t raised with any. On the other hand we can all choose the path of love and forgiveness.
She died a very unhappy person. Her unhappiness is what made the Jehovah’s Witnesses promises so appealing. Pie in the sky when you die.
She had a hard life. Sexually abused as a child. She always had poor physical heath. Married to a man she really didn’t love or respected. A hard life with plenty of guilt.
Like thousands of others she was looked forward to just one thing.
She was waiting every day for Armageddon to show up.
The day god would be killing billions of people so the Jehovah’s Witnesses could finally be happy in their paradise.
That was nineteen eighty three.
in 1923 i almost died.. don't get me wrong, i wouldn't even exist for another 44 years.. for a few seconds, on top a building, my grandfather stood with tears running down his cheeks and a small caliber pistol in his right hand.
if he had pulled the trigger, not just one man--one very depressed and hopeless man--would die; he'd take with him the four children his wife would never carry, their children (including me) and so on.
all of my children and grandchildren would never exist stretching off into the darkness of eternity itself.. it was on the way back from seagoville, near dallas, my grandfather told me about it the day he drove out to the prison where i was to be released on parole.____.
Good stuff
chapter 37. passing it down line.
how did i rationalized everything i had experienced growing up and what i saw at bethel?
no one wants to believe their whole life is a lie.
Most the time there was plenty of food. Breakfast and lunches were decent. Dinners however were a joke. I stopped going to them after a few months. the food was either nasty left overs like squash stuffed with mystery meat or there really wasn't enough to go around to ten hungry men. They only served you food for 15 minutes at dinner and some times it would take 5 minutes to pass the plates out and get them back with hardly anything on them.
There was many times I left dinner still hungry. The proof about the dinners was you never saw any Bethel heavies at dinner. They knew it was shit too.
chapter 37. passing it down line.
how did i rationalized everything i had experienced growing up and what i saw at bethel?
no one wants to believe their whole life is a lie.
Chapter 37
Passing it down line
How did I rationalized everything I had experienced growing up and what I saw at Bethel? No one wants to believe their whole life is a lie. I couldn’t, so for many years I couldn’t connect the dots. I guess that’s not true, I didn’t want to connect the dots. All the little bits of information yes all the dots would have pointed me in only one direction the back of building four with Jimmy.
I was Scarlet O’Hare at the end of “Gone with the Wind” when she said. “I can’t think about that right now. In know I’ll think about that tomorrow after all tomorrow is another day!”
If you ever back a Jehovah’s Witness in a corner, when they even realize there is no sense to what they are doing, the will tell you one of two things “You must have faith” or “Jehovah will straighten it out someday.” That was the way I coped with the nasty stuff that happened to us.
Usually, most if not all of your family are Jehovah’s Witnesses plus all of your friends are for sure. There is no world but that world, their world. I wasn’t ready to leave the only world I knew. If I had connect the dots back then there would have been no place to go. To be on the outside and to lose the only life I had ever known for me would have put me on the couch looking at the 38 special on the coffee table. So, I stopped thinking about it. I couldn’t think about it. I was back on the bindery line mode. I was just trying to get through one day at a time.
There is a rope that pulls you in even tighter into the cement of their organization. It was one of the key ingredients that made a crazy old man name Charles with twelve followers in a basement in Pittsburg, Pennsylvania church turn into an organization of seven million people strong, worth billions dollars.
One person and twelve crazy followers can do quite a bit to change the world. Remember in 1923 the guy with the mustache in Munich Germany.
I didn’t know it at the time but the rope of bondage was actually an umbilical cord attached to my two children.
We had two new people who were in our charge to indoctrinate. As children these two people had no choice in the matter either. Just like my mother who never asked me what I thought of her new religion, my children would not have that option either. They could only make that decision to leave “The Borg” years later when it too would cost them everything.
Even if I didn’t take a lead in this active my wife surely would. At the time of their births, I was still a believer, so my path was clear. Seig Hiel, the beat goes on.
Now there would be one more meeting a week added to the five meetings we were already involved with, that meeting is called “The family home Bible study.” This weekly study was required to mold them to the will of the organization. To the will of the all-powerful god Jehovah. It was easy to do.
