The Ralph Sexton Story
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THE LIBRARY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF NORTH CAROLINA AT CHAPEL HILL THE COLLECTION OF NORTH CAROLINIANA PRESENTED BY Theodore C. and Betty Lou Kerner Fund FOR USE ONLY IN THE NORTH CAROLINA COLLECTION Form No. A-368, Rev. 8/95 wqr" m From The Mountains Came The Light b^ .y £00§: The Trials, Triumphs, and Good Times of a Mountain Preacher with Bob Terrell irUNC-CH for Duke It isn't every man who gets to commit his life's story to paper and see it printed in book form. Bob Terrell and I discussed the writing of my life's story for a number of years, and I am indebted to him for doing it for me. We met more than fifty times at Holiday Inn West in Asheville, North Carolina, and after lunch and fellowship managed to tape an hour or two of the story. Bob then put all of this together in the way I feel only he can do, for he is an expert writer who understands what he writes about. Bob has written more than fifteen books, and at least four were "as told to" books in which he figuratively had to become the person he wrote about. He had to learn to think, to talk, and to act like the persons about whom he wrote. This is the first time he had to become a preacher. I think he was a good one. Ralph Sexton, Sr. Asheville, North Carolina mnn Iruu 1H —From The Mountains Came The Light The trials, triumphs, and good times of a mountain preacher with BOB TERRELL © 1987 Ralph Sexton, Sr. and Bob Terrell All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce any mate- rial without the express written permission of the publisher, Bob Terrell, 55 Dillingham Road, Asheville, NC 28805. Printed in the United States of America C6 TO JACQUELINE "Whoso findeth a wife findeth a good thing, and ob- taineth favor of the Lord."—Proverbs 18:22 Seven years I prayed. God answered my prayers and sent my "Rebecca" (my wife Jacqueline). She has been a total fulfillment of this Scripture. 2 OTHER BOOKS BY BOB TERRELL J. D. Sumner—Gospel Music Is My Life! Fun Is Where You Find It! Holy Land: A Journey Into Time A Touch of Terrell Billy Graham in Hungary Grandpa's Town Woody (with Barbara Shelton) Old Gold The Peace That Passeth Understanding (with Connie Hopper) Disorder in the Court! (with Marcellus Buchanan) Billy Graham in the Soviet Union Keep 'em Laughing Papa Coke (with Sanders Rowland) . CONTENTS 1. A Boy's World 1 2. Drafted By The Lord 22 3. West End 44 4. Building A Tabernacle 53 5. The Holy Ghost 59 6. Jailbirds for Jesus 64 7. A Memorable Year 84 8. On The Air 96 9. Wedding Bells 103 10. Sergeant York 117 11. "God Will Take Care of You" . 127 12. No Beds of Roses 135 13. The Holy Land 152 14. Tomorrow Will Be Better 174 15. My Churches 184 16. Seeing Is Believing 200 17. Spreading The Word 207 18. Philosophy 224 "Because he hath set his love upon me, there- fore will I deliver him: I will set him on high, because he hath known my name." Psalm 91:14 — 1 — A Boy's World Although I don't remember a thing about it, I first saw the light of day on September 14, 1919, in a little house on Sassafras Gap. To pinpoint the location exactly, