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 The last half of the 1960s were a pivotal time, both for society in general as well as for the Watchtower Society (WTS) and Jehovah’s Witnesses (JWs) in particular. The cultural tumult in music, literature and art was a huge draw for me, while at the same time I was pulled in the other direction by the strict tenets of the Witnesses and the excitement generated by a WTS teaching of the time that 6,000 years of human existence was going to be completed in the fall of 1975.
I’ll get back to that amazing teaching in a few paragraphs, but first I want to explain the secular interests that drew me in, as I think they laid the seed that germinated eventually in my leaving the Witnesses and religion completely decades later.
A handful of things stand out. The first was when my grandfather came and lived with us for a few months. As with most schools at the time, my grade school at the beginning of the year had a magazine subscription drive as a fund raiser. I don’t remember how old I was, but for some reason, when my grandfather offered to buy a couple of subscriptions for me as a present, I chose Boy’s Life and The Saturday Review of Literature. The first one might be obvious for a pre-teen, and fed what would become my lifelong fascination with wilderness, woods craft and native peoples. The second was a weekly magazine of arts, literature, theater, music and culture, which also included a chess column, if I remember correctly - hardly the reading of a typical 12 year old.
Yet, I devoured those magazines from cover to cover and kept copies of them for decades. They introduced me to a world that, in pre-Internet days and with very limited reception of only two television stations, an isolated kid in the hills of Vermont was unlikely to hear about otherwise. They also piqued my interest in chess, which would be a passion for many years.
Then in eighth grade, a close friend, Kenny Watson, a classmate who would go on to private schools and a career as an English professor, gave me a copy of James Ramsey Ullman’s The Day on Fire, a fictionalized version of poet Arthur Rimbaud’s life. Around this same time I discovered, in the attic of the huge old farmhouse we lived in, a bunch of books that included Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead. Again, not typical reading for a 12 or 13 year old, but I instantly knew that these books were something special. I devoured them and began my lifelong love of words and writing and literature. The artist’s life, being a Bohemian intellectual, was a huge, romanticized draw for me, one I would see played out again and again in the Beat and rock eras..
This intellectual thirst began in grade school, and was fed when I got to high school. I was a good student, and when we had our eighth grade graduation, I took top honors for my small - very small - graduating class. It would be the only trophy I would win in my school career, and the dance after the graduation would be the only school dance I would ever attend. Jehovah’s Witnesses are strongly discouraged from any socializing with schoolmates outside of attending classes. The scripture at 1 Corinthians 15:33 is known by heart by all JWs,"Do not be misled. Bad associations spoil useful habits." Any association with non-Witnesses is considered a bad association.
That also carried over into sports, backed by Paul’s counsel to young Timothy at 1 Timothy 4:8, "For bodily training is beneficial for a little; but godly devotion is beneficial for all things," which all of us also knew by heart. So though I’d always been athletic, did well in all of the sports we had in gym class and could easily rip off over 100 pushups, I was never able to play school sports.
By the time I was in high school, there was this odd convergence of influences, secular and religious, and I found myself pulled in opposite directions often. Around this time a Special Pioneer couple, Ray and Eunice Spatz, moved into our congregation to help out. Ray had served at Bethel, and he and Eunice were a bright, very nice couple who showed a lot of interest in me. Eunice had a younger brother, Tom Geriak, who was a year older than me, and he and I hit it off. I think it was Tom, who lived in Connecticut, who introduced me to such diverse writers as Edward Abbey, Eldridge Cleaver and up-and-coming new journalism giant Tom Wolfe. I’d begun to learn to play guitar, and Tom was a bass player. We eventually formed a garage band, literally in his garage, and played a Witness dance or two. Ray and Eunice would eventually return to serve at Bethel, Eunice as one of the WTS’s artists, and Ray as head of the Braille Department. They would learn to speak Italian and serve the Italian congregations and conventions. They remain at Bethel today.
There were a couple of other strong influences during those high school years as well. In grade school, as a class assignment, I wrote my first short story, and discovered my love of writing. I knew at that point that if I could do one thing with my life, becoming a writer would be it. In high school I pursued that desire to write, encouraged by a couple of my English teachers, Linda Felch and John McAulliffe, who saw some potential in me. They also informed me that I had an IQ in the top two percentile and strongly encouraged me to pursue a higher education. Linda introduced me to the writings of Sir Thomas de Quincy and Ray Bradbury, and I would later discover that for two decades she would use copies of my class assignments with her current students. Several of her students went on to become professional writers, including myself. When she passed away in her mid-50s, I was one of several writers she had influenced who was asked to speak at her funeral. I thought how ironic it was that my very first public speaking that I did after leaving the Witnesses, where I had given hundreds, if not thousands, of talks, was as an atheist in the United Church during an old friend’s memorial service!
Around my junior year, I began to write about music and school activities for the school newspaper. I’m not sure if my parents knew much about that, or what they thought of it, but I was growing more independent and doing more things on my own. My family had long before this splintered. My two oldest sisters had gone to live with other relatives amidst allegations of abuse against my step-father, which my mother and two other sisters have in recent years verified. Though my younger sister would also be baptized as a Witness at a very young age, she would leave the Witnesses shortly after that, and none of my siblings ever remained a Witness, except me. My mother and step-father divorced in the early 1970. He was disfellowshipped, and shortly after so was my mother. She attended another church for a few years, and eventually was reinstated as a Witness. She remains one to this day, at 86.