There would be only one world for my children the world we showed them. So of course they were eager to join the family. The family of millions of brothers and sisters all around the world. They soon became the righteous and zealous followers we wanted them to be.
Like me, there would be no school dances, no school sports and no school friends who were not Jehovah’s Witnesses. They too would be isolated for their protection and for the protection of the organization.
They both dropped out of high school, so they could be ”home” schooled. This was one way to keep them safe away from the contamination of “worldly” influences and desires.
It their teens they were both baptized. He had done our job they were now locked in. They both pioneered and went to pioneer school.
We even took them back to New York in 1997 to visit Bethel. In some sick way. I was hoping my son would want to go there too. You know, to make a man out of him, like it did me.
The kids of today are so much smarter than their parents. After he walked through the factory he knew it wouldn’t be a place for him. He said he couldn’t find one smiling face there.
We went through the new laundry and saw Peter Hollingsworth, twenty seven years and still working in the laundry.
We visited Daryl Christianson stuck in the Squibb building working by himself on a deserted floor. The only memory of me that he told my children about, was a time thirty years ago when my car was acting up. How I decided to turn the car around and go back to Bethel instead of going to the meeting. Yes, because of me he had missed a Watchtower study. He had never married and had been there over thirty years. I somethimes wondered if he ever masturbated.
We sat on Norm Brecky’s table for lunch and ate hamburgers. There wasn’t much conversation just like the old days. I wondered how many other suicides Norm had known about in twenty three years since I had been gone.
Finally we ended up at the Watchtower Farm. I had never been there before. Yes, four years at Bethel and never visited the farm even once. I told people, it would have been like showing a starving man a steak dinner. I knew if I had seen it back then, it just would made my stay in Brooklyn that much harder.
I tracked down Ester Lopez the old bat was still alive and at the farm. So I had her paged. I was standing there waiting for her with my family.
She walked into the lobby with a total look of surprise. “It’s you! It’s you!” She said.
“Yes, it’s me!” I walked right over to her and grabbed her hand and put it on my stomach. I had put on a few pounds since I left Bethel.
“You were wrong! I didn’t starve!”
in 1974 the society had changed there stance on shunning dis-fellowshipping people.
they said you could have limited association with those who were dis-fellowshipped.. what year did they change it back to the old way of shunning people?
.
so again what was the date of this reversal? 1980 or 1981
in 1974 the society had changed there stance on shunning dis-fellowshipping people.
they said you could have limited association with those who were dis-fellowshipped.. what year did they change it back to the old way of shunning people?
.
So when exactly did they do the flip flop?.
in 1974 the society had changed there stance on shunning dis-fellowshipping people.
they said you could have limited association with those who were dis-fellowshipped.. what year did they change it back to the old way of shunning people?
.
In 1974 the society had changed there stance on shunning dis-fellowshipping people. They said you could have limited association with those who were dis-fellowshipped.
What year did they change it back to the old way of shunning people?
doing research for my book.
since i no longer have any of of the watchtower bible and truck society publications.
1. was it true (and believe it was) that in the nineteen sixties that even if one of the marriage mates was a homosexual that this was not concerned grounds for divorce?.
Doing research for my book. Since I no longer have any of of the Watchtower Bible and truck society publications.
1. Was it true (and believe it was) that in the nineteen sixties that even if one of the marriage mates was a homosexual that this was not concerned grounds for divorce?
2.Was it or is it true that physical abuse can be grounds for divorce. If so are they allowed to get remarried?
chapter 34.
“have another beer and forget the whole thing”.
i saw debbie stillman on tour in september 1972 standing there in the ink room.
At the time of his death the only thing Bob was doing that wasn’t in line with the society’s rules and regulations was smoking. He wasn’t living in sin or doing any other type of gross immorality. But because he left the organization back in 1958, he could no longer have association with his children or grandchildren.
Yet, my father who left the organization back in 1961 was still smoking also, at the time of Bob's death. He could still see his children and his grandchildren. Why? Because he got reinstated before he dropped out for good.