Walking, Praying and the Promise

By ED MCCABE

My life developed according to a promise I made to the lord when I was a young boy. When I was in the third grade at Snow Hill Elementary School, my homeroom teacher said one day if I wanted to be an artist, I would have an easy life. I was a boy working in my dads mill lifting and moving one hundred pound bags of feed and grain. I was accustomed to hard work. After work each day, I would walk the railroad tracks and pray to the Lord. I prayed to the Lord that if He would allow me to become a successful commercial artist and syndicated cartoonist, I would retire at the age of forty-five and serve him the rest of my life. In response to my praying and the promise, I believe the Lord gave me direction and circumstances that are guiding me even to this day.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Feb 5, 2015
• ISBN: 9781490866468

ED MCCABE

Edward Lemuel McCabe Born:March 31, 1939, Married: Janice, Children: James and Julie, Education and experience: U.S.Army Combat Engineers, Advertising Design, BFA, Juris Doctor, National Retail Sales, U.S.Government Printing Office, U.S.Department of State, Audio Visual Information Officer, Ordained Minister.

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Copyright © 2015 Ed McCabe.

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ISBN: 978-1-4908-6647-5 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4908-6646-8 (e)

WestBow Press rev. date: 2/5/2015

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

The War Effort

On the Snow Hill Girdletree Road

Grand Mom Scarborough and the Old Cigar Box

A Comment by My Third-Grade Teacher

Beautiful Native American Stone Tools

The Lie

Dad’s Feed Mill by the Railroad Tracks

Like a Workout in a Gym

The Mistake that Changed Everything

Widely Known in the Grain Business

Walking and Praying

The Promise

A Passing Way of Life

Harbor Light

The Houseboat in the Marshes

The Fancy Speedboat

The Poor Man’s Boat

The Cost of Expanding the Mill

Dad’s Farms

More than a Business

Girdletree and the Bank Museum

Herman, the Migratory Crew Chief

Last Summer Job before High School Graduation

The Assateague Island I Remember

Dad always Helped People if He Could

Draw Me, a discarded Book of Matches

The Fate of the Irish

First Objective: Complete My Military Obligation

A Life of Competition

Developing Discipline to Succeed

The Long Walk in the Night

Gaining skills and direction

at the School of Visual Arts

Dad’s Help and Advice

Walking the City Streets at Night

There Go I, but for the Grace of the Lord

Lights at Night in the Architect’s Office

Balancing a Special Checking Account

The first Advertising Agency ends in Bankruptcy

Uncomfortable in the Small-Studio Atmosphere

Advancing to a Larger Advertising Agency

Designing Beer Cans

A Law Degree in Two Years at Night

National Retail Management Experiences

and the Solid-Slate Pool Table

The Move from Baltimore to Washington, DC

Experience with the Civil Service Commission

Planner-Designer at GPO

Four-Color Printing using Two Colors

A Sixteen-Page Brochure from One Sheet

Marbling at the GPO

Cartooning Experiences in the Government

Job Offers from Two Government Agencies

A Stonemason or an Angel?

Would You Consider the Next Higher Grade?

Trust between Friends

An Introductory Class for New Foreign Service and State Department Employees

A News Briefing Room

President Nixon’s Trip to China

VIP Exhibits

A Diplomatic Tradition

Native American Art Ambassador

The Four-Minute Portrait Sketch

I Never Became a Syndicated Cartoonist

Another Maryland Institute Graduate

My Skills were increasing,

But My Closeness with the Lord was Wavering

Thomas’s Decision Influenced My Direction

Strange Reactions in the Past

Unexplained Reactions Continue

Graphic Arts and Industrial Chemical Reactions

The First Official State Department Medical Report

The Same Circumstances and Directions

Losing the Sense of Smell

The Name of the Claims Examiner

The Visions

The Streets of Washington, DC.

