Almost There

By Elwood McQuaid and Lorna Simcox

Amos Henry was dead set against the church constructing a parsonage. Like the fictional Boss Hogg of Hazzard County, Amos held a lot of power and unnerved a lot of people. But he was no match for the Lord, who performed miracle after miracle to ensure a young pastor and his wife a fit place to live. Building the church parsonage is just one of many inspirational stories the author tells as he relates the mishaps and miracles he encountered while serving God in his very first pastorate in Goodview, Virginia. You’ll travel with Elwood and Maxine McQuaid to America in the 1950s and to the values and lessons that forever shaped the lives and ministry of a young couple that wanted to serve the Lord.

• Language: English
• Publisher: WestBow Press
• Release date: Feb 6, 2023
• ISBN: 9781664290129

Elwood McQuaid

Elwood McQuaid is an award-winning author whose service in Christian ministry spans seven decades. After pastoring churches for 24 years and serving as a conference speaker and editor-at-large for Moody magazine, he was named executive director of The Friends of Israel Gospel Ministry and editor-in-chief of its bimonthly magazine, Israel My Glory, where he served the Lord until he retired. He also hosted The Friends of Israel’s radio broadcast for 25 years and was heard regularly on Jerusalem Post Radio. Elwood has written 17 books, including the popular Zvi: The Miraculous Story of Triumph Over the Holocaust and It Is No Dream about the past and prophetic history of Israel.

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Copyright © 2023 Elwood McQuaid with Lorna Simcox.

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.

This book is a work of nonfiction. 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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Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Getty Images are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Getty Images.

Unless otherwise indicated, all Scripture is taken from the New King James Version, Copyright © 1982 by Thomas Nelson, Inc. Used by permission.

Scripture quotations marked NASB are taken from the (NASB®) New American Standard Bible®, Copyright © 1960, 1971, 1977, 1995, by The Lockman Foundation. Used by permission. All rights reserved. www.lockman.org

ISBN: 978-1-6642-9013-6 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-6642-9014-3 (hc)

ISBN: 978-1-6642-9012-9 (e)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2023901047

WestBow Press rev. date: 02/02/2023

CONTENTS

Dedication

Acknowledgments

Preface

Introduction

Chapter 1 When You’re Sure You’re Lost . . .

Chapter 2 Welcome to Goodview

Chapter 3 Moving In

Chapter 4 Homecoming

Chapter 5 Possum Looking Down at Me

Chapter 6 With the Philosophers on Mars Hill

Chapter 7 There Goes the Parsonage

Chapter 8 Something in the Wind

Chapter 9 Visions of the Grim Reaper

Chapter 10 Goodview’s Answer to the Taj Mahal

Chapter 11 I Think I Will

Chapter 12 Who Was That Masked Man?

Chapter 13 A Bad Day at the Outhouse

Chapter 14 In Pursuit of Houdini

Chapter 15 Mom

Chapter 16 Call Doctor Sam

Chapter 17 The Ballad of Oink McGhee

Chapter 18 The World Pays a Visit

Chapter 19 Changing Places

Chapter 20 Saying Goodbye

Chapter 21 Maxine

Epilogue

DEDICATION

For my children, who prompted me to relive our days among a wonderful people in a place and time now lost, but never to be forgotten.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book, compiled over four decades, draws from countless sources and a host of people without whom it never could have been written. My children—Tom, Andy, Melissa, and Jason—are at the top of the list, particularly Melissa (Missy), who worked tirelessly to bring this work to fruition. Their intermittent reminders, at times bordering on badgering, kept the project from remaining a promise rather than a reality.

Lorna Simcox, who has flawlessly edited everything I have written over the past several decades, was an incomparable contributor in every aspect of the making of Almost There. Her advice, editing, and contributions to the content of the story greatly assisted in making the book what it is. I know the enjoyment our readers discover within these pages will please her as much as it will please me.

I also am indebted to Laura Moak James, owner of Studio 2.10, Art Studio and Gallery in Lubbock, Texas, who contributed the original artwork for the cover of this book. For those wishing to make comments or inquiries regarding her services, Laura can be contacted at [e-mail].

To the multiple people and institutions that have taken time to search files and musty archives for photos and information, I offer a hearty thank you. Your efforts have enriched the story immensely.

I can’t leave without a word for the people who will ever remain more than a story for me. Writing about you has brought me joy, and having you touch my life endures as a treasure.

Elwood McQuaid

PREFACE

The book you have in hand is about a grand passage. Not one measured by calendar years or academic proficiency, but one crafted by a stage in life that instills values and defines futures. It was a passage that transitioned my wife and me from what one might call our student, theoretical phase into one of real-world application.

For Maxine (for seventy years she embodied the better half of our marriage in myriad ways) and me, it was the segment of time we spent pastoring a small, rural church in Goodview, Virginia. Fresh out of university, we already had located from Michigan to the Old Dominion at the invitation of friend and classmate, Mason Cooper. Mason touted the opportunities for ministry in his home state, and his appraisal proved accurate.

Looking back at our time in Goodview today, seventy years later, I see how that once-idyllic place focused and fashioned every essential aspect of our service for Christ for the rest of our lives. And that experience is what turns this story—sketched through a host of diverse characters and vibrant situations often tinted with wisdom and humor—into a significant pattern for life.

Our story reflects life in rural America as it was in the early 1950s. And though it follows our initiation into a lifetime of Christian ministry, it also streams beyond that element into the irredeemable alteration of America. This story represents the final page in the era of a nation of cast-off immigrants who built a country by hand and heart, fueled by the determination to make a better life in a free land for themselves and their children.

