What a fascinating eighty years of living have been mine! If my life is half as interesting to read about as it has been to live it, this light-hearted sketch will not have been written in vain.

Historians, to be sure, tell us that of the billions of people who have inhabited our planet, only about five thousand have accomplished enough to merit remembrance. I certainly do not belong in that select company, but I hope my career has been interesting and significant enough to make it worthwhile to pass on these memoirs to friends and members of my family.

Genealogy -

To begin with, the Park lineage can be traced as far back as the 6th Century A.D., and we can take modest pride in the fact that a tiny trickle of royal blood, derived from ancient English monarchs, still courses in our veins. This tincture of royalty, however, was derived by marriage from the female side. The direct male ancestry of the Park line is traceable back to Robert Parke of Gestingthorpe, Essex County, England, whose death is recorded in 1400 A.D. The seventh in line - Robert Parke (1580-1665) of Acton County, Suffolk, came to Boston, America on the good ship Arabella, with the Winthrop Fleet in 1630 (acting as Secretary for Governor Winthrop of Connecticut during the voyage.) Robert finally settled in Old Mystic, Connecticut. All the Parks of America trace their origin back to him, and in 1930 a bronze plaque was erected to his memory in the Old Mystic Cemetery, a cemetery now maintained by the Daughters of the American Revolution. My brother, Dr. Wilford E. Park, and his wife, Dr. Evelyn Hartman Park, visited the cemetery in 1961 and took pictures which he has preserved among his detailed and extensive records of the Park family.

The above Robert Parke married Alice Tompson, a widow with three daughters. One of these daughters, named Dorothy, married Robert Parke's son, Thomas (who was born in Hitchim, England in 1616). Dorothy Tompson had inherited a royal lineage through her mother, and it is from a son Robert, born to Dorothy and Thomas, that our descent is traced and our claim to a royal ancestry is made.

Dorothy's line of regal descent - sometimes through kings and queens, sometimes through blood relatives of reigning monarchs, provides us a background of which we can be justly proud. Her lineage is traceable back through eleven British kings to Cerdic, King of the West Saxons (519-534 A.D.). In her direct line of descent we find Egbert. first king of all England (827-836) and Alfred the Great who reigned 871-901, and of whom an historian has written, "No nobler monarch ever sat upon a throne." Through related lines, it is possible to name 69 kings and queens of England, Scotland and France with whom she possessed some blood relationship - for example - Malcolm 1st of Scotland (slayer of Macbeth), the Emperor Charlemagne, and Eleanor of Acquitaine, wife of Louis VII of France and Henry II Plantagenet of England, and mother of two other kings - Richard Lion-hearted, and King John Lochland.

Returning to our direct descent from Thomas (2) and Dorothy Tompson, the Park line is as follows: -

Thomas Parke 2 -	Dorothy Tompson
Robert Parke 3	(born 1650 at New London, Conn.
Hezekiah Parke 4	(born 1695, Preston, Conn.
Silas Parke 5	(born Preston, Conn.
Amos Park 6	(born 1749 - becomes the first Canadian. After becoming a physician in Palmyra, N.Y. state, he came to Canada to Niagara-on-the-Lake in Ontario about 1780.
Halsey Park 7	(born in 1779 in Walpole, Ontario. Died 1848. Buried in Hagersville, Ontario
Philip Bender Park	Born at Lyons Creek, Ontario in 1830. Died 1917. Buried at Cultus, Ontario. He became a farmer at Fair Ground in Houghton township, married Margaret Watson (born 1836, died 1915). Had eight children of whom the youngest was Watson. Two daughters and five sons survived to maturity: Agnes, Ezra, John, Michael, Mary, Will and Watson.
Watson Park 9	(born at Fair Ground, Ontario, Canada on March 12, 1874. Died March 10th, 1956. Buried at Cultus. In 1899 he married Mary Emma Lura Cutler (Nov. 11, 1879-Dec. 31, 1935), the younger daughter of Hugh Edgar Cutler and Mehetabel Edmonds.
Clifford Gordon Park 10	(born February 5, 1900, in Fair Ground, Ontario.
Wilford Edison Park	(born March 27, 1901 in Fair Ground, Ontario.
Montie Harold Park	(born October 13, 1902 in Fair Ground, Ontario. Died Nov. 18, 1983. Buried at Cultus, Ontario.
Leta Gertrude Park (Berkau)	(born August 8, 1904 in Fair Ground, Ontario. Died January 23, 1978. Buried in Utica, Mich. (Detroit)

My Childhood -

Weighing in as a "preemie" of 4-1/2 pounds on February 5th, 1900, I doubt if my birth caused much excitement, even in a hamlet as small as Fair Ground. This obscure little village in the center of Houghton township, Norfolk County, incidentally, had derived its name from the fact that the township fair grounds were situated on the northwest corner of the intersection, where the annual township Fall Fair was held. Township council meetings were held in its town hall. My actual birthplace (as it was also of my brothers and sister) was the home of my grandfather, Philip Bender Park, who must have early moved to his farm a half-mile south of the main corner- perhaps a century and a quarter ago--to begin the task of establishing domicile in a wooded wilderness.

It was my good fortune to be born of sturdy stock. With a paternal grandfather of English heritage, a paternal grandmother of Irish parentage, a maternal grandfather of Pennsylvania Dutch extraction, and a maternal grandmother whose parents were Scottish (whose own mother, my maternal great grandmother) could still speak a bit of Gaelic and survived into my early childhood, I was, nonetheless a true-blue Canadian of the fourth generation, with my roots firmly planted in the soil of this great land where so many blood-streams have intermingled to produce a citizenry worthy to stand beside the best the world provides.

For the first eight years of my life our family lived in the northern half of my grandfather's frame house, located a half-mile south of Fair Ground. Father's elder brother John and his wife Effie and son and daughter Stanley and Vera lived in a more pretentious house on the corner farm just north of us. Stanley and Vera were to be older school mates and play-mates of mine until their removal to Brantford before I was fully grown. But my grandfather's home was a good place to spend one's early childhood. One of my greatest memories is that of looking out my grand- mother's bedroom window watching my father working on the addition which was to make our own family accommodation more adequate. As I think of it now, I realize that our bedrooms were small, but the combined living-dining room in my grandfather's part of the house was very spacious, and the big box stove in the middle of the room had a woodbox behind it which seemed positively huge to a small boy to whom early befell the duty of keeping that woodbox filled. Above this part of the house was a very low attic, a child's haunt of mystery, atrociously hot in summer and inhabited by big black hornets which were, fortunately, too sleepy and apathetic to attack anyone.

In his earlier days, my grandfather must have been something of an athlete. He could do a standing broad jump nine feet backwards, and on one notable occasion, he walked the fifty miles from Walpole to Fair Ground in one day, arriving ahead of the stage coach! But he was not only a man of stamina, but a pioneer of vision and resourcefulness. With five strong growing sons to help him, he cleared his land and planned his homestead wisely - building two good barns and a commodious house and planting two acres of orchard with space for a garden. I remember the well-chosen varieties of fruit trees - apple trees, which included astrachans, talman sweets, russets, greenings, kings and northern spies. And there were other fruits as well: sour red cherries, small blue plums and small peaches - all a tasty treat then, but a far cry from the big luscious varieties we know today. In season also, the garden produced black and red currants, strawberries, red and black raspberries and long black thimbleberries. I can see the thimbleberry patch yet - down beside the outdoor privy, beyond the little smoke house where hams and bacon sides were cured, and the old fire-place where my grandmother made soft soap from fats and the lye she leached from ashes. Nearer the house stood the outside cellar, the soft water cistern and the well at the back door, from which water always pure and cold could be enjoyed by anyone energetic enough to operate the pump handle. And never far away was the woodpile and its axe from which wood for the kitchen cook stove or the living room box-stove could be secured as required. Out front on the roadside stood two huge balm-of-gilead trees, redolent with the healthy odour that distinguishes their species. Across the road the little creek wound its way through a neighbour's swamp, down to the old swimming hole which we boys had created by damming up the creek, and in which we learned to swim the dog-paddle without instruction. From that swamp on warm summer evenings, the frogs would lift their voices to rival the birds in a chorus of nature that was always music to our ears.

In spite of the usual childhood diseases, we had a healthy and certainly a happy childhood. I remember how ecstatic I was as a tiny lad on Christmas morning to find that Santa Claus had left a handful of nuts and hard candies in my stocking, an orange, a top, and a whistle, as my share of his Christmas largess. We children were up early before the wood stove was alight, and our bare feet chilled on the linoleum floor - but that in no way detracted from the thrill of our Christmas morning, nor dulled our parent's delight in our happiness. I never had any sense of economic deprivation as a child.

Indeed I shall never feel so economically well-to-do as I did as a little lad of six or seven, when my father brought home to live with us an English girl from the Barnardo (?) Homes. They arrived after the usual evening meal, and mother gave her bread and milk for supper. I remember how my heart swelled with pride as I reflected how wonderful it must be to enjoy our plentiful and delicious bread and milk after the Spartan diet I assumed she had had to endure at the Home. (I still like bread and milk, especially if I am a bit under the weather.)

