I've been thinking about my other father.
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The first time I saw him he was walking toward me, jaw clenched, his eyes unkind. I was a ten-year-old little boy, and he frightened me.
I was already a gym rat. Months earlier, twelve members of my raucous extended family had moved into the only house on a city block that was not part of the First Presbyterian Church of Hollywood. Early on, I escaped the chaos of home in the sanctuary of this gymnasium that was ten feet from our back gate. I was there each day after school, and back after a fifteen-minute break for dinner and the usual mayhem.
Me, age 14
On this particular weekday afternoon, still sweating from an hour of two-on-two basketball, I was sitting with my friend Chris, an equally sweaty eleven-year-old, on the porch railing at the top of the stairs leading into the gym. As part of the usual cooling-off routine, I turned and spit onto the sidewalk beside the porch, which led past the gym into the church sanctuary. Just as I spit, I saw a strange man rounding the corner at the other end of the walkway. My first thought was, He’s really big. Then I saw his tight jaw and his unkind stare. Something jumped in my stomach. He closed in until he was standing beside the spot where my spit had landed, and spoke the first words he ever said to me: Clean it up, boy. It was not a suggestion.
His name was Jim Ferguson and, as I soon learned, he was the new Youth Director for the huge church. For the next twenty-five years, he had more influence in my life than anyone other than the woman I married. Using the foundation my parents laid, he was the architect of my soul.
His job was to direct programs for the 400 high-schoolers who were a mix of middle- and upper-middle class church-family kids and the working-class kids who were drawn to the church not by our families but by the gymnasium and regular trips in the church bus to just-opened Disneyland and Knott’s Berry Farm. We took an entire Saturday each year to visit the San Diego Zoo, and in the summer we took twice-a-week trips to the beach. We had three-day retreats over New Years and a weeklong conference every summer. I was at every event because he always covered the cost of my participation.
For reasons I’ve never fully understood, Jim took this particular interest in me. Maybe it was because I lived next door to his office and was always wandering around, looking for the next reason not to go home. Early on, he’d invite me to jump into the passenger seat of the station wagon the church provided him, and we’d go on short trips to pick up supplies or, on occasion, longer trips to look at sites for retreats. On one trip to Palm Springs, he drove out into a remote section of the desert, switched seats with me, and taught me to drive. In my late teens, he taught me to drive the church bus full of beach-bound kids.
On every one of these occasions, he talked with me. He turned me on to the Bible, so I bought a chunky King James English version with a leather cover, and by the time I graduated from high school I’d worn the cover off and desecrated its pages with thematic colored pencils and marginal notations. He and Barbara had two daughters, Carol and Sue, but no sons, which made me feel that maybe I was a surrogate. I know now that there are many guys who shared this sense of being special to him, but as a boy I took pride in my constant place by his side.
From his own Victorian upbringing he warned us about the dangers of masturbation, which tied my hands for a decade. When I was seventeen and started dating the fifteen-year-old I’d eventually marry, he often scowled when the two of us held hands during prayer meetings. Though he didn’t alter our behavior he pressed sexual guilt into us as if he were kneading dough.
Late on a weekend night, he’d find a group of us who had broken into the gym after we’d dropped off our dates, and rather than kick us out he’d join the game, in slacks, leather shoes and his undershirt. Even in our twenties, we asked him, in his mid-forties, to join our church-league team. His powerful athlete’s body, first obvious when I looked up from spitting, never seemed diminished.
My High School Basketball Team
By my senior year in high school, I was a leader in the youth group, so he asked me to speak at the church banquet that honored recent Sunday School graduates and their families. I sat next to him at the head table. Throughout the meal, I jotted notes on the white paper table covering, outlining what I’d say to this 300-person gathering. As I remember it, I was charming, funny, and displayed the depth of my spiritual commitment by describing my calling from God to be a minister. The crowd’s applause was loud and long.
Afterward, he took me out for dessert. He ordered his usual late-night snack: a plain donut covered with chili, and I had a hot fudge sundae. As I licked the last of the fudge off my spoon, he lowered his eyes at me – those frightening eyes I first saw when he came around the corner as I was spitting. He leaned in and said in a whisper that felt like a cannon’s roar, Don’t ever do that again. They deserve your best, not some last-minute thoughts you sketch out at the table.
He lingers there, in the back of my mind. I’ve spoken in front of people probably two thousand times since that dessert – sermons, classes, weddings, funerals – and with maybe half a dozen exceptions, I’ve never stood to speak without being prepared. I hear his whisper even as I write: they deserve your best.
He hired me throughout college and seminary to work with him in the Youth Ministry, training me to do what he did, modeling what it means to be a leader, still talking about our common faith and his vision of a responsible Christian life. He was a groomsman when Becky and I married the day before we left for Princeton Seminary, and when I graduated from seminary in 1966, he was among the church elders who laid their hands on me and my friend Ron the night we were ordained in the sanctuary.
I spent my first three years as a pastor in Lawrenceville, New Jersey, and connected with Jim only when we came back to Hollywood for summer vacations. My next job was in San Marino, California, ten miles from Hollywood, but with two children and a demanding work schedule we spoke only occasionally. In retrospect, these years were the transition in his role in my life from mentor to friend, from someone to whom I turned instinctively for guidance to someone I loved indelibly but seldom saw.
In May, 1974, wanting to be sure I was alone, Becky tapped on my office door at the church. When I let her in, her eyes were wet and she said, quietly, “Jim Ferguson died.” He was in his mid-fifties and, typically, he’d been riding on the new bike path at the beach when his heart exploded and he fell, probably dead before he hit the sand. I sat in the back of the sanctuary with Becky and a group of our friends, all of whom he’d helped raise; we cried like grown children who had lost the other father we once needed, still needed. We felt bereft. On occasion, I feel it still.