Lessons of My Father

By Edmund V. Bullock Sr.

Lessons of My Father is a small tribute to a great man. A memoir, it is a collection of the lessons Edmund Bullock learned from his father as he stayed close to himin work, in play, and in worshipfor fifty years. Written in a smooth, easy, conversational style of the writers favorite author, the iconic historian David McCullough, the book chronicles much of the life of George Bullock, Sr., the youngest of twenty-seven children growing up in the Jim Crow South, and the years that followed as he raised fourteen children of his own in the inner city of Boston, Massachusetts. In a lyrical voice, the author describes in entertaining detail what it was like to be the son of George Bullock, a larger-than-life loving father, firm disciplinarian, dynamic preacher of the Gospel, faithful friend, gifted musician, and committed church member. In humorous anecdotes, Edmund Bullock shares a little family history, as well as a bit of his own story. This is a compelling and moving tribute, a candid documentary. You will laugh and cry, and be amazed at the magnitude of this great man, small in stature, whose life has touched thousands and continues to do so.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Aug 21, 2015
• ISBN: 9781512709551

Edmund V. Bullock Sr.

Edmund Bullock was born in Boston, Massachusetts. He began singing at four years old. He is on the ministerial staff at the Mt. Calvary Baptist Church in Boston. Edmund holds a bachelors degree in business and is currently studying for a Juris Doctor at New England Law—Boston. He is married to Gisela Morgan-Bullock. They live in Boston.

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Copyright © 2015 Edmund V. Bullock, Sr.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Scripture taken from the King James Version of the Bible.

Scripture taken from the Holy Bible, NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by Biblica, Inc. All rights reserved worldwide. Used by permission. NEW INTERNATIONAL VERSION® and NIV® are registered trademarks of Biblica, Inc. Use of either trademark for the offering of goods or services requires the prior written consent of Biblica US, Inc.

This book is a work of non-fiction. Unless otherwise noted, the author and the publisher make no explicit guarantees as to the accuracy of the information contained in this book and in some cases, names of people and places have been altered to protect their privacy.

WestBow Press

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Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

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ISBN: 978-1-5127-0954-4 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5127-0956-8 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-5127-0955-1 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015913621

WestBow Press rev. date: 10/2/2015

Contents

Acknowledgements and Thanks

Foreword

Author’s Disclaimer

Preface

Introduction

Lesson 1: Daddy Taught Me How to Sing

Lesson 2: Do It Right or Not A’tall

Lesson 3: Don’t Let Others Define You

Lesson 4: Maybe You’ve Been Fishing on the Wrong Side of the Boat

Lesson 5: Search the Scriptures

Lesson 6: Stay Curious

Lesson 7: Rejoice!

Lesson 8: Thou Shalt Love the Lord Thy God with All Thy Heart, and With All Thy Soul, and With All Thy Strength, and With All Thy Mind

Lesson 9: You Can Make It

Lesson 10: Walk

Lesson 11: Don’t Waste Time

Lesson 12: Use What You Have

Lesson 13: Keep Your Word

Lesson 14: Laugh

Lesson 15: Wait

Lesson 16: Ministry

Lesson 17: Be the Head of Your Home

Lesson 18: Fight!

Lesson 19: Daddy Taught Me to Sing the Blues

Lesson 20: Don’t Follow Trends

Lesson 21: Daddy Taught Me to Tie a Necktie

Lesson 22: Lead

Lesson 23: Watch Your Weight

The Impact of Daddy’s Songs

Daddy Speaks for Himself

Afterword

Epilogue

A Life in Pictures

For my eldest son, Edmund Vincent Bullock, Jr.,

for my grandchildren,

and for my siblings.

To Gisela, my love.

Acknowledgements and Thanks

I could not have written this book without the guidance of the Holy Spirit.

My daughter, Geneva Bullock Johnson, read every chapter of this book in its many versions over and over and gave me valuable feedback for which I am grateful.

Gretchen Keene, publishing consultant,

Tim Fitch, project coordinator,

and the entire team at Westbow Press,

Thank you for working to make Lessons of My Father all that I had hoped it would be.

