How I discovered that God bowls on Monday nights at 7
I grew up in a small town called Auburn in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada mountains. On Sundays we faithfully attended Pioneer Methodist Church, just across the street from Harry Sand’s Chapel of the Hills Funeral Home. My parents were married in that church in September 1929, which had nothing to do with the stock market crash the following month. Of course, I couldn’t have known then that my parents’ 50th anniversary reception would be held at that church, and five years later, my dad’s funeral. The entire Shinn tribe had long been Methodists, including my grandfather in Missouri, who was a circuit preacher, and a great-great-grandfather who apparently worked alongside John Wesley in the English revivals of the 18th century.
Down the street from our church was another church, which my parents referred to as a kind of “holy roller” church, with a sign outside that read:
“Jesus saves and heals every night at 7 pm except Monday”
I grew up wondering what Jesus did on Monday nights. My Uncle Verge (who wasn’t really my uncle, we just called him that, he was a neighbor who lived across the field) would go bowling on Monday nights, and while a good Methodist kid wouldn’t get caught dead inside a bowling alley In those days, I sometimes pictured Jesus bowling with Uncle Verge, since apparently both of them had Monday nights off.
Our church was the respectable church in town in the mid 40’s. It had stained glass windows, oak pews and a brass chandelier with 7 candles. We sang the great old hymns of faith from a regular hymnbook, accompanied by a pipe organ and the violet-robed choir, and though I had no idea what words like “here I raise my Ebenezer” or “rend your hearts and not your garments “meant, I guess adults do. I found out later that the vast majority of them had no idea what it meant.
Our pipe organ was big and old, skillfully played by the pastor’s wife, and my second favorite place in the entire church was the pipe room, accessible only through a small door at the back of the choir. I used to sit in the pipe room while people were at choir practice, imagining that I was the conductor of a huge orchestra. Later, when I was about 12 years old, a twisted friend taught me how to temporarily get the tone out of the organ using a combination of duct tape and cotton. Our biggest project was casting the 16-foot “D” pipe (the organ pipe that makes the “D” sound) for the Christmas cantata in 1949. Our choir was performing the Hallelujah Chorus, and it’s in the key of D, so the low D is the base on which the entire composition was based. Time was critical. We had to arrange things between the organ prelude and the beginning of the cantata, a period we estimated to be no more than three minutes while Rev. Cheek offered the invocation and welcomed the guests.
Meanwhile, we had to crawl out of the fellowship hall, slip down the stairs, and get behind the back row of the choir without being detected. We did it like clockwork, making it to the pipe room just in time for the summoning. Rich, my partner in crime, was running the tape while I was running the cotton. We had hardly finished when we were surrounded (and deafened) by the first chord of Handel’s great Oratorio as the concert began. Apparently we didn’t get something exactly right, because the pitch wasn’t quite as far off as we’d planned, just barely sharp, enough to bother the trained ear, but not enough to bother the general public too much. In retrospect, that was probably for the best, as if the tone had been too off, the choir director would no doubt have stopped the concert and investigated. As it was, he continued, occasionally frowning at the organist, as if she could do something about it. Later we heard comments at the reception like “OMG that organ sounds old!” and “Didn’t Mr. Dithers work on it last summer?”, and “You know, it was good except for the bass.” section.”
Our exit was as smooth as our entrance, and by the time the closing prayer was over, we were safely in the assembly hall, ribbon and cotton discarded. It was one of the proudest moments of my life, and I seriously considered taking up theft as a profession. My only regret was that I couldn’t tell anyone about my triumph without paying a price I wasn’t willing to pay.
There were other times, many other times, when things didn’t go so well. When I was six years old I played the part of Tiny Tim in the Christmas play at the community hall, and I fell off the edge of the stage instead of saying “God bless us all!” Hysterical laughter is not a fitting end to Dickens’s Christmas Carol.
My first favorite place in the church was the bell tower, the delight of all the children, and I loved climbing the spiral stairs and feeling the texture of the rope that led to the bell. Occasionally Mr. Ornsby, our Sunday school superintendent, would let one of us ring the bell during the break between Sunday school and church, much to our delight. A year after Halloween, a friend (who grew up to be the Placer County Sheriff) and I broke into the church (we didn’t think of it as “breaking in” at the time, since it was “our church” and we’d go in and we would regularly get out through a back window that we knew), and we would ring the bell for about two minutes at midnight. Growing up in the church and knowing every inch of the surrounding hillside was an asset when the police arrived, and we were long gone and heading home up Nevada Street when they reached the minister (who had apparently fallen asleep during our little concert). ) from the bed in the parsonage next door and asked him to open the church to see who was ringing the bell.