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Sunny Dale Academy


It was during the period immediately after our house burned on Howards Ridge that my mother became interested in the Seventh Day Adventist Church. A man named Barton designed and built our replacement house and he and his wife were the only known members of that church in the area. My mother adopted the teachings of the church with a passion if not a vengeance. She loved worshiping on Saturday rather than Sunday, and even though the Sabbath was observed from sundown Friday until sundown Saturday, just like the Jews, there was something very Old Testament about the practice that appealed to her. She also applauded the Adventists’ teachings against eating meat from animals with cloven hooves—to us it meant hogs—and she also enjoyed taking a pass on catfish because the religion opposed eating fish without scales.
She loved sacrificing things for the good of her soul, and to help guarantee that she would arrive safely into heaven. She often frightened me to tears with her stories of how hell is just below the surface of the earth and that sometimes the fires of hell burst through the surface of the earth and if some accidentally gets on a person, it cannot be extinguished; it just burns and burns, causing extreme and everlasting pain for the victim of the accident.
When the Mexican volcano Paricutin arose from a cornfield in 1943, much to the astonishment of the farmer working his crop, she used that as absolute proof that hell was just below the surface.
She told us that Satan was always watching, and that he was always outside in the darkness of night, that he came up from hell only during darkness because he was so incredibly ugly that he would frighten people. Sometimes, to remind us that human beauty should not be trusted, she talked about how Satan had been the most beautiful of the angels until his ambition and true nature surfaced. She was terrified that her sons would play with themselves instead of sleeping so she said that in the darkness Satan would whisper and whisper and convince people to do sinful things under their covers.
Even though her religion was partially based on superstition—I suspect she believed, as did others in remote areas, that God permitted some personal interpretation of his wishes—there were limits to what she accepted. Banned from her belief was glossalalia and dancing in the aisles at church. I was always glad those displays of religious fervor were not permitted because they frightened me. Not long after my parents gave the land for the little church across the road from the cemetery, Lura Hicks was filled with the holy spirit at a revival meeting and she began shouting and dancing between the chairs and pews in the tiny church, her head flung back and her body twitching almost as though an electric current was running through her. It was very frightening to me and I hoped I would never do anything like that.
After we moved to West Plains and had electricity, she always reserved it when Garner Ted Armstrong’s radio show was on and from him she learned about the last great battle, Armageddon, which would be fought in the Holy Land. She also listened to assorted holy-roller preachers, some broadcasting from Dalhart, Texas, and others from across the border in Mexico where restrictions on the muscle of radio stations were not a problem.
In her effort to cleanse us of everyday sinning, some of which we couldn’t even identify and acts that she decided must be sins, particularly if they were fun or pleasant. To scare us into religion and purity, she told us that the Catholic Church was going to take over before Armageddon and that the priests and nuns would destroy all the King James versions of the Bible and that only the Catholic version would be permitted, and that these Bibles would be chained to the pews in churches. She told us that in spite of Catholic priests and nuns taking vows of poverty and chastity, priests everywhere lived in opulence and that nuns’ primary duties consisted of being mistresses for the priests, and that there are thousands of orphanages around the world to care for the children of priests and nuns.
I never knew if she had heard this from other people or if she made up the stories herself. But I do know they scared me greatly. One result was a fear of the dark that has remained with me throughout my life. The devil was always lurking out there, just beyond the light from our kerosene lamps in the house and the lanterns we carried outside. We were safe within the glow but beyond that . . .
The Baptist Church in West Plains had a minister named Sutter when we moved from Brandsville to the tiny cottage north of West Plains. My mother had not yet decided I was going to be an Adventist minister but for some reason she encouraged me to attend Sunday School at the Baptist church, and to also attend the day camp that summer held in the church. Reverend Sutter was a tyrant. In his enthusiasm to mould children into Christians, he shoved and jerked us around, never actually hitting us but treating us very roughly. My worst sin in the summer bible school I attended was pretending to hammer nails in some project while a camera rolled, and I also stared into the camera while pretending to hammer. The reverend was furious at me because my pretending wasn’t convincing.
