A Tribute to My Mother

My mother was born 110 years ago in February 1914. Her birthday was on Friday the 13^th, right between Abraham Lincoln’s birthday, which was 105 years earlier on Feb. 12, 1809, and St. Valentine’s Day, which had been celebrated on Feb. 14 since 496 A.D.

In 2017, I posted “A Tribute to My Father,” on July 25, the day before the 10^th anniversary of his death. Now, just before the 110^th anniversary of my mother’s birth, I am posting this tribute to her.*¹    

Helen (Cousins) Seat (2005)

To tell the truth, from my boyhood until the end of their lives, I held my father in higher regard than my mother, although certainly I never had any notable conflict or disrespect for her. I am glad now to be sharing this long-overdue tribute to her.

Helen Lena Cousins was born in rural Mercer County, Missouri, the third child (and third daughter) of J. Ray and Laura Kathryn (Hamilton) Cousins. In 1925 the Cousins family moved to Worth County, Mo.

Mom and my father were married in 1935, two years after they graduated from high school in Grant City, Mo.—the same high school I graduated from 22 years later. She passed away 13 days after her 94^th birthday in 2008, having lived most of her long life in Worth County.

There is so much I appreciate about my mother, beginning with my pre-school years. Neither of my parents had any formal education beyond high school, and Mom had not been a very good student as a girl. (She had to repeat one grade in elementary school, but that was partly because of illness.)

As a woman of her times, she was a traditional wife, mother, and homemaker in the best sense of the word. She was a good housekeeper, an excellent cook, a skillful seamstress, and a successful gardener. But more than anything else, she excelled in encouragement and support.

In my life story book, I wrote that Mom “seemed to know how to encourage/support very effectively my desire to learn.”*² Thanks to her, I had learned to read and to do arithmetic so well that a week after I started elementary school, I was promoted to the second grade.

Through the decades Mom’s unwavering support and encouragement continued not only for me and my younger sister but also for her six grandchildren, whom she loved dearly.

In 1966 when June and I left with our two children for Japan as missionaries, taking with us Mom’s only grandchildren at the time, she never complained. I deeply appreciate her (and my father’s) understanding and prayer support of us during our missionary career in Japan which didn’t end until 2004.

The following words of tribute to my mother were heard by the family members and friends who gathered on March 1, 2008, for her funeral and listened to the sermon I preached on that occasion. I am glad to share just a bit of that sermon with you Thinking Friends now.*³

In it, I said that because of Mom’s quiet encouragement, my sister Ann became a medical doctor and I was able to earn the Ph.D. degree. But she was never pushy; she never tried to tell us what we ought to do. With only rare exceptions, if any, Mom always believed in us and always encouraged us.

Since Mom always took great pride in her children and their accomplishments, "we thought that nothing would have pleased her more today than for Ann to furnish the music and for me to preach the funeral sermon.”

Through the many decades of her life, Mom was a faithful Christian and church member. She “was constantly thinking of others—mainly her husband and children, but others outside the family and around the world, as well.”

Mom was also never one to complain—about her work or her health. She didn’t read a lot, but she knew by nature what Norman Vincent Peale wrote about in The Power of Positive Thinking.

At times in her later years when she was not feeling well and someone would inquire about her health, she would usually reply, “I’m getting better.”

After sharing those words in the funeral sermon, partly because the end of her long life was marred by progressive dementia, I said that “now she really is better—and in a better place, the place that Jesus had prepared for her.”

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*¹ Ten years ago, on 2/13/14, I posted “One Hundred Years Ago,” but only a few sentences at the beginning were about my mother’s birth on 2/13/1914.

*² About six weeks ago I published A Wonderful Life: The Story of My Life from My Birth until My 85^th Birthday (1938~2023). One definite reason why I have been so bold as to refer to my life so far as a wonderful life is because of my mother.

*³ I certainly don’t expect many of you to take the time to read all or even any of that sermon, but if you are interested, here is the digital link to it. In March 1959, 49 years earlier, I also preached the sermon at my mother’s mother’s (my Grandma Cousins’) funeral when I was still a twenty-year-old college student—but already an ordained pastor. 

Thoughts on My 85th Birthday

Today (August 15, 2023) is my 85^th birthday. That being so, I am sharing personal reflections on this milestone day. 

I am truly grateful to still be alive and “sound in mind and body.” Many don’t live this long. Three of my closest lifetime friends have been gone for years now: Bobby Pinkerton (1937~2008), Clyde Tilley (1935~2013), and Joe Wolven (1939~2015). I still miss them.

Although I am happy to say I have no illness of any kind, I am experiencing reduced activity, and especially markedly reduced travel, because of the decrease in physical energy/stamina.

At this point, I am not planning to go with June to attend our beloved grandson David’s wedding in Georgia the first of next month, and I will also likely not make the trip to south Missouri later in September for the burial of June’s only brother, who passed away early this month at the age of 88.

Thankfully, modern technology makes significant connectedness possible from the comfort of one’s own home—and for introverts such as I, being home, even home alone, is often more enjoyable than being in a crowd of people.

I can honestly say that overall, I have had a wonderful life during these 85 years. Three years ago, I published a brief book for my children and grandchildren with the subtitle The Story of My Life from Birth until My 82^nd Birthday (1938~2020). The book’s title is A Wonderful Life.