Actually we were not quite as well-to-do as I assumed. My grandmother found it necessary to dry apples each winter on a big screen over the kitchen stove to earn some extra cash for the store. How else could she have secured the sugar and flour for the delectable cookies which established her as a small boy's favourite grandma? President Roosevelt in one of his fireside chats, declared that "the people of America were one-third ill-housed, ill-clothed, and ill-fed." Some wag commented that "this country was founded by people who were ill-housed, ill-clad and ill-fed, and didn't know it!" To a considerable degree that applied to us, even though we ranked as one of the more affluent families. With our poorly insulated wooden houses, our wood stoves and coal oil lamps, lacking both a basement and inside plumbing, we were by today's standards, ill-housed. And we had little to spend on clothes. Even at 19 years of age when I started to Albert College to train for the Christian ministry, I had only one suit and its sleeves had already started to fray and my mother had to turn in the edges of the cuffs to hide the worn spots. But we were never ill-fed, for we were active farmers producing the bulk of our own food in our own fields and gardens. For many years my father grew six or eight acres of potatoes a year - (How skillful I became in hoeing out the weeds and picking off the potato bugs with pail and paddle!) We butchered our own hogs and milked our own cows, sending the milk to the local cheese factory, shepherded our own sheep, had enough chickens and hens to keep us in eggs, and some geese and turkeys to provide a special treat for Christmas and Thanksgiving. In winter we felt no hardship to breakfast regularly on buckwheat pancakes along with fried ham or bacon, and maple syrup to top off the final helping.

Besides, food prices were unbelievably low. In 1908 the Cutlers moved to a new cement block house a stone's throw west, beside the little white Methodist Church, and my father and mother took over from them the rambling old country hotel which stood on the south-west corner of the intersection in order to board the workmen employed at the new sawmill which had been erected a quarter mile east on my uncle John's property. During that period, one butcher offered Dad all the hind-quarter beef he could use at a standard price of eight cents a pound!

But I count it part of my good fortune to have been born and reared on the farm. Not that I do not recall some anxious moments from my early childhood. For instance, there was that time I waded across the neighbouring creek when it was swollen with the melting snows of Springtime, and promptly came down with a bad case of croup. A neighbouring woman (Mrs. Mel Williams) came to sit out the night with me and administer hourly a concoction which didn't taste bad at all - anyway, I was better the next morning. Only years later did I learn the medicine was a mixture of honey and urine! At least it was harmless, but I won't try to recommend it for anyone suffering from croup today.

And then there was that day Wilford and I undertook to kill a turtle not much bigger than a watch. We found it in the creek and had heard mother say its shell would make a nice ornament, so we decided to cut its head off. After argument, I conceded Wilford the privilege of wielding the axe and he cut off the end of the first finger of my left hand! It didn't hurt much, but it bled profusely, and I pictured myself bleeding to death. I let out a yell that must have been audible a half a mile away. Just then mother was sitting on the throne in the old three-holer beyond the smokehouse. I ran to show her my bleeding hand, but wisely she tried to calm me and emerged to bandage the finger as quickly as she could. I am sure that was one day mother needed no prune juice or epsom salts! Care and Zam-buck ointment healed the wound but that first finger has always been a little shorter than its mate on the other hand.

Of course there were amusing moments too, and Dad seemed to have more than his share of them. But one that tickled us most had to do with his regular Saturday night bath. We were accustomed to heat the bath water in big kettles on the kitchen stove and pour it into the big tin tub Dad had made with a wooden frame for our weekly ablutions. However, we were accustomed to tap the maple trees around the house each Spring and boil down the sap into syrup in the big pots on the stove. This particular night Dad mistook the partially boiled sap for his bath- water and used it for his bath - quite the sweetest bath he ever took, I am sure, and probably unrivaled in anyone else's experience. But maybe not an unfitting external accompaniment for the inner good nature that was so conspicuously his!

It was from the home south of Fair Ground that I started to school at six years of age. I didn't like it and came home at the first recess saying I wasn't going to go. Of course I had to go back, but I remember lying awake one night wishing for the time I would be done with school. Little did I realize then how much I would learn to love school; nor did I dream it would be twenty-one years later that I would finally graduate from theological college and be done with the class room forever.

I did not have to be long at school before I learned to enjoy reading. Having devoured the Henry and Horatio Alger books on our own shelves by ten or eleven years of age, I cast about for something of deeper interest and found it in a book in Aunt Effie's library. It was Robinson Crusoe, and the book proved so fascinating that I stole over to read it for hours at a time without telling anyone at home where I was going. This latter indiscretion led to the only real spanking I can remember my father ever giving me, and punishment did nothing to warp my ego or dampen my enthusiasm for reading, but it did teach me to be more considerate of my responsibility to others.

During the four years Dad and Mother operated the boarding house for about twenty millworkers - until the mill characteristically burned down when the available timber was exhausted - they continued their regular farming and nearly worked them selves to death trying to carry two jobs at once. Meanwhile, I continued to attend the local public school a quarter mile north of our house, and did what I could to help on the farm.

I had done rather well at public school and at twelve years of age I had passed my High School entrance exams - rather young, but then I had a father who had done it all at eleven years of age, and had come first of the twenty-six township students who had written their entrance exams.

But now with the mill gone and the boarders gone as well, and Dad able to give full time to his farming (plus some extra time spent barbering on Saturday nights, and his not too exacting responsibilities as Clerk of the Seventh Division Court of Houghton township), I could be more readily spared. So September 1912 saw me a student in the high school at Vienna, a village eight miles west of Fair Ground. Vienna high school had only about thirty pupils, but excellent teachers, and in three years I had finished high school with what was called a Normal School Entrance Certificate (one language short of matriculation). The high school arrangement had been for me to board in Vienna from Monday noon to Friday noon and return home each weekend. Incredible as it seems now, I was able to get the four nights' accommodation and thirteen meals a week for $2.00 per week, and if I remember correctly, I was paying only $2.50 a week when I finished high school In June, 1915. Inflation was not a significant problem then.

Now it was Wilford's turn to go to Vienna to high school, and when he finished, Montie's turn, then Leta's. So, it turned out that from 1915 to 1918 I was at home again, giving now all my time to working with Dad on the farm. At fifteen I was too young to enlist, and anyway, as a farm boy, I was excused from military service because engagement in agriculture and food production was deemed an essential part of the war effort. In that rural setting, with radio not yet invented, without a daily newspaper, and as far as I know, none of my schoolmates in the Armed Forces, the War did not seem to touch our lives very closely. But I do vividly remember the joy of that memorable November 11th, 1918 when the whistles began to blow to announce that the Armistice had been signed and the war was over. That afternoon my father and I were shingling a new shed in our shirt sleeves, and I doubt if we have had as warm a November 11th since.

My formal education was soon to begin again, but I have never regretted the three and half year interlude in my academic career. I was at home at a time when I was sorely needed. We lived in the corner house but farmed two farms of our own, one a half-mile south and the other a half-mile west, and worked and rented land as well. Our farming was done the hard way, by hand, or by primitive horse-drawn machinery. I had as yet hardly seen a tractor or a milking machine. Corn binders and hay bailers were still a foreign curiosity belonging only to more affluent farmers, and an automobile was still out of the question. We took the cows and the horses (eight of them) down the road to pasture at night, and it was fun to ride one of the horses bare-back, set the dog on the other seven, and go down the road like a charge of cavalry. No wonder pedestrians leaped out of the way as we passed, and I am afraid the look on their faces often betrayed an emotion other than fear. But after getting tossed off on my head by the horse, I was less prepared to ride without bridle.

By chance, not long before Christmas, Dec. 18, 1917, before Wilford finished school, Montie upset a lantern in the straw mow and the whole barn went up in flames. He was lucky to escape from the blazing inferno, and neighbours helped drive the cattle from the shed and lead the horses from their stalls so that only a sow and a colt died in the blaze. I was sorry to have missed the excitement, traumatic though the loss seemed at the moment. But luckily Dad had already contemplated building a new barn and it was now only necessary to hasten the project. Dad and I had already spent two winters cutting off the seven acres of virgin bush at the rear of the west 50, planning to bring home the long straight timbers to be shaped into beams for the new barn, and cutting the others into logs to be taken to the mill to be sawn into lumber for sheeting and siding. Chain saws were not yet in use, and it brought my father and me very close together spending those two winters on the opposite ends of a cross-cut saw.

The third winter, 1917-1918, 1 spent in Brantford working at Adams Wagon factory, and boarding with Aunt Effie, Stanley and Vera (Uncle John having died of cancer in 1916). They moved to Brantford a few years before where Stanley was a motor mechanic and Vera a school teacher.

In the Spring of 1918, 1 returned home to do the farming while Dad and an experienced carpenter worked on preparing the timbers for the barn, shaping them with a broad-axe, and mortising the ends for the raising. The raising was a big event. Neighbours gathered for miles around to lend a hand with ropes and pike-poles and their own strong backs. I was proud to have a part in it. When the frame was in place, I helped with the sheeting and shingling and painting. But never unwilling to engage in a harmless prank, I caught the neighbour's rooster who was too ardently visiting our hens without an invitation, and I painted him a brilliant red from comb to tail. Understandably, the neighbour wasn't too pleased to see his rooster so brilliantly bedecked. He complained - "The hens didn't know him!"