I wish I could remember why I stayed with the church but the reasons have disappeared from my memory. What has not disappeared is how he double-crossed me one Sunday. I had been going to Sunday School for some time, hitchhiking into town as I did every school day, then hitchhiking back home instead of listening to the sermon and sad music, which would have put my noon meal in midafternoon. One morning I arrived early and was sitting in the church waiting for others to begin Sunday School when Reverend Sutter found me there and launched into a rant about the Seventh Day Adventist Church and how my mother was misguided. Then he told me that if I would stay for his sermon he would give me a lift home. He put more bait on the hook by saying his sermon would be very interesting to me. I agreed to stay.
I went to Sunday School as always, and then went into the main room of the church and sat about halfway down a pew toward the back. At the end of his sermon, which I didn’t find interesting at all, the altar call was next with Reverend Sutter pleading for sinners to come home, to step forward and be saved, etc., while the choir sang the sad songs used to lure people to the front of the church where they knelt and usually sobbed while the preacher stood above them verbally casting out the devil.
The son of a bitch double-crossed me. He had not preached a sermon that held any special meaning to me. What he did next astonished and shamed me, and surprised members of the audience. He stepped over several sets of feet and legs to fetch me, clamped a hand on my shoulder and proceeded to drag me from my seat to the aisle. I presumed he would drag me down the aisle to the altar where, in front of perhaps 30 people, he would pray over me and presumably eradicate the Seventh Day Adventists, if not my mother, from my young soul. I was so embarrassed, frightened and angry that I was afraid I would wet myself. I permitted him to drag me by the grip on my shoulder to the aisle, but once I was in the open, I fled. I ran out the church door and down the street to safety. That perp walk to the aisle was almost as humiliating as my walk down the corridor of the Sunny Dale Academy dormitory I have described elsewhere. The difference here is that I was saved from humiliation by my anger.
Typically, neither parent said much about it when I went home and told them, although my father told me to never go inside that church again, ever.
My mother cleaned house for the Croziers, who owned the drugstore on the square, and when she next saw Mrs. Crozier the kind woman told Mom that Archie should never speak to that preacher again or even walk past the church.
Yet the stories of eternal punishment of sinners continued throughout my childhood and into puberty. I suspect I was more susceptible to them than my brother three years older, or anyone else in the family. I was a dreamy kid, given to lying on the ground and watching clouds, to listening to music on the radio, to dreaming of traveling to foreign lands and falling in love with dusky maidens. My siblings seemed to be more interested in reality than me. I have never quite understood the sharp differences between me and the others, but there is no doubt I was different. I never looked like anyone else in the family and I was six inches taller than anyone else in the family. My interests were different. It should be no surprise that I often clashed with other members, or that they thought I was incredibly lazy because I wanted to live quite differently than the rest of them.
I graduated from grade school and assumed I would go to high school with my friends, and that since I was tall I would play basketball on the varsity team. The only career I remember being at all interested in at that stage was a forest ranger. But it was by no means a passion.
Soon after we moved to the tiny cottage seven miles north of West Plains the dean of a new Seventh Day Adventist boarding school in Centralia, Missouri, visited the area and spoke at the church in West Plains. The school was a former dairy farm on a section of flat, black soil, a gift from an industrialist named A.B. Chance, who had a large factory nearby in Centralia. The dean was recruiting students for the new school, which was called Sunny Dale Academy (SDA in case you haven’t been paying attention, as in Seventh Day Adventists). My mother was instantly interested. I was the last of her children and she decided that one of sons should be a minister, and I was her last hope. The dean came out to our tiny cottage to talk to my parents, and to have a look at me I suppose. I am doubtful that he was impressed with me or my family because we were poor, we dressed poor and lived in the cottage with my parents’ bed on one end of the tiny living room and my brother’s cot on the other end with perhaps four feet separating them. But he gamely told us that if I would work on the school’s farm every summer and during the school year, I would not have to pay tuition. My father asked something about religion and the dean said I would not be pressured into becoming an Adventist. That relieved me, and my father also, because the incident with Reverend Sutter was very much with us.
This was good enough for Mom and without consulting me, my father or anyone else, she committed me to the school on the spot.
I was hurt and angry and frightened. She clearly had not learned a thing about diplomacy after sending Marie away to Minnesota at the same age. The school was about 200 miles away and, like Marie, I had never been away from home before. One bit of good news was that a member of the Barton family, builders of our house on Howards Ridge, was on the staff as a farmer. But that turned out to be of no use to me because I remember seeing him only one time in the three or four months I was at the school. He seemed to want no part of the resident hillbilly, although I was informed several years later that he told my mother what happened to drive me away was not my fault.