As I wrote on the first page, that title “is not an evaluation I have heard from others. In fact, some may well think my life has not been particularly wonderful—and that’s all right.” The point is that I believe that I have had a wonderful life, and I am genuinely grateful for how my life has been graced.

Tomorrow and in the following weeks, I will continue revising and updating that book with the goal of publishing a new edition of it, with numbers in the subtitle changed to 85^th and 2023, before the end of the year.

However, for as long as possible I want to continue focusing on the present and the future rather than the past. I plan to keep reading, thinking, and writing blog articles (and perhaps an occasional book review).

I want my grandchildren, and their children, to know something about my life story, but I am even more interested in trying to share with them knowledge and, hopefully, wisdom about the world as it is now and is likely to become.

I deeply desire to leave a meaningful legacy to my descendants, but not a legacy of material things or of things past. I hope to leave them a legacy that will encourage them to think critically, meaningfully, and creatively. I also want to motivate them to think deeply about the meaning of life.

To that end, last month I wrote a letter to my great-grandson on his first birthday, asking his parents to keep it for him to read years from now. I decided then that for as long as possible I will write a thoughtful letter to each of my family members on their birthday.

Yesterday I wrote a letter to my youngest grandson on his 16^th birthday. And today I will finish writing a letter to my oldest son, whose birth on August 15 was the best birthday present I ever received.

Looking forward, I want to do all I can to help my children/grandchildren, and as many other people as possible, to think well and to choose wisely, in order that they, too, will have as wonderful a life as possible—and a life that will make a positive contribution to peace and justice in the world.  

In closing, I am sharing this little poem I have written for today:

I’m eighty-five and still alive.
The good old days have parted ways,
but days are new and joyful too. 
So, I’ll go on ‘til time is gone
with gratitude my attitude 
and faith in God until the sod 
will cover me. And then I’ll see
 a blissful state, my lasting fate.

 

66 Years Ago on Route 66

Route 66 is one of the iconic national highways in the U.S. On May 26, 1957, 66 years ago today, June and I drove up that highway as newlyweds. We were on our wedding trip to Chicago—and driving up Route 66 was the best way to get there. 

Route 66 was established in 1926, and it was the major U.S. highway from Chicago to Los Angeles, traversing about 2,450 miles.

In Chapter 12 of the powerful novel The Grapes of Wrath (1939), author John Steinbeck writes:

HIGHWAY 66 IS THE main migrant road. 66—the long concrete path across the country ….

66 is the path of a people in flight, refugees from dust and shrinking land, from the thunder of tractors and shrinking ownership …. 66 is the mother road, the road of flight.

But even by the 1940s, Route 66 was viewed in a much happier mood by many people: Nat King Cole recorded the hit song, “Get Your Kicks on Route 66” in 1946 (hear it here).

It amazes me now to realize that June and I were driving up Route 66 for our honeymoon “kicks” only 31 years after it was established as a national highway.

“57 Years for a ’57 Marriage” was the title of the blog post I made on May 25, 2014. I made some reference there to our marriage, but it was more about the year 1957 in general. (You are invited to (re)read that post, and see our wedding picture, here.)

June and I met in September 1955, not long after we matriculated as first-year students at Southwest Baptist College in Bolivar, Missouri (30+ miles north of Springfield.)

It wasn’t very long before we started talking about getting married at some point. A few months before graduating from the small junior college, we decided that point was soon after our graduation in 1957.

So on May 26, a Sunday afternoon, we were married in Rondo Baptist Church, June’s home church about 15 miles north of Bolivar. Following the reception in the decorated basement of the church, we left at about 4:30 and drove east for a little over an hour to Lebanon, where we got on Route 66.

It was not much more than an hour’s drive to Rolla, but it had been a big day already, so we decided to stop for the night at Schuman’s Motor Inn. (I was amazed to find that there is a “Shuman's Motor Inn US Route 66 Rolla Missouri 1957” postcard for sale on eBay.).

The cost for the room in Rolla was $7—which seems very cheap now, but that was all I made in seven hours working for minimum wage at a shoe factory later that summer. At the current minimum wage in Missouri that would be equivalent to just over $72.

The next night we stayed in the southern suburbs of Chicago—and it cost $9 there. And then we spent a couple of nights in the elegant Palmer House in downtown Chicago. The construction of that 25-story hotel was completed in 1925. It was an impressive place for us, two Missouri farm kids, to stay!

So, what can I say after 66 years of marriage? Would I do it again, get married that young? We struggled financially for our first nine years, during which time the two of us, combined, were full-time students for eleven years—and we also had two children by November 1960.

But, yes, I would do it again, no question about it. In spite of the challenges of those first years—and different challenges in the following decades—I have never for a moment regretted marrying my beautiful 19-year-old bride 66 years ago, when I was still 18.

For several years now, we have talked about hoping we will be able to celebrate our 75^th wedding anniversary. My parents were married 88 years ago this month, and they celebrated their 72^nd anniversary about 2½ months before my father died at age 92 in July 2007.

But we are still hoping that on May 26, 2032, we will, indeed, be able to celebrate 75 years of married life. We may not make it—but if not, we will die trying. 

Thinking Seven Generations Back and Forward

Some Native American nations hold dear the idea that the potential benefits or harm that would be felt by the next seven generations should be amply considered when making major decisions.* That seems to be a very significant idea—and one almost impossible to implement sufficiently.  

I asked AI to create an image that refers to taking care of
the earth for the next seven generations. This was the result.

