Pat Russell:
CLASS OF 1964
Englewood High SchoolClass of 1964
Englewood, CO
Flood Middle SchoolClass of 1961
Englewood, CO
Pat's Story
After graduating from Englewood High School in 1964, I left Colorado and went to college at Huston-Tillotson College (H-T) in Austin, TX, a predominantly black church-related college where I was the only white student in my class. To my surprise, I was elected Freshman Class President. I was there from 1964-1966, during the peak of the Civil Rights movement. Some of my classmates were involved in the Watts riots in the summer of 1965.
During my last year and a half at H-T, I was the drummer for a rock band called the Babycakes. We were voted the top band in central Texas in the summer of 1965; the other guys were tremendously talented. I had very long, bushy red hair, a red beard, and I played loud and hard; not a lot of talent, but I added some color to the group. I also taught the high school Sunday School class at the Congregational Church of Austin during those years. The church was just half a block from the University of Texas campus, in the shadow of the UT Tower. Since there was an electric typewriter in the church office, I pulled an all-nighter there in the summer of ’66 typing a paper for a friend who was taking summer classes at H-T. Got the paper to him early the next morning, then went home to bed. When I awoke, I heard about the Texas Tower massacre that had unfolded very shortly after I had left the exact area where the sniper injured or killed most of his victims. My last performance with the band was at a huge benefit concert we helped organize to support the victims of the Tower incident and their families.
I returned to Colorado to begin my junior year of college at CU in Boulder in the fall of ‘66. My older brother, Graham, had just gotten out of the army, and he and I agreed to be roommates at CU so that we could be closer to home. Our Dad had been seriously ill for several years, and we felt that we needed to be nearby for support. Dad died in April of 1967, toward the end of my junior year.
For spring break during my senior year, I decided to visit Austin so I could see my friends in the band and my college classmates once more before they all graduated. Scheduled to go back to the H-T campus for the first time the next day, I was at a nightclub listening to a buddy band when someone came in and told us that Dr. King had been assassinated by a white man. When I walked onto the H-T campus the next morning, I knew that at least half the students on campus would not know me, and that under the circumstances, I could be in danger. My best friend, Teddy, met me at the campus gate and put his arms around me. I was warmly welcomed by everyone I met.
I married one of the girls next door at CU in the summer of 1968, a few days after I graduated. Immediately after the reception, we hopped into the 1949 Plymouth that my brother Graham had given me and headed off to Berkeley, CA, where I had been accepted as a student at Pacific School of Religion, a seminary related to the United Church of Christ (UCC), the denomination I had chosen when I was in ninth grade. We lived in Berkeley from 1968-1971, during the height of the Student Movement. The doors to our seminary Chapel were blown off by dynamite, and there were days when tear gas filled the air and the streets were blocked off by young soldiers with machine guns standing behind rolls of barbed wire. Mass arrests were not uncommon, and neither were riots. The music was incredible.
For the first two years I was in seminary, I served as Minister to Youth at Shattuck Ave. Methodist Church in Oakland. All the members of the youth group were African American, and we grew very close. Our church was a few blocks away from Black Panther National Headquarters, and I remember standing in front of Panther Headquarters one day with a bunch of ministers who were there to prevent a rumored attack on the Headquarters by Oakland Police.
I earned two Masters Degrees at PSR in three years. One was the traditional Master of Divinity in preparation for ordination, and the other an MA in Religion in Higher Education (campus ministry). Instead of writing a traditional dissertation for my MA, I wrote an autobiographical novel about my two years at Huston-Tillotson in Texas.
I did not have a job when I graduated from seminary; just a lot of hair and a beard. But by September of 1971 I was called to serve as the Pastor of the Community UCC in Biwabik, MN, way up north on the Iron Range. Biwabik was a town of 1200 people, three churches, and seven bars. Most of the men there were iron ore miners, a pretty tough crowd, but very genuine. Somehow they quickly accepted their hippie-looking minister, and we had four wonderful years there. We did a lot of fishing, and we had a great time canoeing and camping in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area not far away. I did a lot with the kids in the community, and we opened a coffeehouse/youth drop-in center during the summers. It was actually the third church coffeehouse I had organized. The people in Biwabik were very patient and exceedingly kind to me.
In September of 1975, my wife and I moved to Winona, MN, which is right on the Mississippi River in southeastern Minnesota. I served as a campus minister at Winona State University for four years. We had a small student singing group called Koinonia with about a dozen members when I got there. They sang in local churches on occasion. By the time I left, we had over sixty-five members in the group and had gone on tours to Chicago, the Iron Range, and Denver. I worked extensively with International Students in Winona, and a lovely student from Pakistan lived with us for about a year.
While we were in Winona, my wife and I adopted two Native American (Ojibway) siblings from Canada. At the time, our son Walter was five and our daughter Beverly was six. They had been through a lot of rough times in their short lives, and Walt had Fetal Alcohol Syndrome. We really did not fully understand what that meant at first.
After a brief "honeymoon" period with the children, there was constant tension between my wife and my kids, and I often felt caught in the middle. We thought that perhaps if we moved to a new place together, that might bring us closer as a family. My wife had just completed her four-year paralegal degree, and there was a promising position for an Associate Campus Minister in Austin, TX. I got the job and went from serving two campuses and seven churches in Winona to serving seven campuses and fifty churches in Austin. My wife got a job doing legislative research for the State of Texas. The Senior Campus Minister had been there for twenty-five years, and I hoped to learn a lot from him. Three months after I arrived, he was removed by his Bishop. I became the Interim Director of that sprawling program. Then the custodian quit, so I was also the Interim Custodian. And then the secretary quit, and ....well, you get the picture. I was putting in incredible hours, trying to save a ministry that had been left in shambles.
By the time the Board found a new Senior Campus Minister a year later, things had completely fallen apart at home. The family had gone through a lot of counseling, and the painful decision was made to put the children in a group home while my wife and I tried to build a more stable family environment. Each time the kids came home for a visit, though, it was a disaster. So we decided that the kids would come to live with me and my wife would move out while we tried to cobble things together. Things only got worse. Between my work and being a single parent, I was getting about four hours of sleep a night. When my wife came to visit, we'd sit down to watch TV and I'd immediately fall asleep. When she called on the phone, I'd be in the middle of cooking dinner before I had to run out to pick up a baby-sitter so I could attend a meeting that evening, and she felt ignored. The pain and frustration became too much for everyone, so we reluctantly decided to get a divorce. Because she had dental problems, we delayed the divorce for about a year to keep her on my insurance, but our divorce was already a reality. I was a single parent for eighteen months. I still don't know how the kids survived my miserable attempts at cooking.
While I was attending a divorce seminar at a local church, I met an attractive young woman with three little boys, all younger than my own children. I was very taken with her, and by the time my divorce was finally settled, she and I had already decided to get married. At first it seemed like a relief. But then tensions developed between her children and mine, and between her and my kids. We were both sharing our kids with our former spouses on a scheduled basis, and that turned into total chaos. Funding for campus ministry was declining rapidly, so with a family of seven, I decided that I needed to find a more secure position. After we had been married for one year, I found an incredible opportunity to serve on the Conference Staff of the Indiana-Kentucky Conference of the UCC (some 200 churches). I was to be responsible for their overall ministry with youth, with young adults, campus ministry, their camping program, and I was to be the Director of their camping facility, Merom Conference Center. It was located in Merom, IN, a rustic rural town of 300 people where my family and I would have to live.
The Conference Center was formerly an old college built in 1859. It is on the banks of the Wabash River on the Illinois border, and it is on the National Historic Register. When I got there, the place was falling apart and the camping program was in decline. Some of the churches treasured the Conference Center and its history, while many others thought it was a dumpy money pit. One of my great ch...Expand for more
allenges in that position was to turn things around at the Conference Center to make it a place that would shine. I believed that resurrecting the Conference Center was critical to the well-being of the Conference itself. A lot of people worked very hard over the years to reverse direction for the Conference Center, and today it is a fine facility prized by the entire Conference.
I helped establish a lot of programs in the Conference, including the Young Ambassadors, which created a community of up to twenty youth and young adults from the Conference and up to twenty youth and young adults from our partner churches in Germany. One year the group would spend three weeks together in the US, visiting each other's homes and churches, doing a mission project together, and spending a week of intense Bible Study and reflection at a church camp. The next year they would do the same thing in Germany. After that, the program would take two years off, then repeat the process with a new group of youth and young adults. Young Ambassadors remains an excellent program to this day, ready to begin its sixth generation, and a lot of the participants in that program have turned into some very gifted UCC clergy.
My work with the Conference also included pastoral placement, staffing regional Associations, and dealing with local church conflicts and crises. It was challenging work that allowed for a lot of creativity and which brought me into contact with lots of wonderful people. And it meant a great deal of time on the road.
In the meantime, life at home was not getting any better. Eventually my own two children moved back to Texas with my ex-wife, but that did not work, and soon both kids set out on their own. Bev spent her last year of high school staying with a minister friend of mine in Austin. Walt was in a group facility for a while, but left, and became a street person for more than a decade. Sometimes it was years between phone calls from him, and those were often from jails or mental health facilities.
After seven years of living in Merom, a town of 300 in one of the poorest and least educated counties in Indiana, my wife insisted on moving to Indianapolis, where I had my second office. She had just started going back to college, and after we moved to Indianapolis, she began her study of neurobiology. She was a brilliant student, but she was also very ill with fibromyalgia and other issues. Our marriage was struggling. New leadership came into the Conference, and it was not leadership I could work with. As my wife approached graduation, I began to look for a new position, finally agreeing to serve as the Associate Minister at the UCC in Kent, OH, next to the Kent State campus. My wife enrolled in medical school there, and earned her doctorate in neurobiology. In the meantime, she was still constantly fighting illness (staying in bed most of the time she was at home), and our marriage, too, was far from being healthy.
