|
Promises Kept
by Rev. Ken
Since Labor Day is coming up, I thought I would use the holiday to pay up on a promise I made long ago to someone I never met. His name is Witherspoon Dodge and he was a Congregational minister and later in life a labor organizer. For the most part, he was completely unaware, of the role he played in a pivotal moment in the labor movement, the life of a sleepy small town in South Georgia and
my family.
All through my childhood at family gatherings around the kitchen table after the adults got to the point of not caring to hide the paper bag and bottle when the kids came in, they would begin to swap stories of Dodge. Although they got his name wrong, it's an easy mistake to switch his two names, they told such an amazing tale that in my final years at Mercer University I decided to go investigate the truth of him.
Finding his unpublished autobiography in the Southern Labor Archives I read in astonish as the very thing I had come to find out about him was the beginning chapter of his book, "Into the Gates of Hell." Before describing his adventures, he asks that any one, who comes upon his material, do their part to spread his story.
I made the promise at that time, and this is just one small way of making good.
Dodge grew up in the Carolinas in a childhood he said could have been scripted out of one of the Andy Hardy movies right down to the caring mother, the kindly wise father and the high school sweetheart that became his wife.
In University he wanted to study religion, but his father advised him that there was little money to be made in God. Instead he studied finance and went back to his small town to open up a stock brokerage firm. As a form of advertisement he installed a stock ticker in the window of his office. Since his father was the editor of the local paper, he soon had his father, the mayor and the judge standing around the ticker during their lunch breaks mesmerized by the little clacking dome that brought news from far away New York of their accumulating wealth.
The advice of the day was to buy on any downturn. As the market became more uncertain those that were following Dodge's counsel became more tied to the health of the market. In the summer of 1928 the trading had become unusually light. The weekend of the crash there had been a major sell-off. Dodge said that weekend anxious friends gathered around him at Sunday services wanting reassurance.
The following week the crash came and fortunes were wiped out. That Sunday, Dodge wrote that those same friends who had once chased him now avoided him like the plague and only sought their balm from the minister.
Within months Dodge was to lose his stock brokerage firm and his father was to lose the newspaper. Even with all of this there was worse to come. He said his father became a broken man and was to wilt away. His mother had to move in with him and his bride and the three of them had to return to the family's farm house.
For months he was so depressed that all he could do was lay in bed. He said that the only thing that gave him comfort was his old minister visiting him to read Bible verses. Helping him rally, the minister encouraged him to apply for a job as a minister for the First Congregational Church of Atlanta.
With no formal education for such a post, in the middle of the depression and not even belonging to the denomination -- Dodge miraculous got the position.
It would have been easy for him to believe that getting a job as minister for a wealthy congregation in Atlanta was the final stop on his spiritual progression. But the Universe knew greater of him than he knew of himself. And Dodge was to find himself in the middle off every bit of hell race consciousness could throw at him and through it all he kept true to the core of his teaching -- that wherever he saw human suffering, he was commanded to act upon it. In doing, so he not only created for himself a life of power and significance, but he was able to change for better the lives of countless.
To hear the rest of Dodge's story, be at my talk this Sunday.
On the Sunny Side of The Street -- with a young Judy Garland
| 