I began thinking about seven generations while working on this blog post that originally was to be primarily about the Louisiana Purchase.

The Louisiana Purchase Treaty was signed 220 years ago this week, on April 30, 1803. That was of tremendous importance for the United States, which had become a nation only 27 years earlier.

That purchase was a major accomplishment of President Jefferson and one of the most significant events in the history of the young nation—and even in the history of the nation up until the present. It is widely considered to be the greatest real estate deal in history.

The U.S. purchased the Louisiana Territory from France at a price of $15 million, or approximately four cents an acre. It added to the United States an area larger than eight Great Britains, doubling the size of the United States and opening up the continent to its westward expansion.

Jefferson explained his action to Congress by saying that this fertile and extensive country would afford “an ample provision for our posterity, and a wide spread for the blessings of freedom and equal laws.”**

President Jefferson was perhaps thinking about the next seven generations in his efforts that led to the acquisition of that huge territory for the U.S.

Without question, that purchase had tremendous benefits for most White U.S. citizens—and considerable harm for Native Americans— for the next seven generations, and more.

Thinking Seven Generations Back

For individual persons, seven generations go back to their grandparents’ grandparents’ grandparents. In my case, Hartwell Seat (1749~1827) was my seventh-generation grandfather whose family name I bear. George Seat (1878~1952) was my grandfather, and Hartwell's grandson Franklin (1818~1905 was George’s grandfather. 

So, seven generations before I was born in 1938, Hartwell Seat was born in Virginia just six years after Thomas Jefferson’s birth. In 1797, Hartwell and his family migrated to Tennessee, just a year after it had become the 16^th state of the USA.

The Mississippi River was the western border of the new state and at that time it was the westernmost edge of the United States. Just seven years later, though, the vast expanse of land on the other side of the Mississippi became U.S. territory.

When working on this article, it was a bit of a shock when I realized that the Louisiana Purchase, which had always seemed like ancient history to me, was made when my seventh-generation ancestor was 54 years old and living less than 200 miles from the eastern border of that vast new territory.

Just fifteen years later, Littleton Seat, my sixth-generation grandfather, migrated with his wife Elizabeth and two young daughters (as well as two of his brothers and their families) to Missouri Territory. That was three years before Missouri became the 24^th state in 1821.

Littleton’s great-grandson George, my beloved Grandpa Seat, was born just 75 years after the Louisiana Purchase, and his death was just one year shy of being as long after his birth as the Louisiana Purchase was before his birth.

Thinking Seven Generations Forward

Now, turning from the generations of the past (and the Louisiana Purchase), what about the generations to come? With me as the first generation, my first two great-grandchildren, who were born in 2022, are the fourth generation. Their great-grandchildren will be the seventh generation.

It is hard to imagine what all will happen and how the world will change during Nina’s and Vander’s lifetime. How can we even begin to imagine what the world will be like when their great-grandchildren are born? That will be well into the 22^nd century.

But maybe the Native Americans were right: we need to consider how the decisions we make now will affect the seventh generation in the future. Of greatest need along this line is concerted thought and action regarding the current global ecological crisis.

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* In the 2022 book What We Owe the Future, author William MacAskill writes about "longtermism: the idea that positively influencing the longterm future is a key moral priority of our time" (p. 4). Early in "The Case for Longtermism," the first chapter, he cites a Native American who wrote, "We . . . make every decision that we make relate to the welfare and well-being of the seventh generation to come. . . . We consider: will this be to the benefit of the seventh generation?" (p. 11).

** Jefferson’s words are cited on page 49 of William Catton’s book Overshoot, which was the main topic of my March 23 blog post, and it was related to the author’s explanation of the significance of the Louisiana Purchase in expanding the “carrying capacity” of the United States at that time. 

The Legend of the Abplanalp Family

Peter Abplanalp, one of my great-great-grandfathers, was born 225 years ago yesterday, on October 4, 1797. He died in January 1879 and is buried in the Prairie Chapel Cemetery of Worth County, Missouri, 59 years before I was born in that same county.

According to the old Abplanalp family legend (which is briefly told in Wikipedia), centuries ago there was an avalanche on Mt. Planalp, a small mountain located near the northeastern bank of beautiful Lake Brienz in the southeastern part of the Canton of Bern, Switzerland. 

That fateful avalanche demolished the houses on the mountainside as land, rocks, and trees cascaded down the mountain toward the lake at the bottom. Shortly after that destructive avalanche, a basket bearing a baby boy was found floating on Lake Brienz.

The baby boy, the lone survivor of the avalanche, was rescued and cared for —but no one knew his name. So, his rescuers decided to call him Peter and to give him the last name Abplanalp, the prefix “ab” being Latin for “from.”

That Peter was not my great-great grandfather who is buried in northwest Missouri, but one of his grandfathers back many generations. (Many male Abplanalps have been named Peter; both the father and the grandfather of the Peter Abplanalp buried at Prairie Chapel were also named Peter.)

There are records of Abplanalps in Switzerland back to the middle of the 16th century, but it is not known exactly when the first “Abplanalp” baby was found floating in his basket on Lake Brienz. But all of us who have Abplanalp ancestors are grateful for his providential survival.

There are records of Abplanalps coming to the U.S. as early as 1795, and many emigrated to southeastern Indiana. Since 1814 Switzerland County has been Indiana’s southeastern corner county. Peter and Barbara (Stähli) Abplanalp emigrated to nearby Dearborn County in 1834.