I don’t remember arriving at the school but assume I rode a Trailways bus from West Plains to Centralia, where someone from the school met me. During that summer I enjoyed the place because there were only two or three other students working with the regular farm staff. One student was a girl named Donna Coe who worked in the kitchen, and who was the first and the last student I spoke to at Sunny Dale. That summer I worked in the fields most of the time, and I was especially welcome because I liked to work with teams of horses. I spent many days fertilizing the fields with a manure spreader, and one day the horses were frightened by something and I had a runaway on my hands. I started to take the spreader out of gear, but decided not to because they would tire faster with it in gear. But another problem occurred: The cow manure was flung wildly in all directions and some of it hit me, on my back and in my hair. A shower and change of clothes was required before I could have lunch.
Most of my memories of the summer have faded, but I do remember that one Sabbath the whole school went over to Moberly for some kind of service, and the dean, who had recruited me, asked me to ride with him. I was delighted, but not for long. He told me I should join the church since it was doing so much for me, meaning the school, and that he knew it would make my mother happy. I was too shy to remind him that he had promised there would be no pressure on me and I felt double-crossed again. I made no commitment and he didn’t bring it up again.
He, by the way, delivered one of my favorite sermons, one of the very, very few I remember with any detail. In this sermon he preached against listening to popular music of all kinds, but he had a special hatred for boogie woogie music. He told us to just think about it, where the words came from: Boo and Woo. Even then I thought the sermon was idiotic.
A few days before school started kids began arriving from all over the state, most from towns and cities, and all from families with a more money than mine. Most had new clothes, and all the boys had dress clothing, if not suits at least sports coats, slacks, dress shirts, nice shoes and neckties. I had none of those things. Nothing I wore was new. Nothing fit properly: most was hand-me-downs from my brother, who was five or six inches shorter than me. The pants were too short. The only coat I had was a black and white plaid zipper jacket with sleeves also too short. I did not own a dress shirt or tie, and those articles of clothing were required on the Sabbath, at the evening meal on Friday and the church services on Saturday. I was the only student who had absolutely nothing decent to wear. In addition to the plumage problem, I was extremely skinny and reached the height of six-foot-five that year. I was often called Inchabod, same as the Inchabod Crane Washington Irving immortalized. I had crooked teeth. I had pimples. I was very awkward and tended to lope and lurch instead of strolling. I talked funny with my hillbilly accent. I was desperate for acceptance and spent far too much time smiling or grinning.
Teenagers are tribal by nature, and I was such a misfit that I immediately became the outcast. My roommate barely spoke to me and would not associate with me outside the room. I have been laughed at since for assorted faux pas but I have never been laughed at by an entire society, as I was at Sunny Dale Academy. Only Donna Coe remained friendly to me and I looked forward to each meal because I knew Donna would say something nice to me, and sometimes slip a little extra food onto my tray. I knew she was only being friendly and although she was certainly good looking, I knew she wasn’t flirting; she was only being kind to a lost soul. She was the only person in the entire school who always treated me with courtesy.
Being such a misfit in a closed society, religious or otherwise, can have only one outcome: the misfit invariably leaves, either through his or her own power or by banishment. I think my departure was a combination of both. It occurred about two weeks after school began. The dormitories had two floors and an adult lived on each floor. In our dormitory it was a farm worker on one floor and a teacher on the other.
One night a pillow fight broke out. My roommate and I heard the laughter, picked up our pillows and ran down to join the battle. It was great fun for a few minutes, but then something happened and I never knew if it was prearranged or just spontaneous, but the two adults singled me out and began flailing me with their pillows. Ordinarily pillows do not hurt, but when they are swung very hard by adult men, pillows can hurt very much. They flailed and flailed at me and soon I was on the floor in the fetal position, covering my face and protecting my genitals, and sobbing in pain and humiliation. I don’t know how long the beating lasted, but of course it seemed a long time. The two men stopped at last and walked away, leaving me on the floor.