Foreword

Edmund Bullock has captured well the humble beauty of his dad—a very strong and gifted Christian leader—and has beautifully described how his dad’s life dramatically affected his own. God brought George Bullock into my life at the critical time when my wife Judy and I were just beginning our ministry in Boston fifty years ago. Because of George’s early discipleship of me, I have been able to enjoy a highly productive ministry in Boston. George affected many Christian leaders in our city, whose lives and work in turn helped to nurture the extensive development of Boston’s Quiet Revival, which has lasted during the entire extent of George’s and my ministries, and has produced a growth of Christianity that has continued for the past five decades.

George Bullock is a larger-than-life, yet invisible, leader. He never extols himself, but nonetheless exudes strength, discipline, spiritual vitality, enormous musical gifts and a life that contagiously affects all those who truly observe how he lives and ministers. One learns best from George by observing him, and this is what Edmund has so beautifully done in this book. He has observed the truth of God lived out in his dad’s life in a multitude of ways. When people observe George, they see not just a great leader, but a person who reflects Christ in life’s everyday activities. They see a life well-lived that instructs us all on the importance of walking with God during every moment, because we never know when our lives are significantly affecting others.

When George Bullock sings I sense three hundred years of the black experience. I feel privileged as a white man to have been asked to write this foreword and participate with George’s own son in describing one of the great leaders in Boston’s African-American community.

Douglas A. Hall, DD, President Emeritus

Emmanuel Gospel Center

Boston, Massachusetts

Photograph1PastorGeorge.jpg

Author’s Disclaimer

I wrote this book entirely from memory based on my own experiences with the persons herein named. The source material was primarily conversations that I had with my father throughout the years, and secondarily, conversations that I participated in with family members and conversations that I did not participate in but for which I was present. I took the utmost care to ensure the accuracy of all information, but because I wanted this book to be a true representation of my own memories and the lessons I took from them rather than a historical treatise, I did not consult any document or person for information, except as noted below. I also wanted to keep this work a complete secret from my father until its publication, which precluded my asking him any questions (I did manage a few, which, I am sure, must have aroused some suspicion in him).

If I have misrepresented any information included in this book, I apologize to the entire Bullock family and to any other persons or families who might be affected by such misrepresentation. Please be assured that any error contained herein is entirely a mistake of recollection and is in no way intended to alter any facts relative to any occurrences I describe, nor to depict any person named within these pages in any light except which reconciles with the truth.

Notwithstanding the above disclaimer, I consulted Duane M. Bullock of College Park, Pennsylvania, as to his grandfather William Bullock’s city of residence in or about September nineteen eighty-one. My uncle Richard Bullock, Sr., was helpful in confirming certain details that I had already included in the manuscript, but wanted to verify before publication.

Finally, the photographs in this book help to tell its story, therefore I wanted to include quite a lot of them. The vast majority of them, however, were not professionally taken. I rummaged the collections of my father and other family members, and the quality of the photographs they shared was often questionable at best. I did my best to improve them without the help of professional restoration. They were important enough to the book that I felt they must be included nonetheless. I apologize for any lack of clarity and hope that they can be enjoyed regardless.

Edmund V. Bullock, Sr.

May 2015

Photograph2EnglishHighYearbookPhoto.jpg

English High School Yearbook picture, age eighteen, 1953

Preface

This book is a collection of many of the lessons I have learned from my father since at least the age of four. I say many because I am sure I could never recollect them all. This is simply my best effort. My father is very much alive. In fact, he is my pastor and my boss at the church where I am employed. In this treatise I use the word was in referring to his lessons because I am looking backward. This is a memoir and these are the things I learned from my dad through his life. They are what have influenced me for the last fifty years. Daddy might remember himself differently to how I portray him in these pages. If so, it will likely be because he has known himself a lot longer than I have. He knew himself when he was becoming, and overcoming, perhaps overcoming fear, self-doubt, low self-esteem, or any other such human frailty that plagues each of us at one time or another. Daddy will also know, as I cannot, what he hid from all but God during times when he had to speak as David did in Psalms 56.

When I am afraid, I put my trust in You. In God, whose word I praise—in God I trust and am not afraid.