Their daughter Margaret was born there in 1840, and in 1865 she married Christian Leopold Neiger (1840~1901), a Swiss immigrant. Before long they moved to Worth County, Mo., and her parents came to live near (or maybe with) them later.

Hans Abplanalp was born in Bern, Switzerland, in 1886 and emigrated to New York in 1906. In 1913 he married Marie Nay in New York, and their son Robert (1922~2003) became the best-known person named Abplanalp in the U.S.

Robert was a wealthy inventor who became a friend and confidant of President Nixon. (His obituary in the New York Times tells of his close ties to Nixon.)

I have been unable to find the connection of Hans and his son Robert to my family tree, but surely they are also descendants of baby Peter, the star of the Abplanalp legend.

The Abplanalps and other Swiss immigrants came to the U.S. primarily for economic reasons. The “new world” of North America offered the promise of a more affluent life than possible on the farms and small villages of rural Switzerland.

My great-grandfather Christian Leopold Neiger was the 13^th child of his family. When he was 21, he borrowed money to come to the U.S. in 1861. Four years later he married Margaret Abplanalp, and in 1869 they moved to Worth Co., Mo., where they bought a farm and lived there until their deaths.

The book History of Gentry and Worth Missouri (1882) includes two pages titled “Christian Leopold Neiger.” It concludes, “Mr. N. now has a fine farm, well improved, and is a respected man and good citizen. Few foreigners, coming as he did, have done better. He has an excellent wife . . . .”

When my Abplanalp ancestors came to this country in the 19^th century, there were no restrictions on immigration such as there are now. A sizable percentage of us USAmericans are descendants of people who permanently left their homes in Europe or elsewhere and freely entered the U.S.

In recent years, a multitude of people, especially from countries south of the U.S. border, have sought to come to this country not only for economic reasons but primarily for their own safety. Can’t they be allowed to live and to flourish here as the Abplanalps and so many other immigrants have?

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 ** The photo above is of Lake Brienz and the village of Brienz, Switzerland, which I took as June and I were riding the inclined railway train up Mt. Planalp on May 26, 2007, our fiftieth wedding anniversary. 

The Dignity of Rural Life: In Appreciation of Millet

Last year I learned more about, and was impressed by, Jean-François Millet when I read “To Plow His Furrow in Peace: Jean-François Millet’s art taps his peasant roots to honor the dignity of rural life,” a major article in the Spring 2021 issue of Plough Quarterly.** That became the seed for this blog post.

Millet (1814~75) was born in rural northwestern France, and his most famous work is “The Angelus,” an oil painting completed between 1857 and 1859.

The painting, which the Plough author says you may have seen “hanging in some grandma’s living room,” depicts two peasants bowing in a potato field to say a prayer, the Angelus, that together with the ringing of the bell from the church on the horizon marks the end of a day’s work. 

I don’t remember when I first saw a reproduction of this painting, but I’m sure it was when I was still a Missouri farmboy.

Two earlier paintings by Millet are also widely known and appreciated, perhaps especially by rural people: “The Sower” (1850) and “The Gleaners” (1857).

What I did not know until I read the Plough article is how Millet was criticized. The author says that Millet’s “rustic paintings met with a great deal of negativity from critics and Parisian society. The truthfulness with which they depicted rural people and rural life was labeled mere ugliness.”

The sophisticated city folks thought that art should depict “dignified things, like lords and ladies and historical events and Greek myths and things like that. It was not for poor people.”

But by his paintings, Millet continued to depict the sacredness to be found in ordinary rural life. And in the concluding words of the Plough essay, to this day Millet’s “works remain a reminder of the worthiness of the ordinary worker who lives an ordinary life.”

My father was born in rural northwestern Missouri 101 years after Millet’s birth in France, and while not a “peasant” such as those depicted in Millet’s paintings, he—and his father—were “common” farmers, and from them I learned, and came to appreciate, the dignity of rural life.

On Aug. 15, 2020 (my 82^nd birthday), I posted a blog article titled “My Old Missouri Home,” and I won’t reiterate here what I wrote then, but it was in part about “the benefits of being a farmboy.”

What I didn’t say in that article is that I learned about the dignity of rural life from my father and his father. Grandpa George lived on a farm in Worth County (Mo.) all of his life except for a brief period in the early 1910s, and my father (d. 2007) did the same except for the years from 1935 to 1945.

There were exceptions, but they and most other farmers like them, were good, honest men who worked hard to provide for their families, who were kind and helpful to their neighbors, and who didn’t get into harsh verbal conflicts with anyone (except maybe on a few rare occasions).

Yes, 80~100 years after Millet, they embodied the dignity of rural life that the French artist painted so beautifully, and I remain grateful for what I learned from them.

But what about now? The world is much different now than when Millet painted “The Angelus” in 1857—or when my father bought his farm in 1945. I am afraid, though, that the dignity of rural life has deteriorated in the last forty years.

“Talk radio” (such as The Rush Limbaugh Show from 1988 until Limbaugh’s death in 2021) and, to a lesser extent since it requires cable, Fox News augmented the polarization of the general public, including and perhaps especially rural Americans.

When 80% of the people vote the same way, as they did in many of Missouri’s (and other states’) rural counties in 2016 and 2020, perhaps that indicates a notable loss of the dignity of rural life to the polarizing forces in contemporary society.