When I got up I saw that the hallway had emptied while they were administering the beating. Through fear, embarrassment and confusion, the boys had returned to their rooms. I had to walk all the way down the hall because our room was near the other end. I walked past the doors, which remained open so the boys could see what was happening. The boys watched me walk past in my ugly clothes and puffy face. It was the most humiliating moment of my life. I have tried to remember occasions when I was at least equally humiliated, but I cannot recall one. It was even worse than the incident with Reverend Sutter in the Baptist Church.
I told my roommate that as soon as the lights were out I was going to jump out the window and head for the highway. If he answered me I don’t remember, but I do remember how frightened he was by the entire episode, and how he simply stood against the wall and watched me pack a few things into either a bag or a cardboard suitcase and wait for the lights-out signal. A few minutes later I was out the window and walking the quarter of a mile to the east-west highway.
The first vehicle to come by was a truck. The driver stopped. He locked the door and then rolled down the glass to prevent me from getting in. He asked if I was running away from the school and I said I was. He asked why and I told him. He asked where I was going and I said both of my sisters lived in St. Louis and I was going to ask them to help me convince our mother I should come home. Then he opened the door and didn’t ask any more questions.
He was hauling some kind of produce to a wholesaler in South St. Louis and we arrived shortly after dawn, a trip that today would probably take two hours. Then the trucks were slow and the highways rough and narrow. When we arrived at his destination, he took me into the office to ask them directions where I was going, which was some distance away in Northwest St. Louis to Marie’s house because she was married and did most of her real estate work from her house. My other sister, Tressa, was single and shared an apartment with two or three other girls, and all were at work during the day. The office workers told me which streetcar to take to Natural Bridge, which bus to catch there, and where to get off to transfer to another bus. The driver asked me how much money I had and it was less than a dollar. He gave me two quarters. One quarter would get me there, but he wanted to be certain I had enough if I lost the transfer or forgot to get one. With that, we shook hands and he was gone.
The streetcar and bus voyage went very well. I told the conductor on each where I was going and they were kind and helpful. I got off at the last transfer point on Natural Bridge and stood on the corner to wait for the bus that would take me over the hill. I knew, either from a previous trip or from being told—I don’t remember which—that my sister’s house was just over the hill and to the left. While I stood going over the itinerary and imagining my conversation with my sister, a car pulled up in front of me and the window on my side was rolled down. I stooped and looked in, and it was Marie’s husband, Ray.
He said he was waiting for the light to change so he could turn left onto Natural Bridge and go to work, and he idly looked around. There stood his 14-year-old brother-in-law! He said many times over the years that he had never been so startled. At least forty years later he told me he could never go past that corner without checking to be sure I wasn’t there.
My sisters could do nothing, and I didn’t expect them to, but I wanted backing and protection from our mother when I went home. Tressa called our mother at the home where she did housework almost daily to tell her where I was and that I was coming home. She also pleaded with her to let me stay at home, but that plea was not welcome. Marie put me on a Trailways bus the next day and wished me good luck because she had considerable experience with our mother’s determination, and had lived in Minnesota perhaps a decade as a result. I thought about the situation and decided on the way home that I would stand up to her and do what I wanted to do. I knew from working on the farm the previous summer that I could do the work of a man, and if I had to leave home, I would always be able to find work.
The woman was as angry as I had ever seen her. She would not listen when I tried to tell her about the beating I was given, and she was certain I must have deserved it, anyway. She had already called the school to tell them I would be back the following day. The only reason I went back, and I told her so, was because I had left a few things there, including the very first books I had ever owned. I told her I would get the books and would be home again in two or three days. She made dire threats and I said I would run away if she delivered on the threats. It was a standoff that would continue over the next four years.
Those books were very important to me, not only because I had bought them with my summer labor, but also because my love affair with books was already in full bloom. The people on my mother's side of the family, the Howards and the Canterburys, harbored a suspicion that they were a little better than everyone else in the communities they settled in along the Arkansas-Missouri border. My grandmother, who died long before I was born, was formidable, the first woman in the whole area to ride astraddle a horse rather than side-saddle and a no-nonsense teacher who with an iron hand ruled the classroom, her family and anyone else she could pull into her sphere of influence.
