Reverend Josephus

Jesse Halsey |c1927

 

Reverend Josephus has a big house—and a big family; a big church building and a big congregation; a large parish house with many rooms, but also with many activities.

He has a room designated a study, but it is a perpetual motion office. Parties, dances, classes, conferences, meetings for prayer, for praise, for study, and whatnot. Committees and boards and agencies, meetings morning afternoon and night are held in Reverend Josephus’ church and parish hall. He is seldom alone or unattended. His telephone is like a junebug on the first hot night of late spring.

And his house; in the attic he took an unused room, stacked the boxes, whitewashed the walls, and improvised a desk, for two mornings it was his, unmolested. Then his little girl needed a playhouse—she got it.

One boy went away to school. Rev. Josephus appropriated his room, forgot the trinkets on the wall, covered up the stuffed snakes that gave him the jitters, and began to write. Mother needed a sewing room “where there was sunshine.” She got it.

A study was provided in the parsonage. It had an inside and outside door; it was a convenient pass to the side yard, as such it was successful; but as a study it was not a success—the adjoining garden was the children’s playground.

Then the radio for some reason seemed to fit this study best and night and day if any of the family were home it wailed away.

Reverend hated the radio—except for a few minutes a week—but the family were addicts: Tiny Tim to Fire Chief and School Boy Pete; the Cook to Tink and Wink; Jimmie to ____; and mother to Danroch (Rev always tried to finish his sermon on Friday morning, and Saturday afternoon) and the opera.

In the evening, he hit upon the kitchen; it was warm; the big table could accommodate his books. For a while it worked, but Helen came home from boarding school and fudge and cookies were concocted by night and after she went back Mirandy, the cook, got a beaux and the Rev moved out.

Sermon quality began to deteriorate; people spoke of it. All parish activities boomed, but sermons were thin.

The pastor put a sign on his (church) study door: “Occupied”; but the phone didn’t heed and the beggars who stopped in could read, and the President of the Board, or the Ladies Aid, didn’t. So he burned it up.

One day at the trade show he heard shop management. It worked. The boys carried on their studies in the noise.

Shop Management

Jesse Halsey | 1927

My friend Johnston—he’s a minister—went to the Automotive Trade school to speak on Lincoln’s Birthday. After the assembly, the principal was showing him around. They came into a machine shop with the crack of two decrepit engines being timed, a planer was scraping in one corner and a lathe groaning in another; every half second there was the explosion of the main engine that drove the main shaft over head; there were revolving pulleys and flying belts everywhere—confusion worse confounded, thought my studious friend.

At one side of this busy shop room was a long table and at the table fifteen boys were absorbed in their books—more than less.

“How in the world can they study?” asked the preacher. “It would drive me crazy to read in here.”

When they reached the quiet of his office, the principal explained.

“That’s what we call ‘shop management.’ These boys are going to work in the noise of machine shops and garages, such thinking and planning as they do will be done in confusion and noise. We are training them for their work and purposely have the classes, most of them, right in the shops.”

The preacher went home thinking about it.

His study had become an office. Telephone calls by the score came in each day. Some could be shunted to his helpers, but the bell rang just the same. No sooner was he immersed in reading of the composition of some sermon, than in came a caller on some errand or other.