That dignity has been tarnished in recent years by the MAGA majority demonizing those with opposing political views and many of those in the minority 20% feeling alienated from their neighbors/friends.

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** Back in 2016, I posted “Following the Plough” on a Blogger.com page. Few have accessed that page, so if you would like to know more about Plough Quarterly and the Bruderhof community that produces it, click on this link.

Celebrating Milestones

“Milestone,” as most words, can be defined/described in various ways, but I am using that word here to indicate a significant point in a person’s life. In particular, I am using “milestone” to refer to wedding anniversaries and birthdays that are divisible by the number five. 

Celebrating anniversary milestones

Recently there have been three milestone wedding anniversaries in my immediate family.

65th anniversary photo

June and I celebrated our 65^th anniversary on May 26. Today (June 4) is our son Keith’s and his wife Brenda’s 45^th anniversary. Then, May 26 was also the 20^th anniversary of our daughter Karen and her husband Rob Daoust.

We didn’t do much to celebrate our milestone anniversary this year, unlike the previous three. 

With the encouragement of our children, we made a trip to Europe for our 50^th anniversary, celebrating the very day on Mt. Planalp near Brienz, Switzerland, near where some of my ancestors had been born.

Five years later we had an extended car trip, mostly in the Dakotas, and it was on that trip I was finally able to visit the last of the 50 states (N.D.). Then in 2017, June and Kathy, our oldest daughter, organized a family cruise in celebration of our 60^th anniversary (and June’s 80^th birthday).

Celebrating birthday milestones

Yesterday and today were milestone birthdays for two dear family members. Ken, our fourth and last child, celebrated his 50^th birthday! (You realize you must be getting up in years when your youngest child turns fifty!) 

And then today is the 25^th birthday of David Laffoon, our oldest grandson (and fourth grandchild).

Yesterday evening we had a family birthday party by Zoom, mainly in celebration of Ken's big 5 0.

And then on the last day of this month, June will be celebrating a notable milestone, her 85^th birthday.

June’s milestone birthday fundraiser

Institutions celebrate milestones as well as individuals. In May 2016, Seinan Gakuin, where I served as a professor from 1968~2004 and as chancellor from 1996~2004, celebrated its centennial. June and I made a trip back to Japan for that joyous occasion.

The speaker at the main celebration service was Dr. Tetsu Nakamura, who had gone to Seinan Gakuin Junior High School. After becoming a medical doctor, he spent decades helping people in Afghanistan. (See my blog post mostly about him here.)

In December 2019, Dr. Nakamura (b. 1946) was assassinated near Jalalabad, Afghanistan, as he was going to work. That was less than two months after he had been granted honorary Afghan citizenship.

Early in 2020 through posts about Dr. Nakamura, June became Facebook friends with Musa Anwari, a young man (b. 1999) who lives in Jalalabad, the fifth largest city in Afghanistan. Musa was a great admirer of Dr. Nakamura.

June and Musa have interacted repeatedly on Facebook during these past two and a half years.

Musa is now starting free, four-month schools around Afghanistan for the children who have become orphans because of the wars and for girls and other students whose schools were closed by the Taliban after they came to power again last year.

Each new school costs US$300, and June and I have sent him that amount, which he soon put to use. You can read about what he did with our donation and see the pictures he posted by clicking on his Facebook account (here) and scrolling down to May 21.

For her (milestone) birthday fundraiser this year, June has set up a GoFundMe site to raise money for Musa’s schools. Please read about her “Let’s Start an Afghan Class” project here—and both she and I would be delighted if you would click on the “Donate now” button there.

Isabel’s Testimony: The Power of Faith

In my March 25, 2021, blog post, I wrote briefly about Rachel (Clark) Seat, my great-grandmother. This article is about Great-grandma Rachel’s oldest daughter Isabel (also spelled Isabelle) and her strong faith expressed shortly before her death 132 years ago tomorrow, on February 13, 1890.

Introducing Isabel

Isabel Tempe Seat was born in rural Worth County, Missouri, on September 9, 1871. She was the first child of William and Rachel Seat, who had also been born in the same township.

When she was still 17, Isabel married Jake Williams, and before long they were expecting their first child. Leslie was born on January 25, 1890. But before three weeks had passed, his 18-year-old mother Isabel died of complications from childbirth.

Three days before her untimely death, a sizeable number of relatives and friends gathered around her deathbed where she repeatedly urged people to become Christian believers so that they would later be reunited in Heaven.

Isabel’s Testimony

A document titled “The Last Words of Isabel Williams” has been preserved in the Seat family. I don’t know who initially put those words in writing, but the first copy I saw was one made by Mary Rachel Seat, Isabel’s niece and my “wonderful aunt,” as I called her in my 6/25/16 blog post.

The first line of that document says, “Isabel Williams, while on her deathbed and there being several present, asked them to talk.” But actually, Isabel wanted to talk to them, and most of the document (which can be read in full here) are the words of testimony and entreaty given to many people.

I don’t know how so many people could have been present under one roof—and probably they were not all there at the same time—but Isabel called for them to come one or two at a time for her to speak to them from the depths of her Christian faith.

Her most often spoken words were, “Will you promise me you will meet me in Heaven?”—or words to that effect. And, evidently, many did make such a promise, including many who had not been Christian believers, or active Christians, at the time they heard Isabel’s question and plea to them.