A Medical Retirement

The Climax

"Your Husband would be dead

before He Hit the Floor"

Commercial Artists Save Samples of Their Work

The Forgotten Promise

Baptized in the Name of the Lord Jesus Christ

Gift of Tongues

A Wedding Ring Lost

Because of the Promise…

Upper Marlboro Detention Center

A Near Riot

Asked to Become a Prison Chaplain

Excavations at Sepphoris

Jessup Truck-Stop Ministry Experiences

The Name McCabe

Sunday Family Service in the Truck-Stop Chapel

Unable to Sleep

Identical Dreams

Track Life

Waiting upon the Lord

Acknowledgments

I thank my wife, Janice, my daughter, Julie McCabe Hellmer, and my son-in-law, Richard Hellmer, for aiding in the editing and preparation of this manuscript. I am also grateful to Richard for helping me design the cover.

I thank Stephen Mathews, Lifetime Visions Photography, Snow Hill, Maryland, who took the time to photograph the right picture for the cover of this book.

Introduction

We are often affected by events that happened before we are born. My Dad graduated from high school in Selbyville, Delaware. Unable to find a job to support himself, he borrowed five hundred dollars from a cousin in Teaneck, New Jersey, and five hundred dollars from his father, a grain salesman in Selbyville. In 1937, my father bought an old feed mill located along the railroad tracks passing through Snow Hill, Maryland. Snow Hill is the county seat of Worcester County, which is in the middle of the Delmarva Peninsula. The peninsula includes all of Delaware’s counties and some of Maryland’s. The lower two counties of Virginia make up the southern tip of the peninsula. Local people and visitors refer to the area as either the Delmarva Peninsula or the Eastern Shore. I use the name Eastern Shore more often, even though Delmarva Peninsula is more descriptive and to my way of thinking a more prestigious name.

When Mom graduated from Snow Hill High School, her dad sent her to a finishing school in Philadelphia for one year. After completing school, she returned to Girdletree and worked for Granddad Scarborough’s Sinclair-Betholine Heating Oils and Gas business in Snow Hill. Mom met Dad there. They were married in 1938. Dad’s feed mill was located on the north eastern edge of Snow Hill along the same railroad tracks that passed by Granddad’s oil business on the south eastern edge of town.

The War Effort

I was born in 1939, the year Hitler invaded Poland. My brother was born in 1941, the year Japan attacked Pearl Harbor. These events created the environment of my early life. Dad’s feed mill thrived on supplying the food required in the World War II war effort. Sometime after the end of the war, Dad asked me to work in the mill. He paid me a dollar a day. In the beginning, I swept and cleaned the mill, the offices, and the agricultural product display areas. In a feed mill operation, the dust goes everywhere.

I considered myself a part of the war effort because of all the war stories being told by the mill workers everyday during the war and the postwar period. But my story really began in the postwar period. Summer weekdays and Saturdays during my school years, I worked in the mill. I was big for my age, a head taller than any of my classmates. I was soon able to do heavy lifting five days a week, all day Monday through Friday. As I got older, Dad had me working on some Saturdays during the school year. From an early age, I worked a full schedule during the summers. I rarely played sports during those years. I enjoyed working in the mill; it was like a dusty gym!

Years later, I asked Dad why he bought the mill when he did. His answer was simple: when he graduated from high school in Delaware, there were very few good-paying jobs available on the Eastern Shore. I have always thought he should have said that he was in the right place at the right time. Buying the mill in 1937 gave my Dad a life of opportunities, excitement, satisfaction and recognition. But the postwar period brought change. Dad did not prepare for the changes that were coming. He lost the mill in the mid 1950s. It is hard for me to remember the exact dates of the events. Everybody who knew is now dead, including my younger brother, Paul, my Dad and Mom.

During the war years, air raid sirens often broke the nighttime stillness. When the Snow Hill firehouse sounded the sirens, all the townspeople quickly pulled down their black window shades to eliminate the possibility of German bombers seeing any light in the dark sky.