I am sure such times arrived often enough, but I would not, nor would anyone else, have known it because Daddy was not one to make a show of weakness. He was not phony or pretentious, but weakness, for him, was not something to trumpet or parade ostentatiously, or wear as a badge in order to gain sympathy. Weakness, for Daddy, was an enemy that must be acknowledged, yes, but then fought and overcome. Daddy relied on God. He trusted in Him and therefore always emerged safe, sound, and victorious at the other side of whatever threatened.

This book depicts the George Bullock I have known, the diminutive David advancing (never retreating) toward many Goliaths on many occasions through many years with very simple, but very dependable, weaponry. The giant was always well armed and well armored, but that never mattered because Blessed is the [man] whose God is the Lord and who trusts in Him (Jeremiah 17:7 and Psalms 33:12). Daddy was that man.

I wanted to write this book in tribute to my father during his lifetime so he could read it and discover what his example has meant to me, the impact he has had on my life, how he has shaped my character, and what his legacy to me shall be. If he does not recognize himself, I hope he enjoys the view from my perspective. If I can be only half the man he has been, what a man I shall be yet.

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Left: Promoted to 5th grade. Front and back of Daddy’s fourth grade report card and promotion certificate, 1945. Right: Daddy at thirteen, shortly before emigrating to Boston in 1947.

Introduction

About twenty years ago someone caustically asked me, What did you learn from your father? I don’t know what the asker expected me to say. The person neither respected my father nor me, but I thought seriously about the question just the same and I realized I had learned quite a lot: important lessons that would carry me through this life with success and into the next with eternal joy. But, I also realized that my father never taught me lessons specifically. He did not use the term teaching moment as is popular today, but he taught me in the most significant and relevant school room: our immediate environment, through the most powerful of methods: example.

My dad taught me everything I know by simply being. He demonstrated to me everything he wanted me to do, know, and understand. Through his practical lessons he showed me how to be a man of the people, humble, larger than life, able to sit comfortably among kings and schmooze with the simplest, most ordinary person on the street. Daddy taught me dignity, fun, class, how to laugh at myself and have a self-respect that commanded the respect of others. He taught me to learn from my mistakes, to be still, quiet, boisterous, loud, comical, casual, formal, distant, and close to others. Daddy taught me to love and revere, to fear and to be fearless. He taught me timidity and anger, strength, understanding and wisdom. He taught me to be sensible, to be holy, and upright.

Daddy taught me to ask questions and give answers, to bellow and whisper, to talk, to listen, to walk and to run, to give, to accept and to grow. Daddy taught me to work, play, how to drive a car, and to be driven from within. He taught me to be assertive and to acquiesce; to lead and to follow; to move quickly and to be patient; to gain, to share, to hold closely, and to let go. Daddy showed me when to smile. He taught me to be brave, and to hope. He taught me to look forward, and backward, enjoying the past. Daddy showed me the value of nostalgia, and the cost of regret. He taught me to grasp and never let go, and what to reach for. He taught me to learn all I can, and to never shortchange myself or cheat others. Daddy taught me how to live.

And he taught me to be a man and nothing less.

Lesson One

Daddy Taught Me How to Sing

My daddy was born in nineteen thirty-four, the last of an astonishing succession of children (twenty-seven of them) belonging to one man who married twice. At least as far back as my grandfather, Singing Walter Bullock, the Bullocks have predominantly been singers and preachers. Apparently Walter Bullock was widely known for his singing around North Carolina, where the family was reared. He had a powerful, gravelly voice, and was a tall and statuesque man of medium brown complexion. Bald at a young age, he was handsome, strong, vigorous, with a forceful personality, but of few words. My grandfather was a black sharecropper in the Jim Crow South. He worked hard all his life until his retirement and emigration to Boston, Massachusetts, in nineteen forty-seven. By then, most of his many sons and daughters had married, moved away and established their own lives in other cities, and parts of the country. It was time for Singing Walter to leave the farm too, and the South. Life had not been easy.