Several of the people didn’t live close to New Hope Church where Isabel and her close family were members, so not long after her death, a new church was started—and given the name Isabelle Church. (It was about 3½ miles northeast of New Hope, a fair distance when traveling by horse and buggy.)

The Isabelle church building has been torn down in that sparsely populated part of northwest Missouri, but the cemetery is still there—and just a year and a half ago, J.W. Harding, a man I knew fairly well, was buried there. The picture below (taken several years ago) is of the entrance to the cemetery.  

Isabel’s Faith

Isabel’s belief/certainty about going to Heaven after death was not at all unusual for someone living when and where she did—although perhaps it was a bit unusual for someone only 18 years old to express that faith so strongly.

Isabel’s parents lived within easy walking distance from New Hope Church after it was constructed in 1877-78, and she, no doubt, attended services every Sunday morning and evening with her mother during her girlhood years. (Isabel’s father, sadly, died in 1880 on Isabel’s ninth birthday.)

My previous blog post was partly about common sense, and I asserted that “common sense” can be called that only for those who see the world through the same, or quite similar, “conceptual lenses.”

The conceptual lenses of most people in Worth County, Mo., in 1890 were those fashioned by evangelical Protestant Christians. While certainly everyone was not a professing or active Christian believer, Christianity as understood by Baptists and other evangelicals was the dominant culture.

Certainly, there were many things about Christianity that Isabel still needed to learn—but who can say that her faith that she expressed so powerfully was wrong?

Isabel’s faith was, without doubt, highly comforting to her. But who can say, and on what basis, that her powerful Christian faith wasn’t also basically true?

Congratulations, Missouri!

Recently, Missouri was often in the news, but for embarrassing reasons for us Missourians: Missouri, especially the southwest part of the state, was a hotspot for new covid-19 cases. But today (8/10) is a celebratory day for all Missourians; it is the state’s bicentennial. 

Missouri History

The name Missouri came from the Native Americans, and it is usually pronounced mĭ-zo͝or′ē, although in the west/northwest part of the state, mĭ-zo͝or′ə is more common.

The land that became the state of Missouri was part of the Louisiana Purchase of 1803 and was called Louisiana Territory until 1812 when Louisiana became a state. From then until 1821, most of that area was called Missouri Territory.

Then on August 10, 1821, Missouri became the 24^th state of the United States. That was following and in accordance with the Missouri Compromise of March 1820.

That Compromise was federal legislation that stopped northern attempts to forever prohibit slavery’s expansion by admitting Missouri as a slave state and Maine as a free state in exchange for legislation that prohibited slavery in the remaining Louisiana Purchase lands except for Missouri.

Missouri Fame

Missouri was the first state completely west of the Mississippi River to be admitted to the Union, and long ago St. Louis was dubbed “Gateway to the West.” In 1965, construction of the Gateway Arch in St. Louis was completed, and it is the world’s tallest arch.

Missouri was the birthplace of many who became nationally, and internationally, famous. Foremost of those is Harry S. Truman, who always had a home in Missouri. Earlier this year, historians again ranked Truman the sixth best President in U.S. history.

Other famous Missourians include (in alphabetical order), the painter Thomas Hart Benton, author Dale Carnegie, George Washington Carver, theologian Reinhold Niebuhr, and Mark Twain. Also, author Laura Ingalls Wilder lived in Missouri for over 60 years before her death in 1957.

The geographical center of the contiguous United States is actually in Kansas, about 250 miles west of the Missouri-Kansas border. But because of its diversity, Missouri seems more like the center of the nation.

Missouri is not East or West, North or South, but right in the middle, adjacent to all four geographical areas of the 48 states, so I have sometimes claimed that it is the most typical part of the U.S.

Missouri Roots

Even though my pride in Missouri has waned some in recent years, mainly because of the state’s political position, my Missouri roots run deep, and most of my life I have been justly proud of my home state.

My Grandpa George’s grandfather, Franklin Wadsworth Seat, was born in Cooper County in 1818, three years before Missouri became a state.

Not long before Franklin’s birth, his parents, Littleton and Elizabeth, migrated with two of Littleton’s brothers from Tennessee to Cooper Co.—and then in 1844 moved to what is now Worth County.

The area that became Worth Co. in 1861 was the very northwest corner of the state—and of the United States—when Missouri was admitted to the Union and remained so until the Platte Purchase was added in 1837.

I regret that the Seat family in Tennessee, and previously in Virginia, “owned” enslaved people, but as far as I have been able to ascertain, the Seats in Missouri never had “slaves” and a couple of Littleton’s nephews in Cooper Co. were Union soldiers in the Civil War.

Today, I am happy to join with fellow Missourians all over the state in celebration of Missouri’s bicentennial—and to take pride in the fact that some of my branch of the Seat family have lived in the state for all of these 200 years, and even longer.

After my death, some of my ashes will be buried not far from the grave of Franklin Seat, who, as mentioned, was born in Missouri before it became a state and who was buried in Worth County’s New Hope Cemetery in 1905.

So, as a deeply rooted Missourian, I join the chorus of those who, today and this month, exclaim, Congratulations, Missouri! 

_____ 

** For those who would like to learn more, here is the link to the Missouri Statehood Day website, which has a schedule of activities, some of which will be live-streamed.

** Many Missouri communities will be having ice cream socials today, including here in Liberty. There will be free ice cream on the square between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. (More information here.)