When war broke out, I was too young to realize its significance. The mill was very successful in war and post-war years for dad. He also supplied agricultural products like Black Angus beef, chickens, soybeans, corn, and seafood from the Chincoteague Bay for the war effort. Dad even built a few homes to rent.

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The old feed mill located beside the railroad tracks. Loading trucks with 100lb bags of feed directly from the feed mill or directly from the train cars was continuous work during the war years. The empty train cars would be replaced by full train cars during the night. All photographs were taken by Mom.

When Dad first asked me to work in the mill during the summers, I was excited to be working among the laborers in the mill. I wanted to do my part. A few years after I started, Paul joined me. Like most kids, my brother and I wanted to do what the grown-up laborers did. After a few years, I was able to lift and stack six, hundred-pound bags of feed onto a wooden two-wheel pushcart all day long.

After work each day, at 5 p.m., if it wasn’t raining, I would jump off of the loading docks and walk the railroad tracks. I loved to do this. It was during those walks, I began talking to the Lord. I loved the peace I felt as I walked and talked to Him. To this day, I do not know how or why the walking and talking started. I did not go to church very often, only when Mom, Paul, and I wanted to. I did not consider myself religious, but I have had a relationship with God for as long as I can remember. Listening to the pastor and Sunday school teachers, I learned to fear God. And I learned to trust God. I loved to walk and pray to Him when I was by myself. Talking to the Lord seemed natural.

Over the years, as I worked in the mill, I increased the distance I walked on the railroad tracks. I kept going until I thought I could see the tops of buildings in the small town of Newark, Maryland. The distance between Snow Hill and Newark was established in colonial times. It was ten to twelve miles. In those days the small towns were called stagecoach stops. They were located along dirt roads from the northern border of the Delmarva Peninsula to Cape Charles, Virginia, at the southern tip.

When I first started walking and talking to the Lord, I walked about a mile or two a day. Then I would stop, turn around, walk back to the mill, and go home for supper. As I grew, I increased the distance I walked. In all the years I walked the railroad tracks beside my father’s mill, I do not remember a train passing me. I guess the railroads must have picked up empty train cars during the night and dropped off full cars at night.

Our home was in Snow Hill on the Public Landing Road about a mile from the mill. Public Landing was a small resort area on the Chincoteague Bay, used mostly during the summer by Worcester County folks. Public Landing had a large concrete area for walking along the water. A pavilion in this area housed a lot of tables and benches and provided shade for large parties along the water. It was about twelve miles from Snow Hill and the only place in Worcester County for the public to swim, crab, and have picnics.

Even though I had never read much of the Bible, I spent my spare time talking to the Lord on the railroad tracks, in the fields as I hunted for Native American artifacts, and on the beaches of the Eastern Shore picking up sand dollars and sea shells. Over time, my conversations with the Lord advanced to a more personal and meaningful level. After the final years of high school and completing basic training in the U. S. Army Infantry, I began to suspect my life had progressed because of circumstances and directions provided by the Lord. I became convinced that He answers our prayers, because He has answered many of my prayers to Him over the years. Today I am convinced more than ever that I received help and guidance because of my solitary praying and talking to the Lord on the railroad tracks.

My walking and talking to the Lord started sometime after 1945. Sometime after 1947, when dad enlarged the feed mill, I began seeking guidance from the Lord. I wanted to become a commercial artist and a syndicated cartoonist. I knew I could not do it with out His help and direction.

The walking and praying on the railroad tracks continued until Dad lost the mill in the mid 1950s. When I realized he was going to lose the mill, I made a promise to the Lord. I do not know the date I first made the promise (I think I was about eleven, twelve, or maybe thirteen). How many times I repeated the promise I do not know, but what I promised is still clear in my mind. It always will be! I remember I was walking on the railroad tracks, passing the lumberyard on one side and the town sand hole on the other side. It had to have been after working all day in the mill, which would have been after 5 p.m., after the mill activities ended. On Saturdays, when I worked, it would have been after 2 or 3 p.m.