Although I have always been secretly happy that I didn't have her to contend with while I was growing up, I have always been indebted to my mother's family because they owned books, nice books with leather binding and with sheets of tissue paper covering each photograph or engraving. My mother stored some of the gorgeous old books in a trunk the barn loft. Many times I went into the loft and sat in the hay while I looked at the books, taking pleasure in the rich feel of the leather covers, and listening to the slight crinkle of the pages as I turned them.
Sometimes the barn cats came almost close enough for me to pet, but they were feral and kept their distance, and always while I played with the books, I could hear the chickens clucking and cackling below and could smell the mixture of hay, and the horse and chicken manure.
Instinctively, I knew when I had a book in my hands that I was in the presence of greatness, and since then I have always owned a small group of books that I treat as though they are religious icons. One book in my family was a self-published autobiography by one of my mother's ancestors back in Georgia or Alabama, but I was permitted to see it only once in my life before it disappeared back into Marie's private hoard of our meager family heirlooms.
Magazines were an escape for me, not the professional or spiritual calling that books were, and I read the hunting and fishing magazines my father bought, and dreamed of the day I would be old enough to be a guide in Manitoba and wear a red-and-black plaid shirt, own a 30-.30 carbine and a birch-bark canoe. I seldom if ever thought of writing for magazines then, or of writing books; I only wanted to own them so I could enjoy them on my own terms.
So took the bus ticket my mother shoved at me and went back to the school. I arrived late in the day. I told the dean’s wife, who worked in an office at the entrance of the dormitory, that I came back for my things and that I was leaving the next day. She told me that if I left again I could never come back. I welcomed the news. I had about nine dollars in my account, from doing extra work in addition to my normal duties, and the dean’s wife told me she would use part of it to mail a box of my books if I filled and addressed the box. She would send the rest of my money in a letter.
Neither the books nor the money ever came. My mother may have had something to do with that because she would never discuss it. On the other hand, perhaps the pettiness of the school embarrassed her. It is one of those tiny mysteries we can never solve.
I was very hungry when I arrived, of course, but decided against eating the evening meal with the other students, so I stayed in my room, to my roommate’s distress. Nor did I eat breakfast the next morning. Each morning in pretty weather the whole school gathered around the flagpole between the two dormitories to pray, sing, and hear announcements. I wanted to make a final statement to the school so I waited until this ceremony was well under way, then walked out so everyone could see me. I forced myself to walk slowly rather than scurrying. To my relief, no member of the staff came to talk to me, none wished me good luck or said goodbye. I was entirely on my own, and I assume I was used as an example in lectures by the administration to other students.
Suddenly I saw someone break ranks and run my way. I looked and it was Donna Coe. She ran past me and told me to wait. She ran into the kitchen and soon came out carrying a paper sack fat with food. She hardly broke stride as she handed it to me, told me goodbye and went back to the formation.
That is the only act of kindness I remember from Sunny Dale Academy, although since it is a religious school there must have been others. But only Donna’s friendship remains in my memory. I burst into tears and cried almost all the way to the highway. I cried because of Donna’s generosity and I cried because I had never been so defeated. While I had fantasies of running away from home and going Out West as had some of my uncles and cousins, I was much more stubborn than I had given myself credit for. I no longer was afraid of my mother. I knew she wouldn’t kill me and I knew that I could stay away from her except for a few hours at night, so I headed home with my little bag of belongings, ashamed of the way I had failed at the school but determined to get on with my life. I had fantasies and daydreams to make real, and fortunately all of them were of my becoming a success in life. None were self-destructive. I did not want to fight with her, and I did not want to get even with her by becoming a criminal or doing anything else to shame or humiliate her.
As I walked away from Sunny Dale Academy that morning I assumed some of the people were watching me as I stood beside the highway, thumb at the ready. Luckily I caught a ride with the first car that came by. It was an elderly couple in a Kaiser sedan. They had no questions about the school, and seemed glad to have company for at least part of their journey.

A postscript: As I was writing this book, it occurred to me that I should have tried to find Donna Coe at least fifty years ago to tell her how much her generosity meant to me. I found that the school has an alumni association and I told the representative of my class who I was looking for and why. He knew Donna by name and said she was a good friend of a relative, and that he would contact her. I waited a month and contacted him again but never received an answer, and almost certainly never will.
If you read this book, Donna Coe, please understand: I only wanted to thank you.