And lest readers might assume I never engaged in any other mischief, I will confess that one Halloween night, after Wilford and I had gone dutifully upstairs to bed, we climbed out our bedroom window, unbeknown to Dad and cut the chain securing a neighbour's gate - which he boasted was prank-proof, and deposited the gate in his own haymow where he found it not too long after. When someone discussed the disappearance of the gate next day, Dad remarked that his boys were innocently in bed. The other said: "Don't be too sure!", but happily nobody pressed the matter any further.

However, the legacy of my years on the farm were both great and positive. My character, my habits, and my outlook on life were shaped and matured by these years in the great outdoors. I learned to enjoy Nature, and feel at home with Nature's God. The fields, the trees, and growing things, the animals, the sun and the rain, and the open sky, the stars and the glory of the sunset made me look beyond the things that are seen to the wisdom and love of their Mighty Maker. As a farmer, dealing every day with the forces at work in our world, I was an existentialist before I had ever heard that word for Sartre's now popular philosophy. But I was a religious existentialist, convinced that behind the seen and heard, and the known, stands invisibly a wise creator and a loving God. Perhaps that is why I have always loved the hymn: -

This is my Father's world, And to my listening ears         All nature sings And round me rings The music of the spheres. In the rustling grass         I hear him pass; He speaks to me everywhere.

I learned too, from years on the farm, that work comes before play, and I think I would have agreed with F. R. Barry who told the students of St. Andrew's University in his rectorial address - "There may be something that is more fun than hard work, but I do not know what it is." Anyway, I had plenty of it. One summer I got up at a quarter to five each morning to fetch the cows and horses from pasture, get the feeding and the milking done, and after a gargantuan breakfast, be ready for the day's work in the fields. The ability to work hard and consistently and do it happily, has stayed with me all my life, and doubtless has been a major secret of my success in life.

My Future Involves a New Departure

Now that Wilford was finished with High School and home again, it was no longer necessary that I remain on the farm, and a decision regarding my future had to be made. That decision, it turned out, was determined by the cumulative factors of my religious development.

Our circle of social fellowships had not been large. Mother's sister Edith had married Stephen McDonald about ten years before, and lived a number of miles away. Their son Hugh and daughter Ruby - now among our best beloved friends - were then too small for companionship. The real centre of our social life was also the centre of our religious life - the little white Methodist Church of Fair Ground. In the religious milieu in which I had been reared, attending Sunday School and Church seemed as natural as eating one's Sunday dinner. I had learned to pray at my mother's knee, and for many years we had daily family devotions, with the reading of the scriptures and personal prayer by members of the family. Much as I liked church, I wouldn't want to give the impression that my conduct was always exemplary. Parents and children often sat side by side in the little church and I remember my father snapping my 'ear severely and saying in a gruff passionate whisper - "I'm ashamed of you!" But I really did love the Church and never questioned that the way of Christ was the only right way to live.

Then on November 2nd, 1915, a significant event in my religious life marked a new milestone in my spiritual development. A Baptist minister by the name of Torrey came to Cultus (three miles east of Fair Ground) to conduct evangelistic services and our family attended. He was no hell-fire exponent of a terrifying Gospel, but a winsome, loving shepherd seeking to gather the lambs into the loving arms of a dear Redeemer, and when he made an earnest invitation to all those who wanted Christ as their Saviour and Lord to stand, I was one of the first to rise to my feet. As a result, my sister and my two brothers made a similar commitment, and we were all received into membership in Fair Ground (Methodist) United Church a few months later. (I regret that this church is no longer there and the congregation now attends Cultus United Church.)

I want to speak frankly here. I have never regarded that November 2nd commitment as a conversion or a change of direction. Rather it was a decisive step forward in the same direction I had been moving since childhood. What it did was to make overt and explicit the discipleship which had been growing a long time, so that everyone now knew I was committed as a follower of Jesus Christ. I was like a young man keeping company with a young lady he expects some day to marry - then one night, perhaps by some unexpected turn of events, the proposal is made and accepted, and he announces to the world "At last we are engaged!".

That night when I stood to pledge my allegiance to Christ, the minister said "Thank God for this young man, just through High School. We hope some day he'll be in the Christian ministry." But at fifteen years of age, I wasn't yet ready for that further commitment. However, God knew what he was about, and his net closed about me gently and inescapably. I learned that my dear old grandmother Park, a saint of God if ever there was one, had been dreaming and praying that she might someday have a grandson in the ministry. When she was buried the old minister said of her "I have never conducted a funeral in which the ashes of the departed seemed more sacred." She died soon after that night of my commitment to Christ, and just before she died she asked my brother Wilford and I to kneel and pray beside her bed. Then she laid her hands on our heads and said, "I am so glad before I go to know you boys are in the Kingdom."

Then I learned that my own Mother's most cherished wish for me was that I would become a Christian minister. Only twice do I remember her shedding tears on my behalf. I had become a Sunday School teacher and my religious interest was beyond question, but when she voiced her hope for me I answered, "How can I become a minister, we can't afford it!" The second time she wept on my behalf was in January 1919 when I left to begin my training for the ministry at Albert College, Belleville. Smiling with pride, she had waved me a cheery good-bye, but when I looked back I saw her weeping on my father's shoulder, for she knew that the boy she loved so much and given so gratefully to the ministry, would never be home for any extended period again.

My final decision to enter the ministry was made in September 1918. I had been harrowing wheat ground and the Spirit of God must have been speaking to my soul. I looked up toward the sky above and I said, "Lord, you open the way, and I will give myself to the Christian ministry." A few weeks later, my parents said, "Clifford, if you want to go to Albert College to continue your education and become a minister, we will provide the money to make it possible." Here was God's answer to my promise. It meant that in spite of living on an unproductive and debt-burdened sand farm (this was before the tobacco industry came in to redeem Norfolk economically and erode its morality) my parents were prepared to borrow $600.00 from the bank to cover my 1919 Spring term board and tuition. Here was an act of faith and a deed of concrete Christian sacrifice that challenged my dedication to the utmost.

So January 1919 found me at Albert College completing my Senior matriculation (Grade XIII) and beginning my Theological studies under Rev. Charles Scott of Bridge Street Church, Belleville, starting with Wesley's sermons and his famous treatise on Christian Perfection. I returned to Albert College for the 1919-1920 year (this time on a loan from my grandfather Cutler) and achieved creditable academic success, a prize for the best essay, and another for coming first in the public speaking contest. I had been taking "Expression" as an extra - after all - why not, with a father who was an unusually gifted amateur elocutionist? (I can still recite his "Address to Young Ladies" and "The Stowaway" as well as a repertoire from other sources, not to mention the famous "One-Legged Goose.")

It was also in the spring of 1920 (just sixty years ago as I write) that I did my first preaching, supplying the little church at Rossmore across the bay of Quinte for a couple of months. (The quality of my preaching was far from high, but I must have done better on Mother's Day, for one of the officials said to me at the door, "That was a good sermon, Mr. Park", then added in a whisper, "There'll be somebody else mention it to you.")

On graduation, Hamilton Conference of the Methodist Church had no hesitation in appointing me as student minister for one year (1920-1921) at Harley, Cathcart and New Durham (sixteen miles west of Brantford) and then for a second year, (1921-1922) at Tintern and Eden (near Beamsville in the Niagara Peninsula.) I managed to do acceptable work on both fields, continuing my theological studies, including New Testament Greek extramurally, and by making good use of illustrations, and a liberal dash of humour, I laid the foundations for the excellent reputation as a preacher which the years would ultimately confer.

At Harley I boarded with a farm family, Mr. and Mrs. Wallace Ryder. Their married daughter, Mrs. Roland Tye, became organist and kingpin of the Harley church. At her behest I have thrice returned to Harley for anniversaries, and also to conduct the funeral of her father in 1934, and of her 96 year old Mother some thirty-five years after my pastorate there.

Incidentally, I preached one stormy night at Harley to seven people, the smallest Sunday congregation I ever addressed. One other incident at Harley merits inclusion. Mr. Ryder and I were driving some cattle to a neighbour's farm when I suggested the neighbour's fifteen year old son challenge Wallace to a footrace. The older man accepted the challenge and appeared likely to outrun the boy, but suddenly, after a few yards, he collapsed in agony with a fierce attack of sciatica. We had to ease him into a car and take him home to bed for several days recuperation. It was the haying season, and as the guilty, if innocent, cause of the attack, I went ahead with the haying, using his team and farm implements - a service he never ceased to remember with gratitude.

Probably my best work was done at New Durham where I organized a Young People's Union and conducted a play in which I personally participated. Thirty years later, one of the McClelland boys, now a High School Inspector, called to see me, and declared that he owed more to me than to any other minister.

At Cathcart I organized a Ladies' Aid Society, and when I returned for the 25th Anniversary of the organization, the Minutes of their first meeting, read for the occasion, indicated I had not only chaired the meeting, but had moved the important motions myself. Such was the inexperience of youth!

I was unable to accept invitations back to Tintern until after the celebration of the 50th anniversary of my Ordination. Then in the Autumn of 1978 I was able to accept an anniversary invitation, and my wife and I enjoyed one of the loveliest weekends of our career - with a well-attended Service in the old Tintern Church, and a delicious pot-luck dinner in the Sunday School hall after the Service. But only a few of those present had known me in the old days fifty-six years before. I think of one couple who had been members of my young people's union, had married, and were now retired in Beamsville. I recalled that noon dinner at her cousin's home on Sunday, with an attractive young lady present from Brantford upon whom I wanted to make a good impression. It was the custom then for the minister to follow the meal with a prayer. On this occasion, I upset my glass of water on the table cloth early in the meal - which was embarrassing enough, but at the close of the meal when I said "Let us bow our heads in prayer" I upset it a second time! I have never prayed under more embarrassing conditions.