During my time in Kent I was present for the 25th Anniversary of the shootings at Kent State, a tragic event felt around the world, and the community still bears the scars. I was honored, though, to be present for that time of remembrance. I also attended the opening concert for the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in Cleveland. The list of performers was staggering - it was one of the most incredible concerts in the history of rock. We had bought the cheapest seats at the last minute, and when we got to the stadium, we were told that our seats were no good - they were blocked from the stage by a huge lighting tower. So they moved us to some other seats they had set aside for us - in the third row, right in front of the stage! That five hour concert was truly an amazing experience.
After my Dad's death in 1967, I discovered that he had been married before he met my mother, and he'd had another family, including a son and a daughter. I inherited my Dad's stamp collection, and in that collection were several dozen letters to him from his other children and from his first wife. At first, the whole subject was too painful for me to touch - there were some very sad stories reflected in those letters, most of which came from Buffalo, NY, near where Dad had grown up in a Catholic orphanage. As I moved into my fifties, I realized that my unknown brother and sister had to be getting older, too, so I decided I'd try to find them. A search of Buffalo phone numbers online was no help, so I drove up to Buffalo, parked myself at a pay phone at Applebees, and started calling.
After many disappointing responses, my brother's wife finally answered the phone. It's a long story - a very good story - and today, after more than twelve years, my brother David and his entire family are precious to me. He's a devout Catholic and a right wing Republican, and I'm a Protestant minister and a left-wing Democrat, but we couldn't love each other more. And the rest of the family is just as wonderful. I'll never forget the day I got to introduce my brother Graham, whom I grew up with, to my brother Dave, whom I found.
I also took my first and second trips to China during those years in Kent. My Grandfather had been a missionary, humanitarian, scholar, and explorer in Sichuan Province from 1911-1948. I wanted to visit some of the places he’d been, meet some of the kinds of people that he had worked with, and generally tap into his roots. Those two trips were life-changing experiences. Much of my Grandfather's work is still very evident after all this time. I love the people and the culture(s) there. China has come to feel like my second home.
Pastoral leadership at the Kent church kept passing through crises and going through changes. During my ten years there, I worked under three different senior pastors and thee interims, so I had to be the glue that held the system together. There were some tragic situations regarding some of the senior ministers, and the church went through some very hard times. It was by far the toughest position I've ever served. Of course, that did nothing to help things at home. When I realized that I could not work comfortably with the third senior pastor, it was time to seek another placement. That's when I moved to Good Shepherd UCC in Cary, NC, and my wife stayed in Ohio for some post-doctorate work. After a few months, we decided to get a divorce, and although divorce is always very costly emotionally as well as financially, that's one of the best decisions I ever made. We had been married for over twenty years, and I did my best to support her and care for her. My efforts never seemed sufficient, though, and finally she suggested that I was a big part of the reason for her illness. That felt like an appropriate time to call it quits. I do not believe in divorce. That made two for me. And in both cases, I believe that it was the right decision -- the moral, most responsible, and kindest decision I could make for everyone concerned.
My eight years at Good Shepherd UCC in Cary, NC, were wonderful. Although it was a small congregation of about 150 members, they were courageous and committed, willing to embrace creative opportunities. I got to play my drums again as part of the Praise Team. With their support, I started an Intergenerational Sunday School Class for middle school kids through adults - we did some amazing exploration together. We started a monthly "Munchies and a Movie" series where we would gather for refreshments, a good film, and an in-depth discussion. These weren't your typical Sunday School films - our features included Spiderman 3, Fantasia 2000, and The Buddy Holly Story combined with a showing of La Bamba on the anniversary of that fatal plane crash.
We had a partnership with a primarily Black congregation and shared our facilities with a Korean congregation. We had started a summer mission trip at Good Shepherd, going to West Virginia every other summer to help renovate homes. During my final mission trip with Good Shepherd, we invited members of those two other congregations to join with us. I don't think the folks in West Virginia had ever seen a work crew like ours!
At my urging, members of the congregation also started volunteering as ushers and ticket takers for the Carolina Roller Girls (CRG), our local flat track women's roller derby team. At first the girls were suspicious of us, but they learned to trust us, and I became their unofficial team Chaplain. Our church choir even sang the National Anthem at a CRG bout!
During my time in NC, I spent a three-month sabbatical in China. I also discovered the music of an amazing singer/songwriter, independent recording artist Vaughan Penn. Her music is rich and spiritual and real. I did a couple of sermons about her songs before I found out that she lived not far from me in North Carolina. I met her at one of her concerts in the area, and we became close friends. She performed several times at our church. She's incredible, and we still spend time traveling and hanging out together. Visit her at VaughanPenn.com or check her out on YouTube or Facebook. You'll fall in love!
I retired from active ministry on December 31, 2011, found a lovely home in the mountains an hour west of Denver, and love being back in Colorado after all these years. My son is living in South Dakota and is doing well. My daughter and two granddaughters are in Texas. I have three fantastic cats - Pumpkin, Bear, and Tux, all rescue cats from Vaughan. I've just started work as a Tour Guide at the historic Hamill House in Georgetown, a few miles from where I live. It's tremendous fun! And I thoroughly enjoy hanging out with my brother, Graham, who still resides in our family home in Englewood. Life is good!
Register for Free to view all details!
Yearbooks
Register for Free to view all yearbooks!
Reunions
Photos