Their legacy ushered in the spectacular, industrial, mind-stunning technology that led to a new age. For the most part, these people are gone now, but they must never be forgotten. Perhaps, in some small way, a return to Goodview might help us remember them and the enormous contributions they made to this nation.

For reasons that soon will become obvious, I’ve changed some names and places and given pseudonyms to individuals where appropriate. However, the events are accurate, apart from the occasional embellishment an author uses to keep the narrative flowing and the readers engaged, as I hope you will be as you travel with me back to Goodview, Virginia, and to small-town America as it once was.

Elwood McQuaid

2022

INTRODUCTION

Like so much of what we cherish in life, the small hamlet tucked amid the rolling hills of rural Virginia that I write about in this book no longer exists. Goodview is still on the map, but virtually all the people I knew there more than a half century ago have packed up and gone. No longer do women with sun-leathered faces look out from their big-brimmed poke bonnets while bending over long rows of beans and collards. And you’ll search in vain for men in bib overalls and high-cut brogans sauntering down the dusty lanes toting hoes or axes on their shoulders. Some of them now reside in heaven; others have slid off in the other direction.

The few still living have moved away, opting for Roanoke or similar places with strip malls and fast food. Some vaguely remember the old days and what their little community was like so long ago. Others, however, can’t remember much of anything anymore.

I’ve decided to take a look back. If you care to, you can come along. We won’t catch the local train and rumble into town with the morning newspapers and sundries, as so many folks once did. You can’t do that anymore. The puffing steam engines have been replaced by growling diesels with their annoying imitations of steam whistles. Scattered railroad museums still display a few remnants of the iron horses that carried America to greatness; but seeing things in a museum is not the same either.

Nothing can compare to standing by the track when an old steel behemoth rattled by, wheezing and belching great plumes of gray smoke as it emerged from the soot-blackened tunnel at the far end of town. That experience was an exhilarating form of entertainment in the pre-television era. And the shrill dirge from the whistle of a train waiting on the siding for another train to pass excited the imaginations of children bedded down for the night.

I’m hoping these pages will transport you to Goodview as it was in the 1950s. The world then was a different place, one as foreign to people today as the horse and buggy or baggy BVDs (men’s underwear). Steep hills and intimidating, winding dirt roads no longer isolate the area from the rest of the world, as they did then. Social media, instant mass communication, ribbons of rut-leveling blacktop, and cars in every garage changed the landscape.

Perhaps that is why the Goodviews of bygone America intrigue me so. The people there were originals. They didn’t imitate media influencers, who have done so much to change the fabric of contemporary culture. Many were rough types, to be sure; and others were Garden Clubbers or members of the secretive Masonic Lodge and fancied themselves a cut above the rest. But most epitomized a quality of life and stability of values that have all but vanished.

Goodview blended lightheartedness with common sense, dedication, and hard work to produce an environment imbued with a sense of spirituality that still speaks to the need in each of us today. In his best-selling book, The Greatest Generation, journalist Tom Brokaw made the case for the invaluable contribution made by Americans who came of age during the Great Depression and World War II. I believe he was correct. These people left an indelible imprint on our history that will never be erased or duplicated. These are the people about whom I write—the generation I miss more and more as time passes.

So come with me to Goodview, Virginia, and the values, virtues, and good life it exemplified.

CHAPTER ONE

When You’re Sure You’re Lost . . .

The pastor’s instructions were specific. Take [State Route] 24 out of Vinton and travel about 20 miles until you see an Esso station on the right. That will get you into Chamblissburg. Turn right there and take the road over the mountain. I can’t tell you exactly how many miles it will be until you get to Goodview. But I can tell you this: Because of the way the road twists and turns, it will seem a lot farther than it is if you were doing it in a straight line.

Then with a wry smile, he added, Just when you’re sure you’re lost, you’re almost there.

It wouldn’t be long before we discovered the reason for his smile. The pastor was Elbert Yeatts. His base for ministry: Colonial Baptist Church in Blue Ridge, Virginia. Substantial in size and influence, it bore the distinction of being the foremost, almost-unaffiliated Baptist congregation in the region. By almost unaffiliated I mean it managed to remain independent from the ubiquitous Southern Baptist Convention to which it would belong until 1962 and whose denominational tentacles stretched clear across the southern part of the United States.

And though unaffiliated churches boasted no formal bishop guides, ecclesiastical oversight committees, or commissions, they still honored pastors who had earned some status and respect for being faithful to the gospel, for shepherding their congregants with compassion, and for helping and counseling other churches. In addition to these attributes, Colonial’s pastor possessed a keen disposition for assisting young men entering Christian service. He offered them counsel, education, and opportunities to minister throughout the area.

Thus came our invitation to become a candidate to fill the pulpit of the Goodview Baptist Church. Our futures lay gloriously ahead of us on that pleasant spring day in 1953 as we swung onto the washboard-like gravel road that would deliver us to Goodview, Virginia. For my wife, Maxine, and me, fresh out of university and eager to test my wings, the trip was high adventure.

We lived in Roanoke, Virginia, but were both from the Midwest—flat country. I came from Michigan, where some folks looked at anything South of Toledo, Ohio, as the Deep South. Maxine came from Sumner, Illinois, a small town just beyond the Wabash River near Vincennes, Indiana. In the Midwest, roads were straight.