Remembering Great-Grandmother

This blog post is about two great-grandmothers: Rachel Seat, my great-grandmother who was scarcely known beyond the county where she lived most of her life, and writer Michelle Duster’s great-grandmother, the world-famous Ida B. Wells. 

Ida B. Wells (c.1917)

My Great-Grandmother: Rachel Clark Seat

Although I have claimed to faintly remember Great-grandmother Rachel, I may remember mainly the picture of me sitting on her lap in 1941 (see picture on right) and what my parents told me about her.

Rachel Clark was born in Perry County, Illinois, in 1852 and in her tenth year migrated with her birth family to Worth County, Missouri, where I was born 76 years later. 

Great-grandmother Rachel married William Littleton Seat in November 1870, the month after her 18^th birthday. Sadly, he died before they had been married ten years—and before Rachel’s 28^th birthday. At the time of his death, they had four children and one on the way.

Rachel was a widow for over sixty years, dying in the summer of 1941. In addition to five children, she was the grandmother of at least eleven, and I don’t know how many great-grandchildren there were/are—but I am happy to be one of them.

Michelle Duster’s Great-Grandmother: Ida B. Wells

Michelle Duster was born 101 years after her great-grandmother, Ida B. Wells, whose birth was ten years after my great-grandmother Rachel, in 1862, the year the Clark family migrated from Illinois to Worth County, Missouri.

Ida died 90 years ago today, on March 25, 1931, ten years before my great-grandmother. But even though Ida’s lifespan was twenty years shorter than Rachel Seat’s, her accomplishments far exceeded what my great-grandmother could ever have imagined.

Early this year, Ms. Duster’s book about her illustrious great-grandmother was published under the title Ida B. the Queen: The Extraordinary Life and Legacy of Ida B. Wells. It is an informative book that is quite visually appealing because of its extensive artwork and other images. 

No one would have the slightest reason to write a book about my great-grandmother, although my Aunt Mary Seat did write a six-page, unillustrated story about her (and available for viewing/reading here).

The Life and Legacy of Ida B. Wells

In July 1862, James and Elizabeth Wells, who were both enslaved on a farm in Holly Springs, Mississippi, became the parents of their first child, whom they named Ida. She was a precocious child, and she learned to read at an early age—and read the newspaper to her father and his friends.

When she was 16, Ida’s parents and her youngest sibling died of yellow fever. Ida was determined to keep her surviving five siblings together. She studied hard and passed the test to become a teacher in a rural Black school. For two years she provided for her siblings in that way.

That was in 1878, just two years before Grandma Rachel became a widow and had five of her own children to take care of from January 1881. So, Ida was providing for her siblings by teaching school in the same year my great-grandmother was working in her neighbors’ fields for 50 cents a week.

And at the same age Grandma Rachel became a widow, Ida became the one-third owner of a newspaper and a journalist in 1889. Five years later she published her first book, Southern Horrors: Lynch Laws in All Its Phases.

For forty years before her death on March 25, 1931, Ida worked as a writer and activist, combatting the evils of lynching and other forms of racism as well as sexism. She was a tireless, and effective, advocate for the social equality of Blacks and of women.

Had she known about Ida B. Wells at the time of her death, Grandma Rachel probably couldn’t have fathomed the outstanding social impact of a little Black slave girl born in Mississippi, whose entire life was within her (Rachel’s) lifespan.    

Ida’s courageous fight for social justice has been recognized in various ways, including the USPS issuing a Black heritage postage stamp in her honor in 1990, Chicago changing a street name to Ida B. Wells Drive in 2019, and her being awarded a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation in 2020.

Thank God for the extraordinary life and legacy of Ida B. Wells!

_____

Here are some notable books by and about Ida B. Wells (in addition to Duster’s 2021 book):

* Crusade for Justice: The Autobiography of Ida B. Wells (1972, edited by Ida’s daughter Alfreda Duster; 2020, with Afterword by Michelle Duster)

* Ida in Her Own Words (2008, edited by Michelle Duster)

* The Light of Truth: Writings of an Anti-Lynching Crusader (2014, by Ida B. Wells)

My Old Missouri Home

There are few people who don’t know about Stephen Foster’s “My Old Kentucky Home.” But there are not many who do know about my old Missouri home to which I moved 75 years ago this month, so let me tell you a bit about it.

Becoming a Farmboy

I was born 82 years ago today (on August 15, 1938) in the little town of Grant City, the county seat of Worth County, Missouri. My father was born on a farm in the southeast part of that county and my mother moved to Grant City with her birth family when she was a young teen. My parents graduated in the same high school class in 1933 and married two years later.

During World War II, my father and then my mother also worked in the Sunflower Ordnance Plant in western Johnson County, Kansas. In 1945 as the war was winding down, they went in with my mother’s parents to buy a 480-acre farm (for $16,000!) about six miles northeast of Grant City.

My grandparents moved into the old farmhouse, which did not have electricity or indoor plumbing, and not long after my seventh birthday I went to live with them in order to start the school year in Grant City.

Later that year, my parents moved from Kansas to the farmhouse and my grandparents moved back to their farm on the other side of town.

The next spring, we were able to have the house wired for electricity, and maybe the next year we installed indoor plumbing. It was great to no longer have to use the outdoor toilet! Year by year we improved the house, first inside and then the outside.