But now to double back. For my two years as a student minister I received $1,000.00 a year - a very good salary for a student back in 1920 and 1921, and by leaving cars out of the picture, driving a horse (Wallace Ryder's) or riding my bicycle, I was able to save enough to repay my father half of the six hundred dollars he had borrowed for my first semester at Albert College (he insisted I retain the balance as a free gift) and I also repaid my grandfather Cutler a similar three hundred dollars he had loaned me, and in addition I had over five hundred dollars in the bank with which to finance my first year at Victoria University in Toronto, beginning in the Autumn of 1922. I enrolled in the Philosophy-Psychology Course - an Honours Course in which it was possible for a Senior Matriculant to secure a B.A. degree in three years. The Course, as it turned out, fitted my talents admirably and I was able to head my course with first-class honours in each of the three years. And besides receiving a couple of small bursaries along the way, I was awarded the George Paxton Young Fellowship in Philosophy on graduation, which provided me with four hundred dollars with which to continue my studies in philosophy along with my courses in Theology. As a result I received my B.A. in 1925, my M.A. in 1926, (after writing a major thesis on the Philosophy of the American Pragmatist, John Dewey), and my Diploma in Theology in 1927 - and I received no less than six prizes in Theology when finished in 1927. (Mine was the last year that Theological graduates received Victoria College Diplomas. In 1927 Knox College, where we had taken part of our lectures, was awarded to the continuing Presbyterian Church, and thereafter United Church theological students were recognized as graduates of the newly-built Emmanuel College.)

Other than the prizes and scholarships I have mentioned, two other University honours came my way. In 1924 I was elected Leader of the Opposition in the Victoria College Student Parliament, and in 1925 I became president of the Philosophic Society of the University of Toronto. So, aware of both my limitations and my achievements, it was not without justification that I described myself as "one of the best second-class minds at the University!".

How did I manage financially? Well, to begin with, the Methodist Church paid the tuition fees of its Theological candidates, and the United Church (which came into being on June 10th, 1925) exacted no tuition fees from its Theological students. Then for four years my brother Wilford (who was studying Medicine and was to graduate third in a class of over one hundred students in 1926) and myself roomed together, third floor front at 18 Grosvenor Street and boarded ourselves. Our room cost us only $3.25 a week but when Wilford married Lila Marshman in 1926 and I had to move out, I took a room at 11 Charles Street, and if I remember correctly, rents had sky-rocketed for a single room to $3.75 a week! Incidentally, I had managed my first year at Victoria University for a little less than $400.00.

Wilford had already put in one successful summer selling Wearever Cooking Utensils, and for the next four summers, I followed his example - two summers selling in North York county, (1923-1924) and two in the Sudbury-Blind River-Chapleau districts of Northern Ontario, (1925-1926) thus missing the creation of the United Church of Canada in Toronto on June 10th, 1925. I made nearly $500.00 the first summer and for each of the three summers I was able to bank $250.00 a month for each of the three months I worked per summer. I was not as fortunate as my brother in winning the $100.00 prize for the largest student sales over a limited number of weeks, but I did, one summer, sell the most by any of the 20 or 30 college students engaged in the enterprise. My best week was associated with High Falls on the Spanish River - where a 198 foot dam develops electrical power for Copper Cliff. I conducted my demonstration with its combination of cooking and lecturing on Saturday evening - with every man, woman and child of the nine family community present - plus a visiting couple who also attended the demonstration. Then I preached on Sunday morning for the student friend who was in charge of the church that summer, and on Monday I made my business calls to solicit sales. Every one of the ten families bought generously and my sales for that Monday totaled $273.00, and the grand total of my sales for the entire week, other places included, was $512.00 - the highest single week in my entire four years. With a profit of 40% I felt so affluent that I took the next week off and went by train down to Newmarket to visit my fiancée!

Which brings me to my engagement to Amy Aleta Brodie who would later become my wife. The summer of 1923 I began selling Aluminum Ware in Newmarket and my first Sunday in town found me worshiping in the Newmarket Methodist Church. This young lady, sitting in the choir, sang that Sunday "The Old Rugged Cross" in a beautiful contralto voice. I looked up at her and said to myself, "that girl would make a good minister's wife." Little did she realize the cross she would be asked to bear as a result of that solo! Not long after I met her in the Sunday School where she had been spending a good bit of her time and talent, and adroitly secured her consent to call on her at her home. It must have been love at first sight - Anyway, things moved so rapidly that by the time the summer was over we were engaged. Aleta had taught school for three years. Now she enrolled in the Deaconess Training School on St. Clair Avenue in Toronto, and graduated two years later as the Gold Medalist for the two-year course. For another rather lonely and unhappy two years she taught in Lindsay while I finished my course in theology. You see, at that time, a theological student was not allowed to marry until he had completed his training, and was ready for ordination. The Church is more humane now!

But at last the happy wedding day arrived on Wednesday, May 25th, 1927, and we were married at her parents' home at 11 Arden Avenue, Newmarket, with Rev. W. L. L. Lawrence and Rev. J. C. Cochrane officiating. Wilford was our best man and Carrie May our bridesmaid. Then off to Toronto for the night in a hotel, and on to Hamilton next morning to Centenary Church for the meeting of Hamilton Conference and my Ordination to the Christian Ministry on Sunday morning, May 29th, 1927 - two of the happiest and most significant events of my life had been crowded into one short week!

As a result of my success in selling aluminum wear, and with the help of the scholarship's I had won, I had enough money to get married, buy a used Ford coupe, and take a wedding trip to Toledo where we visited my cousin Ila Reisler and attended the very first talking movie I had ever seen. (I had heard my first radio in the North in 1925, and of course, television was as yet only a dream, and it would not be until September 1,1966 that the CBC Television Network would broadcast its first programme in colour, and with no less a person as its guest interviewer than a future Moderator of the United Church, Dr. Robert McClure of India!)

Our first Charge was Wainfleet, located in the Niagara Peninsula, eight miles east of Dunnville, on Highway number three. A completely rural field - it had three points - Zion (with the parsonage), Mt. Carmel, and Moulton Station, with a fourth named Diltz Road added the second year to make the Charge self-supporting. A pick-up truck carried all our worldly possessions and wedding gifts to our new home. It was heated with gas, but there was no electricity, and the plumbing was outdoors. The former minister's cat and four hungry kittens greeted us at the door, and it was 'home' - our first home, and a happy beginning for the forty fruitful years of service Aleta and I were to spend together as a team which happily combined my own gifts and enthusiasm with her as a devoted wife, a trained deaconess, a good pianist, a contralto soloist, and active church worker and leader in choir and Sunday School, Woman's Association and Woman's Missionary Society, and eventually in Presbyterial organizations as well.

I list here the Charges we have served since Ordination -
1927-9	Wainfleet (Zion, Mt.Carmel, Moulton Sta., Diltz Road)
1929-34	Cayuga (and Decewsville)
1934-39	Elora
1939-46	Whitby (and Almonds)
1946-54	Victoria Avenue in Chatham
1954-61	Byron
1961-66	Wesley-Willis of Clinton and Holmesville
After technical retirement with Pension
1966-69	Glendale
1969-74	Associate at Wesley-Knox, ending December 1974
1975 -	Summer Holiday Pulpit Supply at Dundas Street Centre and King St.
1976-7-8	- Summer holiday supply at Empress United
1979-80	Single preaching opportunities in various churches.

Altogether I was a salaried employee of various churches for forty-nine and a half years (including my two years on student fields at Harley and Tintern.)

There were achievements or events of interest on each of these fields which beg for mention. I want to recount one or two such items in connection with each Charge.

1. Wainfleet -

On this Charge I found a generation of young people had grown into their teens and were participating in the worship and activities of the Church, but had not yet been challenged to make a confession of discipleship to Christ and to become members of the Church. During my second winter on the Charge I organized two weeks of special services in each church, using neighbouring United Church ministers to do the midweek preaching, and using my own time to interview personally, singly, or in groups, these potential candidates for the Christian commitment. Their commitment was to be signified by standing in the public Service when the invitation was given. As a result of this effort, one hundred and twenty- three new members were added to the congregational rolls, seventy-five of them young people who, during the services, confessed their faith and pledged their allegiance to Christ. No other Charge I have served has presented a similar challenge and opportunity because more progressive ministers have conscientiously conducted Confirmation classes and received their young people into membership after systematic instruction. But, understandably, the Charge was not enthusiastic when at the end of my second year, I accepted an unsolicited invitation to become the minister at Cayuga.

2. Cayuga (and Decewsville, 1929-1934)

These were depression years and the time of the great drought in the Canadian Northwest. Our Charge helped to collect carloads of vegetables and clothing for Western use. The financial stringency in our own congregation was alleviated a bit by the voluntary reduction of my salary from $2000.00 to $1500.00 a year, but prices had fallen so much that my wife and I experienced no economic hardship. An interesting venture which we introduced at Cayuga was the arrangement of a six week holiday pulpit exchange with the minister of Avonlea and Hearne, Sask., Rev. Clifford Miller. While at Avonlea we took a ten-day motor trip through the Crow's Nest Pass, and northward through the Canadian Rockies to Lake Louise and Banff - and if I remember correctly, when we arrived back in Avonlea from this memorable trip, we had only $3.25 left in our pocket! But the most important result of this Avonlea visit was the fact that we brought back with us from Saskatoon, Aleta's young cousin, Edith Storey, to live with us, and eventually marry Donald Badger, Cayuga's gift to the United Church ministry.