Not an awful lot is known of this man or his life in the early years. Perhaps much more could be learned by diligent research, but none has been done so far, so most of what is known has been passed down through oral history, with some context clues. Everything I know, and relate here, I learned at my father’s knee and his side from his stories and reflections, and to a lesser degree, those of his siblings. One thing is sure, Daddy loved his father immensely. He talked of him incessantly, of how big he was, how hard, how tough, how strong, how well-respected, of his singing, of how he worked his land, raising tobacco, and how he worked his children, particularly his boys. Daddy told me of the cold, cold mornings when Papa would set out for the woods before first light to cut wood with his three youngest sons in tow. Freezing, his boys would timidly ask, Pa, can we make a fire? Get some fire out of the axe handle, would be his father’s blunt reply. Sometimes they would take fire along in a bucket. Daddy relived his youth over and over again through the stories and anecdotes he told. When he talked of his father, he would get a faraway look in his eyes and a wistful tone in his voice. All of Walter Bullock’s children revered him. Any time I was in the company of any number of Daddy’s siblings, the conversation would invariably drift to stories of Papa sooner or later, and all of his children would adopt that same faraway look and elegiac tone, as though they were seeing him all over again—and missing him terribly. I could hear the respect and high esteem in which they held him just in the way they all said the word Papa.

My grandfather was born around eighteen-seventy, most likely in North Carolina. He appears to have had some white siblings, but how many, or even how many siblings he had in all, is beyond my scope of knowledge, and is perhaps lost to history, at least to oral history. In nineteen eighty-seven, in Virginia, while traveling with Daddy, I met a silver-haired, blue-eyed, apparently Caucasian woman who said she was kin to us. We learned that she was Daddy’s cousin, the daughter of one of his father’s white brothers. A typical Bullock, like the aunts I had known growing up, she was a feisty woman with a loud and ready laugh, who loved good gospel singing and preaching.

Family lore has it that my grandfather owned land at or around the turn of the twentieth century, not all that common for this son of slaves, whose older black siblings were likely slaves, and who only escaped being born a slave himself by five years. (Daddy did tell me of two of his father’s sisters that the family knew well, Cora and Agnes, called Sis Aggie by all. I have no knowledge of whether or not they were older or younger than my grandfather, and if older, whether or not they would have been old enough to have been born into slavery.) Again, absent any serious research, no one seems to know how he came to be a land owner or what became of his land. In the only known photograph of him in his relative youth, taken around nineteen hundred when he would have been about thirty years old, he is handsome and nattily dressed in a high, starched collar, with a firm gaze and the slightest hint of smile. Pictured with him are his first three sons, Percy, William, and Samuel, all as well-dressed as their father, the youngest still in an infant’s gown. My grandfather’s first wife, Sarah Bullock (probably a cousin some number removed), bore sixteen children and died in childbirth. Grandpa’s second wife, Viola Hawkins, was the mother of eleven. By the time the second family came along, the older, half siblings were adults, the land was gone, and the family was very poor. Some days there was barely anything to eat at all. Daddy remembers that he and his brothers were forbidden to parch corn, a process similar to popping corn, but not allowing the kernels to reach temperatures hot enough to burst open. The result was roasted corn kernels, which Daddy describes as delicious. Perhaps Grandpa thought it a waste of grain, but for whatever the reason they were not allowed to have it. Daddy would know that there was absolutely nothing for the family to eat when Grandpa would come out to his brothers and him and say, You boys go parch you some corn.

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Not an awful lot is known of this man or his life in the early years.

Right: ‘Singing Walter’ Bullock, about age thirty, c. 1903. Upper left: Received of Walter Bullock for full payment of his 1928 taxes. Lower left: Walter Bullock with four of his daughters from his first wife. Left to right: Gladys, Kezia (Kizzie), Sarah (called Sis Lonie), and Maude.

My grandfather loved church, he loved to travel, and he loved to sing. That combination produced a family of church-going, Bible-believing gospel singers and preachers that would endure until the present day and is likely to continue for a very long time. (Just yesterday my own son sent me a recording of his three-year-old son singing a composition of his own with completely unintelligible lyrics.) My grandfather taught his children to sing, and the older siblings in turn taught the younger ones. One of Daddy’s sisters, Caroline, taught Daddy and his two older brothers three-part harmony. Daddy was five years old at the time. Walter Bullock’s children traveled with him to churches in and around Burchett, in Warren County (now Warrenton), North Carolina, where the family lived. Their home church was Burchett Chapel, which I had the great fortune to