| Testimonial: I received the Herald in Lincoln Park, Michigan at the First Baptist Church. Later, when I was in the Coast Guard, I started and was Captain at a battalion in Ketchikan, Alaska. This would have been about 1971 or so.
I also went to the Brigade camp, which, I believe was near Allegan, Michigan (or someplace near). This would have been around 1962 or so. One day a friend and I took a couple horses out for a ride, and they started racing. I managed to turn mine off the road, through an electric fence and into a fresh-plowed field. At a full gallop, I saw the forest coming up fast before me, and the field looked a lot softer than those trees, so I jumped off and rolled in the soft dirt (unhurt)! The horse soon pulled up, we caught him and walked them back to the camp. Such was life at the CSB camp!
Another Brigade experience one might find interesting: The regional director about 1971 could not make it to a planned seminar for the Brigade leaders in Northern British Columbia, so he asked me to fill in since I was living in Alaska and it was closer for me to go than him. The day in January that I got to Burns Lake, it was -57°! [That is not a misprint.] A couple days later, Saturday, the local leaders wanted to show me the Brigade camp they were building, which was maybe 15-20 miles back into the “bush.” We got on snowmobiles, each with a sleigh full of building materials for the camp, and went back to the campsite. Once we’d unloaded, they built a fire, broke out hot dogs and all the fixin’s and we roasted hot dogs. We had to eat them VERY fast, however, because the HIGH temperature for the day was -35°!
Although it has been decades since I last saw him, I knew “Uncle Joe” Coughlin very well and attended quite a few meetings with him. I can still “see” his smiling eyes looking at me through his big glasses. |