This first holiday exchange was to be the beginning of a long series of summer exchanges which were to give us free manses to live in, with little pastoral responsibility beyond preaching on Sundays and the opportunity to become acquainted with new areas of Canada. In this way, across the years, we served churches in Windsor, Timmins, Thunder Bay, Noranda, Three Rivers, Coaticook, Summerside, Winnipeg, Medicine Hat and St. Johns, Newfoundland. Other travel trips were to enable me to preach as far afield as Bermuda, Port of Spain in Trinidad, Prescott in Arizona, and Southampton, England.

But I have always remembered Cayuga most happily as the church from which, very largely due to my personal influence, Donald Badger was enlisted for the Christian ministry. It was eventually my privilege to unite Donald and Edith Storey in marriage, and we have followed their careers with pride and joy - his as a minister in his pastorate at Wellington Street United, London, and hers as a minister's wife and an official of Artex, of which company she finally became head of the Ontario Division. Currently retired in Melbourne, Florida, they are numbered among our closest and dearest friends.

Let me conclude my account of our Cayuga pastorate with an incident which was both embarrassing and amusing. A lawyer's wife (Mrs. Meadows) had suddenly quit the choir, and having heard rumours of a quarrel with the milkman as a possible explanation of her defection, I visited her, hoping that a frank and tactful discussion of the situation might assuage the hurt and bring her back to her place in the choir. Suggesting that we had missed her and regretted her absence, she replied, "No, I am afraid you won't see me there for some time anyway." Determined to extract the reason if I could, I said, "Mrs. Meadows, I hope I am not to blame." She replied, "No, Mr. Park, you are not to blame. We are expecting an increase in the family." At that moment, I could have fallen through a knot-hole, but the story has been a source of amusement ever since.

3. Elora - 1934-1939

My father and mother had been residing since about 1928 in the Cutler house next the Fairground United Church, and my brother Montie was living in his own house on the other side of the Church. Except for my mother's death from cancer on December 31st, 1936, the Elora years were good years - marked by the celebration of the 75th anniversary of the building of the church, with a former Moderator, Dr. T. Albert Moore, as guest preacher, and two of the men who had helped to build the church still alive, present and active in the church - Henry Stafford and David Scott.

But during the years we enjoyed at Elora, one event stands out above all others - the adoption of five weeks-old Bonnie (Beverley Ann Mills). I shall never forget that day - March 5th, 1937 when Aleta and I brought her home from Toronto! It was Aleta's birthday and never had Aleta or I had another birthday to equal it. In spite of the inevitable problems and anxieties of rearing a child to adulthood, nothing brought us so much pride and happiness and enrichment of life as the addition of Bonnie to our family.

One amusing Elora story I must relate. One of the grand old men of our congregation, David Scott (who was present for the church's 75th anniversary) died at the age of 93 after I left Elora. He had a remarkable record of association with the Sunday School. Except for a few months at 17 years of age when he emigrated from Scotland to Canada, he was continuously a member of the Sunday School from six years of age to eighty-nine - as pupil, teacher, or superintendent. Even at 89 he was successfully teaching a class of junior boys. One day he came to me and said, "Mr. Park, I'm afraid I will have to give up my Sunday School class." "Why, what is wrong?" I asked. He replied, "My memory's failin'." I said I hadn't noticed it. He told me he had been out at the son's farm to lend a hand with the threshing. When they came in for dinner he had been attempting to make a phone call but the line was busy. The men had waited for the old man to sit down and say Grace. As they bowed their heads, with the phone call still on his mind, he began "Ring 6342" and of course everybody burst out laughing. "When that happens to you, I think it's time to quit!" I answered, "Mr. Scott, that incident doesn't betray failing memory. It only indicates the intensity of your concentration upon the phone call you wanted to make." I told him that the other day I was pacing up and down the hall thinking about a sermon, when the telephone rang. I picked up the receiver and said, "Our father who art in heaven." The person on the other end of the line nearly flipped, imagining he had somehow got a connection through to the realm above. I said, "Mr. Scott, when that can happen to a young man, I do not think you need to worry." He felt encouraged and continued with his teaching for a few more months until he finally retired for good - after 83 years in Sunday School!

Whitby and Almonds - 1939-1946

In accepting a call to Whitby, I became minister of one of the major Charges of the Bay of Quinte Conference, and discovered that my work was the heaviest I had ever had to carry. I was expected to preach morning and evening in Whitby, in the afternoon at Almonds, once a month at the County Home for the Aged, and one morning every five Sundays at the Whitby Psychiatric Hospital, and my sermons were supposed to appeal to the students of the Ontario Ladies' College, who always attended the Whitby morning Service, and appeal, of course, to the rank and file Christians of my constituency as well. Besides, the Second World War had begun and the Ajax shell-filling plant was being erected not far away, with the inevitable increase in the Whitby population. The latter included my brother, Dr. W. E. Park, whose success in learning how to control the rash caused by exposure to the explosives, brought him to the attention of the authorities, with the result that he was chosen to head the medical and hospital services at the new hush-hush Atomic Energy Plant at Chalk River. The War, of course, bore heavily on my heart, the more so perhaps because it was my sad duty to carry to the parents of Flight-Lieutenant John Ross Anderson that their son had become the first Canadian to die in the dread conflict.

Churchwise, I like to recall the Lay Visitation Evangelism effort we organized in 1945 - a splendid undertaking our people engaged in with enthusiasm. As a result, at the Reception of New Members Services which we held on two successive Sundays, we added one hundred and twenty new names to our Roll - half on Profession of Faith, and half by letter of Transfer.

During our pastorate in Whitby, Aleta's father died and her mother came to live with us, bringing with her an orphan niece, Jean Allard, who finished her high school training while with us, got a good job with Canada Bread and eventually I married her to John Dyck, and both are now living retired in Oshawa. (Mrs. Brodie died after we had moved to Chatham and was buried beside her husband in Newmarket Cemetery.)

It was from Whitby, also, that I acted as Dean of the old Oak Lake Senior Young People's Summer School north of Belleville for five successive summers with the remarkable Stephen Saywell as Director and his wife Susan as Secretary. Incidentally, although this was undoubtedly the high water mark of my camping experience, I participated during my ministry in at least twenty camps, beginning with Boys' Camps at Featherstone Point near Cayuga, and acting, sometimes as Dean, sometimes as an Instructor at Port Elgin, Ryerson, Sparrow Lake, Goderich and Kenesserie. I am rather proud of the fact that as a co-founder of Kenesserie, which was first designed to serve Kent and Essex counties, I gave it its name, combining the first letters of Kent, Essex and Lake Erie. It was good to attend the 25th anniversary of the camp's founding at the lovely campsite on Lake Erie in 1978, and meet again many of the old originals!

Victoria Avenue, Chatham - 1946-1954

I was called to this Church in 1946 after it had weathered the bleak depression years and paid off its mortgage under Rev. Charles Malcolm, who replaced me at Whitby. The War was over and the Church was now ready to roll under new leadership. The Charge made such splendid progress in the succeeding period, that one official remarked after my eight years there - "Mr. Park, this is likely to he the most important pastorate of your career." Maybe so!

About three hundred and fifty new members joined our church, and following a Lay Visitation Evangelism effort which rivaled the success of the one we had conducted in Whitby, we received on one memorable Sunday morning, one hundred and fifteen new members, once more, half of them on Profession of Faith. The church was organized as never before, and one Park Street church lady remarked in my hearing, though not intended for my ears, that "she thought Victoria Avenue was the most progressive church in the Conference." Back for its Centennial on the fiftieth anniversary of my ordination, I could not help but feel that under the present leadership, her judgment of Victoria Avenue was justified. With Mr. Duthie and Mr. Neal as its ministers, it holds two morning and an evening Service and plans are afoot to enlarge the auditorium. A splendid programme of Bible Study is in progress, and the Youth work of the church is the envy of other congregations. Most remarkable of all, in the last few years, it has had six ordained to the Christian ministry, and seven more in prospect or already in training. I am humbly proud to have made a contribution to such a Church, and can find satisfaction even in the backhanded compliment of its choir leader (Mrs. Tye) - "Thank God for a minister who can't sing."

There is much I would like to add concerning my eight years in Chatham. Centred in Kent County, I gave addresses as Churchman, Rotarian, or after-dinner speaker in at least fifty places in the area during my Victoria Avenue pastorate. Privileged to broadcast the Service once a month, I did eighty broadcasts over CFCO. I also served a year as chairman of Kent Presbytery - and in case the reader is interested in economics, I was the first minister in the Presbytery to receive a salary of $4000.00 a year! Thanks to laymen like John Jenner, Ralph Edwards, Ernie Fleming, and Shirley Mackness.

I became deeply involved also in Conference matters, and one year, the then very flourishing Laymen's Association of Conference planned to have a layman fill each pulpit of the Conference, I prepared a missionary address for laymen to use. It became to be widely used, even in my own pulpit by a Wallaceburg layman. Fortunately, I hadn't already preached it!