So, even though it was 75 years ago this month that I began living in my old Missouri home and became a farmboy, I have deep appreciation for the many blessings of having had such a childhood.

My old Missouri home in 1950; improvements were made inside first.

The Benefits of Being a Farmboy

1947 school picture
of farmboy Leroy

In the briefest fashion, these are some of the main boons I experienced from being a farmboy. 

1) I was part of a close-knit unit that worked together for the wellbeing of the whole family.

2) I learned how to work and to work hard.

3) I was able to raise my own livestock and was thereby able to become relatively independent financially at an early age.

Even though it was 65 years ago that I left my old Missouri home/farm to start to college, I still have great memories and deep appreciation for the ten years that I lived there.

The New Book of a Farmboy

Yesterday I basically finished writing my newest book. There will be some more editing, proofreading, and technical work before it is published, but I have completed the writing of it.

The title of this new book is A Wonderful Life: The Story of My Life from Birth until my 82^nd Birthday (1938~2020). I have long said that I would never write an autobiography—but a couple of years ago I decided that I should write my life story for my children and especially for my grandchildren.

(I do not plan to do any marketing of this book when it is published later this year—not that I have done very well marketing the books that I did hope to sell!—but it will be available for purchase for the few people who might like to get a copy.)

As I explain on the first page, the title “A Wonderful Life” is not an evaluation I have heard from others. In fact, some may well think my life has not been particularly wonderful—and that’s all right.

The point is that I believe that I’ve had a wonderful life from the beginning up until today—and that includes, of course, the ten highly significant years I spent as a farmboy.

Naturally, not everything during the past 82 years has been wonderful. But yes, overall, I believe it’s been a wonderful life, and I am profoundly grateful. 

The Southern Baptist Convention: 175 Years of Turmoil

Christian Leopold (C.L.) Neiger, my only great-grandparent not born in the U.S., was born in Canton Bern, Switzerland, 180 years ago today, on May 30, 1840. Five years later, and sixteen years before C.L. immigrated to the U.S., the Southern Baptist Convention was formed in 1845.  

The International Mission Board of the SBC was formed
 on the same day as the new convention.

Turmoil at the Beginning

The Southern Baptist Convention was formed because of turmoil over slavery. There were some other issues that also led to the formation of the new convention, but the slavery issue was unquestionably the most decisive one.

Specifically, in response to the policy adopted in 1844 that slaveholders would not be appointed as missionaries, Baptist delegates in the South formed the SBC.

In May 1845, those delegates met in Augusta, Georgia, to form the new Convention. Beginning with a total membership of nearly 352,000 in over 4,100 local Baptist churches, it was geographically restricted to states that would eventually become the Confederacy.

Turmoil through the Years

Most of the turmoil in the SBC after its founding has been theological. One of the first such controversies centered around C.H. Toy, professor of Old Testament at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary. He was forced to resign in 1879.

Fundamentalists, such as those led by J. Frank Norris, the fiery pastor of First Baptist Church of Fort Worth, caused turmoil in the SBC from the 1920s to the early 1950s.

Turmoil in the SBC again emerged after Ralph Elliott, professor of OT at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, published The Message of Genesis in 1961. He was fired the next year.

The “conservative resurgence” of the SBC (aka the “fundamentalist takeover”) began in 1979 and following years of turmoil, the convention made a massive move to the theological—and to the political—right.

And now this year a new movement has started. It is called the Conservative Baptist Network (CBN), and some are calling it a “second conservative resurgence.” It remains to be seen how much turmoil CBN will cause in the coming years.

An Embarrassed Southern Baptist

Not long after C.L. Neiger married my great-grandmother Margaret (Abplanalp) in Indiana, they moved to Worth County in northwest Missouri, the county where I was born about 70 years later.

C.L. and Margaret’s daughter Laura married George Seat, my grandfather. George’s great-grandfather, Littleton Seat, moved from Tennessee to Cooper County, Mo., about 1818. He moved to Worth County with his family in 1844—and died there the next year, the same year that the SBC was founded.

In the eighteenth century the Seat family lived in Virginia—and they owned slaves. According to family stories, two of Littleton’s older brothers were killed by a 13-year-old slave boy in 1786.

When the Seat family moved to near Nashville, Tennessee, about the turn of the century, they likely took some slaves with them, although the three Seat brothers who moved to Missouri before 1820 didn’t seem to have slaves—and it is quite certain that the Seats in Worth County never had any.

Near the beginning of my book Fed Up with Fundamentalism, I wrote about being an embarrassed Southern Baptist—and  in June 2015 I wrote about being both a proud and ashamed Southern Baptist—but that was because of what the Southern Baptist Convention had become, theologically, after 1980.

My first embarrassment, though, was when I learned why the SBC was formed in the first place. As a boy, I always identified with the North/Union in thinking about the Civil War—and I wasn’t prejudiced against African Americans, for I never saw a Black person in my home county.

The SBC formally apologized to African Americans in 1995 (at the annual convention marking the 150^th anniversary of the SBC’s founding) for the denomination's pro-slavery past. Some charged that that was too little, too late. But I am on the side of those who say, Better late than never.

During all the years I was a Southern Baptist, I disliked the name, which embodies its racist beginnings—and I have been an advocate of a name change since my student days at The Southern Baptist Theological Seminary in the 1960s.

After 175 years, surely the time has come for a name change—and after 40 years of turmoil caused by those on the theological right, surely the time has come for a move back toward the theological center.