Even today my promise to the Lord keeps me seeking ways to serve Him. I will witness to anyone who will listen. So what was the promise? I promised the Lord that if He allowed me to become a successful commercial artist and syndicated newspaper cartoonist, I would retire at age forty-five and serve Him the rest of my life. My prayer was simple and sincere but not well thought out, and definitely not practical. Nevertheless, this is what I promised the Lord.

Members of our church and of the staff at the Pecometh Methodist church camp my brother and I attended for two weeks each summer would say the Lord hears us when we pray to Him. As I walked in the plowed fields around the camp, picking up Indian artifacts, I prayed to the Lord. At night I sat high above the wide Chester River on the concrete seats and looked across the moon lit river. The seats also served as steps, built into the sandy cliff of the Pecometh Methodist Church Camp. I thought about what the visiting missionaries and preachers said each day and each evening. After everybody else had retired to the cabins for the night, I continued sitting there and thinking about the Lord and what I would do when I grew up. I do not know how many years Mom and Dad sent Paul and me to Camp Pecometh for two weeks each summer.

I enjoyed talking to the Lord. I felt relaxed after a long walk on the railroad tracks or rapid jaunts around the mill’s massive wooden columns in the feed mill, especially when activities lessened and the emptiness of the enlarged facility became more noticeable and I had more and more time on my hands. The huge rooms once stacked, wall to wall with six to nine, hundred-pound bags of feed, now remained empty more and more as the postwar period was ending. I could sense something was going to change. I think it already had changed. But Dad did not want to accept it. Maybe the thought of losing the mill was just another reason I made the promise to the Lord. Years earlier, my third-grade teacher had said that if I wanted to be an artist I would have an easy life. The teacher may have known nothing about commercial art or fine art. But she was so certain that I started looking at advertising and illustration art in Mom’s magazines and studying the Sunday newspaper cartoons. All my classmates thought I was good at creating art. Teachers can have an effect on students. My third-grade teacher had a lasting effect on me, but I do not remember her name!

When there was little or no business during the summer months in the closing post war years, someone had to be at the mill to handle whatever business came in. I was by myself a lot in the mill during the summers and on Saturdays during the school year. Walking quickly and praying around the large wooden columns made the time pass by rapidly. If I was not tired, I would continue walking and praying on the railroad tracks after the mill closed in the evening. I never tired of doing this, though there may have been some daydreaming mixed with my praying! But I always felt that the Lord heard me and that maybe He would answer my prayers even though I did not deserve it.

I never told anyone that I talked to the Lord. I was concerned about what classmates or people in our small town would think. I never told my parents or any family members. Mom and Dad thought I was different because I did not play sports and did not date as I got older. I was generally alone, either sweeping out the dust in the mill or walking around the massive support columns when business was slow. As the feed mill activities lessened, Dad was at the mill less and less. At home in the evening I was always working on developing my commercial art and cartooning skills.

I would walk and pray as I looked for Native American artifacts in the fields of the Eastern Shore. I think the beautiful colors and shapes of the stone Indian artifacts attracted me to them. As I got older, I developed contacts with collectors who had taken trips to Europe and found Stone Age artifacts. I would trade some of my Indian treasures or purchases. Some collectors had Stone Age relics found in Ireland, France, Sweden, and Denmark. The Danish stone ax heads are the most beautiful ax heads I have ever seen. So I not only had the pleasure of walking, talking and praying, but I had an exciting and interesting hobby. This hobby and my studies to be a commercial artist and a syndicated cartoonist kept me to myself a great deal of the time.

As I got older, my life began to revolve around the promise I had made to the Lord. It was a promise I made as a boy, but it was sincere. I never realized it would be impossible. But now I truly know nothing is impossible for God. To further complicate things, after I graduated from law school, I had forgotten the promise. I was going to law school at night and I was advancing rapidly in commercial art, cartooning, advertising art direction, creative design, package design and graphic production. I was doing many things in many graphic art fields during the day and studying law in school at night. I even got married at the same time! Janice and I had