At Chatham, and on into my Byron pastorate, it was my privilege to occupy major Conference Committee chairmanships for a number of years. I served two years as Missionary and Maintenance chairman, then two years as chairman of the Overseas Missions committee, then at the request of the Conference Executive, two more years as M & M chairman, then, again, at Conference Executive's request because of the illness of the elected chairman, Bill Bell, a year and a half as Home Missions chairman, and then finally, the last Conference office I held and relinquished only in 1976 after four years - the chairmanship of the Fairfield Museum Committee. It was during my incumbency that the difficult negotiations between the McGeachys and the Board of Missions were completed and a Fairfield Trust was established which put the Museum on a secure financial foundation.

Now, once more, a note of humour - As a Rotarian at Chatham, I was accorded on one occasion the responsibility of thanking the visiting speaker, and one of the most important occasions was when the well-known Detroit poet Edgar A. Guest, addressed a joint meeting of the Service Clubs of the city. Sitting at the head table I could observe the audience as he spoke and I have never seen the faces of listeners beam with greater pleasure than they did that day. When thanking him, I referred to the obvious delight of his listeners, and went on to say that that afternoon I had taken up Mr. Guest's little volume of poems called "The Path to Home"- (it takes a heap o' livin in a house to make it home) and had read several of the poems to my young daughter. She was so entranced she would hardly let me stop - such was the remarkable power of this poet to the masses to appeal to both young and old.

Then I related this story for the amusement of the audience. I said that years ago at University I had heard of the distinguished Canadian poet, Bliss Carman, read a selection of his poems, including Vestigia (I took a day to search for God.) Bliss Carman was six foot, five or six inches tall, straight as a pike pole, and almost cadaverously thin. His flowing white hair, his finely chiseled intellectual face and impressive personality shaped for me my idea of what a poet could be expected to look like. The contrast of this description with Guest's short and stocky figure and undistinguished pebbly face was clearly obvious to the audience. "Then," I said, "when I saw Mr. Guest I thought of this story." "A young lad was sent to deliver an important telegram to an Anglican Bishop whose first name was Edward, and the boy was told he was to give it to the bishop in person. It happened His Grace was upstairs putting on his episcopal regalia for an important public appearance. His wife called up the stairs, 'Come down, Eddie, a boy has an important telegram which he says he must deliver to you himself.' A few moments later the bishop swept down the stairs in full episcopal attire - black gaiters and purple stock, flowing robe and richly decorated scarf and hood. The boy's eyes popped and he exclaimed, 'Holy Moses! Is this Eddie?' The story nearly brought down the house.

Byron - 1954-1961

As a suburb of London, Byron's rapid growth after the war transformed a sleepy little village into an expanding town, and the over-crowded little church on Commissioner's Road was no longer adequate for either Sunday School or Sunday worship. A new church had to be provided. A Site was secured at the north-east corner of Boler Road and Baseline Road, and a financial campaign netted over $80,000. in cash and pledges, but the sudden death of the minister, Rev. J. McKay, brought a halt to the building project until a new minister was secured. After a careful search I was selected and called, and after considerable hesitation, consented to come - July 1st, 1954. The opportunity of participating in the building of a new church was irresistible. We lost no time in setting the various boards in motion, and I am sure I held meetings of the Session, Sunday School executive, Board of Stewards, and Official Board during that first July month, and suitable committees were set up for planning, financing, etc., with Bob Pawley as chairman of the Building committee, Walter Davis as Treasurer, and Elmer Quinney, the contractor engaged to build the church. The new church was built to hold four to four hundred and fifty people, and the dedication was held in January 1956 with the moderator, Dr. Angus McQueen participating. The Hall was completed later and dedicated in the Autumn of 1959. The Church and its furnishings had cost about $135,000. and the Hall about $109,000. A bank indebtedness of around $41,000. was finally discharged in 1977 under Rev. Douglas Storey.

One of the real surprises of the venture was to find that the enlarged accommodation of the new church was soon being used to capacity. Membership doubled to around nine hundred and for a time the Sunday School enrolment matched the membership. One Sunday the Sunday School attendance reached six hundred and two and for some time Byron had the largest Sunday school in the Conference. Babies were being born on nearly every street, and often newcomers to Byron brought unbaptized little ones with them. One year, I remember, I performed seventy-two baptisms!

In January 1961, the Byron area was annexed to London and became a part of the city. I believe the church remains to this day, under the leadership of Douglas Storey and Edith Bolton, the liveliest, best-organized and most successful suburban church of any denomination in the city of London.

The ability and dedication of the lay men and women who built Byron Church and have made it what it is today are the real creators of this fine Church, but it was no small privilege to have been religious leader and spiritual guide (and I trust) inspiration of the congregation during the crucial years when a strong new church was coming into being.

As usual, the Bryon years were marked by both sunshine and shadow - shadowed by Aleta's serious heart attack the first Autumn we were there, and the death of Auntie Maud Allard (who had come from Parry Sound to spend the winter with us) while Aleta was still in Victoria Hospital - brightened by Bonnie's graduation in Music and Secretarial Science after two years in Alma College and her marriage to Larry Blackburn in Byron Church on September 1st, 1956 with Rev. Donald Badger officiating. I rejoice also, that largely due to my influence and encouragement, Derwyn Docken decided to give himself to the Christian Ministry during my Byron pastorate, and at the time of writing he is enjoying a very successful pastorate in the town of Dorchester. Incidentally, it was an added pleasure to have my brother Montie and his second wife Katie and their son Gordon in Byron for a couple of years while Montie was employed in the Davis greenhouse. Gordon had lived a year with us in Chatham after his mother's death.

Wesley-Willis of Clinton and Holmesville - 1961-1966

I like to say I have never served a Charge that wasn't benefited by my coming and wasn't the better for my going, and I was never one to overstay my time on a Charge. Now in 1961 I was 61 years of age, and riding the tide of reputation and popularity, I deemed it wise to move while it would be easy to secure a desirable new field. In one week I was offered Wesley-Willis of Clinton and the choice of two good Charges in Windsor. I chose Wesley-Willis-Holmesville, partly because it approached me first, and partly because it had the nicest manse and Wesley-Willis possessed the most attractive church, and the choice proved a wise one. In 1963, at the Conference meeting in Westminster College, I was chosen by an overwhelming majority as the President of London Conference for 1963-1964. It was one of the most thrilling honours of my life and I was glad my wife and my daughter and her family could be present to share the proud ceremony of installation with me.

Being president of London Conference with its eight Presbyteries and some two hundred and fifty Charges with nearly four hundred congregations was no small responsibility. During the year I traveled eight thousand miles on presidential duties, addressed each of the eight Presbyteries, presided at meetings of the Conference Executive, and conducted or addressed some eighty gatherings of one sort or another, dedicated three new church halls and two new churches - Gethsemane in London and Wesley in Amherstburg. The latter occasion provided me with one of my best stories. At the crowded reception following the dedication, an enthusiastic young man said, "That was a wonderful address, Mr. Park. My name is McGee - 'Fibber McGee' they call me."

Presiding over the 1964 Conference was, of course, the most demanding and exhausting part of my responsibility, but I weathered the ordeal in creditable fashion, but was greatly relieved when it was over and my successor had been installed in office. Perhaps it was as a humorist that I was best remembered, but I am greatly comforted by the remark of a great French religious leader who said, "Humour is the nickname for wisdom."

Glendale - 1966-1969

Why did I leave Wesley-Willis in 1966? I had several reasons. I now had forty-three years credit on the Pension Fund and was entitled to retire. I was sixty-six and the Church was about to make sixty-five the official retiring age. Besides, my wife's health was seriously deteriorating after an extended period in hospital, and she wanted me to retire and lighten the burden on both of us. Moreover, Rev. Duncan McTavish had had enough of Glendale and wanted me to take my pension and return to London to take over the less-demanding responsibility at Glendale. We decided to do just that and moved back to 310 Griffith Street - the house I had provided for my daughter at the time of her marriage. She and her family were now in Windsor.

I served for three years at Glendale, spending a great deal of time visiting in the community and managing to build up the congregation appreciably, both financially and numerically. Unfortunately, my wife Aleta only lived a year after our return to London, although she managed to maintain her place in the choir and in the United Church Women almost to the end.

Although she knew she wasn't well enough to go, she wanted to take our daughter and her two boys, Randy and Bradley, to Expo in Montreal. We stayed in a motel in Rigaud, Que. and spent three days at Expo. Although we used a wheel chair for her on the last day, and she took nitroglycerine pills freely for her heart, the strain was too much. I wakened about 5:45 a.m. the morning we were to return home and almost immediately she gave two or three gasps and was gone. I roused my daughter and the boys in the next motel room, and notified the police and the coroner and the Rigaud undertaker, and at noon began the long journey home. Randy made the briefest and most discerning comment upon her demise - "She died for us."

It was Friday morning, August 18th, 1967 when she died, and she was buried in Woodland Cemetery, London on Tuesday, August 22nd from the Millard George Funeral Parlour, following a Service conducted by Rev. Donald Badger. Friends and relatives from afar, especially my daughter and her family, Wilford and Evelyn, Montie and Katie and Gordon from Alberta, brought their sympathy and the tribute of their love for Aleta. Good friends of Aleta' s from Byron and Glendale provided a lunch at the house after the funeral. Finally, I was alone, with only my faith and the memory of an idyllic companionship of just over forty years to comfort me.