My very first published writing was a review for the school paper of the first album released by the Chicago Transit Authority, a horn-driven rock group with an amazing guitarist named Terry Kath that would go on to become simply Chicago. The head custodian at my school was a man named Dan Brown, a single gentleman of indeterminate old age who was also a practicing poet in the Beat tradition and a Buddhist. He was a gravelly voiced man with close-cropped white hair, a ready laugh that crinkled the corners of his eyes, and a penchant for fine scotch and cigars.
Dan, likely well into his 70s at the time, introduced himself to me one day in the school library, commenting on how much he liked my writing in the school paper. We became friends, and he began to pass on to me his copies of The Village Voice with the admonition, "If you get caught with these, don’t tell your parents you got them from me." Thus opened yet another avenue into modern culture. Dan also introduced me to the writings of Alan Watts, the former Christian priest who became one of the great Western interpreters of Buddhism, as well as to Trappist monk Thomas Merton. Watts would lead me back to the Beat poets and a lifelong interest in Eastern philosophy. Merton would direct me to the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh, to the Christian mystics and to a much deeper consideration of what constitutes spirituality than I would ever get from the Witnesses. Somewhere in there I also was exposed to the work of Aldous Huxley, and became an avid reader and collector of his writings, a collection I have til today.
So my last couple of years of high school were spent dealing with the pull and tug of my diverse interests. Playing and writing music, fiction and non-fiction writing, reading and all along trying to be as good a Witness as possible. With my JW buddies we’d talk about all of this, and I can remember how they’d point out that you really couldn’t be a good Witness and still try to pursue a career as a musician or a writer or an artist. And essentially, that was true. Being a good Witness demanded a huge amount of time, and a separation from non-Witnesses and non-Witness interests, as well as avoiding any temptations to do things that the Witnesses considered sinful or wrong.
There were five, hour-long Witness meetings to attend every week, which with travel and getting ready, easily took twice that amount of time. Then you were expected to spend several hours each week going house to house preaching and placing WTS literature, and several more hours studying and preparing for the meetings and any parts you might have on them. Being a Witness was a way of life. As one of my friends put it, being a Jehovah’s Witness, unlike many religions, is like being a part of a culture, or perhaps more accurately, it is like being a member of a tribe, and thus has a huge appeal to our basic tribal instincts and need to belong. The tribe takes on a life of its own, more important than the lives of the individual members.
That is exactly what being a Jehovah’s Witness is like.
For myself, there was also the fact that when I was 15, I began to be interested in a pretty young Witness girl, Wendy Chamberlin from the Keene, NH congregation, who was 13 at the time. By the time she was 15 and I was 17, we’d decided we wanted to get married. So, despite an interest in a girl I was going to high school with, at 17 I decided Wendy and the Witnesses was the route I was going to go. Early courtships and young marriages, often while still in their teens, are common among the Witnesses.
There were two other overriding factors at that time that were key to my decisions. First, the WTS strongly discouraged higher education, considering it a spiritual danger due to the bad association and the "worldly knowledge" that so often contradicted what the Bible said and thus undermined faith in the Bible. College was also considered a waste of time because there was tremendous emphasis then that 1975 was the end of 6,000 years since Adam was created, and therefore was likely to be the year that Jehovah God would bring the end of this wicked old system of things by means of the Battle of Armageddon and the establishment of the Kingdom of God over the Earth.
How the WTS, and in particular its pre-eminent theologian of the last half of the 20th Century, Fred Franz, vice president and eventual president of the Society, came up with that date, will have to be the subject of another article, but suffice it to say, "Stay Alive til ‘75" was a common sentiment heard in the late 60s and early 70s. The WTS’s literature often spoke of people selling their belongings in order to Pioneer through the "last few months" of this old system. In 1969, the WTS’s Watchtower magazine had this to say about higher education. I was a high school senior at the time, and considering what I should do with my future:
"Many schools now have student counselors who encourage one to pursue higher education after high school, to pursue a career with a future in this system of things. Do not be influenced by them. Do not let them brainwash you with the Devils propaganda to get ahead, to make something of yourself in this world. This world has very little time left....make pioneer service, the full-time ministry, with the possibility of Bethel or missionary service your goal." (Watchtower, March 15, 1969, p. 171)
And then there was this: "In view of the short time left, a decision to pursue a career in this system of things is not only unwise but extremely dangerous....Many young brothers and sisters were offered scholarship or employment that promised fine pay. However, they turned them down and put spiritual interests first." (Kingdom Ministry, June 1969, p. 3)
When you’re 17, a strong believer, and those you trust tell you that it is the "Devil’s propaganda" when school counselors encourage you to go to college, and they tell you it’s merely a matter of months before this old system is destroyed - well, you can perhaps imagine why I chose skip college, Pioneer as a Witness and stick with my future Witness wife, whom I loved very much. But I would never be able to unlearn all that I had read and come to understand during those teen years, and that seed of exposure to other ways of thinking, other ways of understanding the world, would stay with me and eventually save me.
RFS
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