But it seemed wise to continue my work at Glendale and the good people of the congregation continued to give me their affection and support. But I feel sure God didn't want me to remain a lonely widower, and providentially I found my thoughts turning to a splendid lady whose husband I had buried in 1960 - Mrs. Lillian Coates. She and her husband Edgar and her boys had been active leaders in our church. She was a popular teacher of retarded children, and she had probably been Aleta's best friend. Besides, she possessed experience, skill and enthusiasm in church and community work, and she manifested an amazing ability to make and keep friends and bring strength and cheer to others. She was the wife I needed, and it did not take long to conclude she was the woman I wanted. She had been accustomed to calling me "Mr. Park" and she nearly choked the first time she called me "Clifford" but I was accepted by her family and friends and she by mine. Our attachment deepened rapidly, and on June 29th, 1968, we were married in Glendale United Church by Rev. Douglas Storey of Byron Church with my daughter Bonnie as Matron of Honour and Lillian's eldest son, Kenneth Coates as Best Man, and granddaughters Debbie and Kelly Coates as Junior Bridesmaids. The church was crowded with friends and relatives though no formal invitations had been issued.

A lunch was served in the Hall by the Glendale ladies and after the festivities we returned to 289 Stephen Street, which was to be our home. Then on to 247 Stephen Street where Robert Coates' wife, Elva, had prepared a wonderful wedding repast. We motored to Sarnia for our first night, (where we removed the stones from our hub caps) then on to Edmonton to visit Lillian's son Don and his family, then to Banff where we were joined by Doug and Beth Goodge for a motor trip through the mountains to Vancouver where the four of us boarded the Princess Patricia for a wonderful voyage through the inland waterway to Skagway, Alaska and a railway trip through the White Pass to Carcross in the Yukon.

On our return Lillian found herself well-received by the Glendale people - (what else could you expect?) - and we had one more good year at Glendale as Lillian and I served the Charge together.

Wesley-Knox - 1969-1974

Lillian had a lot of good friends in Wesley (Knox didn't join with us until 1972) and when Rev. Robert Trimble approached me in 1969 to become his assistant minister, I found the pressures too much to resist. Beginning in August 1969 I had four happy years with Bob - almost a father and son relationship existed between us - and without overworking me he made regular use of me in the pulpit and the congregation accorded me both their confidence and their affection.

When Bob Trimble left us in August 1973 to become minister at Islington United Church, Toronto, and Rev. Douglas Ross of Ottawa, who was called to succeed Bob, deferred his coming until April 1st, 1974, I was left in charge of the congregation. Fortunately, we were celebrating our Centennial Year and the various organizations of the church under the general chairmanship of Carl Hearn had assumed responsibility for their own special monthly events. So that I had only to hold things together, prepare the weekly Services, preach about once a month myself, and welcome to our pulpit the best men we could find - among them Father Williams of St. Peter's Basilica and Dr. George Goth of Metropolitan United. Of course, there were weddings and funerals to conduct and sick people to visit and I shall always be appreciative of the work done by Rev. Douglas Facey who was engaged to visit the hundred Shut-Ins of our congregation. And with the hearty cooperation of our splendid church secretary, Marjorie Hutchinson, and of our organist and choir leaders, Marie and Deral Johnson, our leaders of organizations, and all the other wonderful folk who stood loyally by us, the congregation did not suffer under my interim leadership. The appreciation of the congregation was expressed by a standing ovation at the Annual meeting in January 1974.

But it was a great relief when Rev. Douglas Ross arrived and took over in April 1974. I stayed on until the end of the year to help him get his bearings, but no one could question the appropriateness of my retirement at the end of 1974, just prior to my 75 birthday. The congregation marked the occasion with handsome gifts for both Lillian and me, including a purse of money and a beautiful painting of Wesley church done by the Toronto sister of our church secretary. In addition the Breakfast Club staged a special "Park" Sunday morning programme with gifts and laudatory speeches. In July, 1975, Rev. 'Bert' Carr succeeded me as Visiting Minister, a most fortunate choice for the church and an immense help to Mr. Ross who was honoured by election as president of London Conference for 1979-1980, who had to give a good deal of time and energy to the responsibilities of his high office. His presidential duties concluded with the meeting of Conference held in May, 1980 in Wesley-Knox United Church.

I come now to the concluding highlights of my Ministerial career - the celebration of the 50th anniversary of my Ordination. First conceived by my wife, as a surprise, it soon became obvious that plans for the celebration of this anniversary would have to be divulged. Our Ministerial and Staff Committee at Wesley-Knox learned that Sunday, May 29th was the exact date on which I had been ordained in Centenary Church, Hamilton, fifty years before (in 1927) and they invited me to preach that Sunday morning, and arranged for a reception to follow the Service. During the Service the chairman of the committee, Mr. Paul Mullen, made a beautiful speech of appreciation and congratulation to both Lillian and myself, and presented to Lillian a lovely sheaf of yellow roses. After the congregational reception which followed the Service, a delicious dinner was served at two o'clock in the Social Hall for almost ninety special friends and relatives by Lillian's U.C.W. Unit, led by Mrs. Trudy Carroll. Representative members of Wesley-Knox, friends from other churches and relatives from Toronto, Bonnie and Larry and close relatives of Lillian were in attendance. The Spettigue-Coates-Blaine family gave me a beautiful Quartz Digital watch, and there were other presents as well. Lillian provided a yellow rose for each lady present, and tributes and good wishes were voiced by many, but especially by Rev. Donald Badger of Wellington Street United Church, who had entered the ministry through my personal influence during my pastorate at Cayuga.

The following Sunday, I preached at both morning Services in Victoria Avenue United Church, Chatham - half to commemorate my fiftieth anniversary, and half to permit my participation in the Centennial celebration of Victoria Avenue. For me this was another memorable occasion. It was good to have my two grandsons, Randy and Bradley, and my sister Leta with her daughter Charlene and husband, and their eldest daughter on hand for the occasion and dinner together at the Holiday Inn after the Service.

Since 1974 I have been a free man except for acting as pulpit supply during the summer holidays in several London churches, including three summers at Empree United. Even in my eightieth year I have preached at Wellington Street in London, Dorchester United, Wesley-Knox, and twice at Byron United Church. The last occasion at Byron on September 12th, 1979 afforded me the much appreciated opportunity of baptizing our newest grandchild, Michael Patrick Coates, born to Paul and Gay Coates on May 15th, 1979.

Residing since January 1978 at Apartment 407, 555 Berkshire Drive, London, we continue to enjoy Wesley-Knox United Church where so many of our best friends are still to be found. Lillian, very much my junior in age, is still using her fine gifts and personal popularity in the service of the United Church Women of which she is currently co-programme director. Both of us, also, have found additional opportunity for service and friendship through our participation in the Y's Men's Club - myself as Chaplain, and Lillian (for a two-year stint, as president of the Y's Menettes - the group of Y's Men's wives who meet monthly). Our winters we are spending in Florida. The long illness of Lillian's sister Betty and her death in February 1979, and the dreadful motor accident of Margaret and Eunice in July 1978 with Eunice's long hospitalization and dreadfully crippled right leg, impelled us to sell our mobile home in Kokomo Park and spend most of the winter in London. The winter of 1980 found us back in Florida, this time in rented quarters at Darefoot Bay (which we shared in turn with Eunice and with Margaret and her husband. But next winter, God willing, will find us back in Kokomo Park at Lake Worth where Lillian has purchased another mobile home at 5861 Shawnee Drive.

But this chronicle has to come to an end, and a good place to stop is to refer to the fine celebration of my Eightieth Birthday - planned as you may guess by my good wife, but this time with the collaboration of her sister Margaret and my daughter Bonnie, and Bradley's girl friend Tracy Bennett, who had flown to Florida to attend the occasion. Sixteen people in all were present for the dinner on the big day - February 5th, 1980 - Lillian and I, Bonnie and Tracy, Margaret and Eddie Blaine, Fred and Flo Pratley, Donald and Edith Badger, Hugh and Alta McDonald, and friends Maurice and Jean Grant, and Jim and Julia Jordan. Presents and congratulatory messages enlivened the day, starting at 7:45 a.m. with a telephone call and the fine voice of eight-year-old Stephen Coates in London, singing "Happy Birthday Dear Grandpa, Happy Birthday to You!" Included later, just to show I hadn't suddenly become decrepit with the attainment of my eightieth birthday, my daughter took a movie of me doing pushups and jogging briskly in front of the camera! And to liven proceedings a bit, I shaved off my newly-grown moustache in mid-evening so I could have 'before and after' pictures for comparison. The sacrifice of the moustache brought some loss of dignity but the restoration of a more youthful appearance, and anyway, I feel more like myself without it.

So now with eighty years behind me, I face the future in pretty good health (except for impaired hearing) and otherwise in possession of my faculties - although it just could be I ought to be echoing the little quatrain -

Anyway, I had a couple of speaking engagements before we left for home, and I still cherish the occasional opportunity to speak a good word for Jesus Christ. But for the most part, I am content to sit on the sidelines while others continue the work in which I was so long and happily engaged. I loved my years of service to the Church, and I feel I have achieved all that was in me to achieve, God having blessed my ministry beyond my deserving. My Lord means as much to me now as ever He did, and in spite of the new problems that confront the Church in a secular and permissive day, and the new ethical issues, ranging from the validity of abortion to the threat of nuclear holocaust with which the Christian conscience has to wrestle, I still believe that the central task of the Church is to woo youth and manhood and womanhood into redemptive discipleship to Jesus Christ. And I am still convinced that important as the electronic church and its T.V. presentation of religion has become, there is no substitute for local congregations meeting regularly for worship and Christian nurture and organized for service to their needy fellowmen.

Meanwhile, I am in no hurry to leave this old earth, but I trust it will be a great day, the greatest I have ever known, when my Master welcomes me into the heavenly mansions with the great words - "Well done, good and faithful servant. You have been faithful over a few things, I will make you ruler over many things. Enter now into the joy of thy Lord!"

Some After-Thoughts -

Old Fair Ground has been extensively rejuvenated. The houses in which I grew up, the barn I helped to build, the church of my childhood, are all gone and new buildings have taken their place. There remains only the cement block house my grandfather Cutler built, in which my mother died, and in which my father, in company with his second wife Jessie, spent his last years. Most of my generation are also gone.

Several older cousins, however, are still alive. Vera Park is now living alone in Brantford after a splendid teaching career. Ila Reisler and her husband, Herbert, at 87 and 89 respectively, are hale and hearty in Toledo, Ohio. Ila, a former high-school teacher, has finally concluded more than fifty-five years as a Sunday School teacher in the Methodist Church, and her popularity as a bird-imitator, lecturer, and Nature enthusiast, brought her the award of "Naturalist of the Year for the city of Toledo" in 1978. Her younger sister, Aline Vaughan, commutes with the seasons between Toledo and Pine Grove, Florida, but paralysis of her legs has robbed her of her mobility, though not the vigour of her mind or the warmth of her spirit. Her daughter, our good friend Grace, is her mainstay.

My brother, Dr. Wilford Park, and his wife Dr. Evelyn Hartman Park, after outstanding careers in Public Health in Minneapolis, (see postscript) are retired in Prescott, Arizona, where the presidency of District IX of Zonta International, is currently utilizing her energy. Montie, the farmer of the family, and first to retire (- farming is a hard life!) resides in Chilliwack, B.C., with his third wife Thelma.

Happily, my daughter Bonnie Blackburn and her husband Larry, and their two athletic sons, Randy and Bradley, live in Amherstburg, only 130 miles away, and it is easy to keep in touch by letter or telephone and the occasional visit.

We rejoice that our younger cousins, Hugh and Alta McDonald of Tillsonburg, spend their winters in Kokomo Park, Florida, and that our equally good friends and cousins, Edith and Donald Badger, now winter in Florida also.

Happily also, remarriage not only brought me the supportive love and fellowship of a wonderful and cheerful wife, but also the fellowship of her fine family and splendid relatives. Her sons and their wives and children - Bob and Elva, and Paul and Gay here in London, and Ken and Betty in Montreal, and Don and Lois in Edmonton, (not to speak of the grandchildren) seem as dear to me as my own. Besides, there is Lillian's sister Eunice here in London, her sister Margaret and her husband Eddie Blaine of Hamburg, N.Y. Other cousins - Shirley and Norman Ford, and Margaret and Bill Gadsden here in London, and in Toronto Fred and Flo Pratley and John and Marian Mulholland - and in London again, those two young friends David and Cathy Hutchinson (whom we like to think of as a daughter because her name used to be Park and she lived in our house while she was attending the University of Western Ontario.) And of course, there are the multitude of friends whose friendship we cherish - ministers and friends at Wesley-Knox and Byron United Churches, the Y's Men's Club and the Y's Menettes, and those two fine couples with whom it has been our privilege to chum with so often - Beth and Doug Goodge and Ralph and Louise Lashbrook!

With such a circle of relatives and friends, who could help but confront the past, the present and the future with gratitude and equanimity!

Postscript
Dr. Wilford E. Park & Dr. Evelyn Hartman Park

In any history of the Park family the exceptional medical careers of my brother Wilford and his wife Evelyn merit a much more explicit account than the incidental references contained in my personal memoirs.

Dr. Wilford E. Park married Dr. Evelyn Hartman in Minneapolis while both were employed in the Public Health Dept. of that city. Though now retired in Arizona, their biographies continue to be listed in the "Who's Who in the West" - 1978-9 edition - "inclusion in which is limited to those individuals who have demonstrated outstanding achievements in their own fields of endeavour and who have thereby contributed significantly to the betterment of contemporary society." The Medical "Who's Who in America" lists at least a score of significant positions and achievements for each of them.

Wilford graduated from the Toronto School of Medicine in 1927 with First Class Honours, ranking third in a class of over 112 graduates. After private practice in Brownsville, Ont., from 1929 to 1942 he began work as a doctor at Defense Industries in the new shell-filling plant at Ajax, Ont. There, as superintendent of toxicology and medical research he solved the problem of T.N.T. poisoning at the plant and attracted the attention of Canadian authorities, with the result that he was chosen to set up the hospital and direct medical services at the highly-secret Atomic Energy Plant at Chalk River, Ont.

By 1949 he felt that his work there was essentially completed, and he accepted a position in the Minnesota Dept. of Health as Director of Industrial Health Services. Here he became familiar with the extent of the problems which beset the broad field in which he was working, and began writing brochures and publications dealing with these problems, totaling in the end at least 220 in all. His work and writings brought extensive recognition, including Fellowships in the fields of Preventive and Occupational Medicine, and membership in national and local organizations.

After two years working for the State of Minnesota he was transferred to the Minneapolis Health Dept. to develop an Industrial Health Service for the city. Here he not only developed the Industrial Health Programme but became also Director of Adult Health. His work was so highly valued that his mandatory retirement at age 65 from service to the city was followed by another 5-1/2 yrs of employment by the State of Minnesota. He was assigned to continue his uncompleted, federally-funded demonstration-project concerning the nursing homes of Minneapolis. Two large volumes preserve the results of the careful work and significant contribution he was able to make in this field until his final retirement in 1972.

It should be noted that during his years in Minneapolis he was an active member of the Hennepin Ave United Methodist Church, serving on its Council of Christian Education for ten years, and as the chairman of its Council for the last three of those years.

Since his retirement to Prescott, Arizona, in 1972 he and his wife have been esteemed members and loyal workers of Prescott United Methodist Church, and valued consultants in the public health activities of both the city and the county.

Dr. Evelyn Hartman Park

Evelyn's quite different background has led to a success and a contribution no less conspicuous and outstanding. She was born in America of Finnish parentage, but went to Finland as a young teenager, where she received her education, her father a beloved teacher of Suomi Seminary having decided to return to his Finnish homeland. Reading the names of Evelyn's family sounds like a roll-call of the outstanding medical, educational, judicial, and religious leaders of that magnificent little land.

Evelyn graduated in Medicine in 1945 from the University of Helsinki, proficient in four languages (English, Finnish, Swedish, and German). As a medical student her experiences during the war between Finland and Russia, contributed greatly to her maturity. (In 1979 she put her wartime reminiscences into a gripping little book entitled "Survival from Hopelessness".)

In 1946 she managed to return to America, and it was her good fortune to become a Fellow in Pediatrics at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn. She was awarded the degree of Master of Science in Pediatrics from the University of Minn., and from 1953 to 1955 she was Pediatric Consultant for the Minnesota Health Dept.

In 1955 she became Director of Maternal and Child Welfare in the Minneapolis Health Dept., where her ever-expanding responsibilities came to include Maternity Clinics, Family Planning Clinics, Children's Medical and Dental Clinics, Parochial School Health Programs, and Surveillance of Child Care Centres in respect to health. It was her responsibility also to exercise an oversight over a wide variety of personnel which included physicians, dentists, nurses, social workers, nutritionists, health educators, statisticians, and clerical workers - totaling altogether over 100 employed workers as well as a large staff of community women who were volunteer workers.

She was also Clinical Assistant Professor of Pediatrics at the University of Minnesota. It is not surprising that her early retirement from her heavy responsibilities created deep regret on the part of a multitude of friends and associates. Nor is it surprising that after so busy a life her retirement in Prescott soon indicated that housekeeping was no adequate outlet for her abilities and energy. So she quickly became active in community and church activities, and was the organizer of the "Community Cupboard", which coordinates the dispensing of emergency food supplies to individuals and families in need of immediate and temporary assistance. She has also enjoyed teaching "Healthful Living Courses" at the Yavapai Community College.

In addition she has maintained her participation in Zonta International (a Service organization of business and professional women). After serving a year as Lt-Governor of Zonta District IX (Arizona, Nevada, Utah, California, and Hawaii) she is currently for 1980-2 the chief officer of the District, and is engaged in a full schedule of traveling, speaking, and counseling. On top of all this, and mindful of the professional articles which have brought her acclaim, she has written a novel entitled "The Woman Executive" (Ashley Books). A semi-biographical mixture of fact and fiction, with a dash of domestic friction thrown in [to] heighten reader-interest, she has produced a book of real imagination and literary skill - which any reader will find it hard to put down.

Meanwhile she is a charming hostess, and visitors fortunate enough to visit her lovely Prescott home will find themselves graciously entertained and will carry away with them the memory of a very able and very human couple whose entire lives have been motivated by high ideals of professional excellence and Christian Service.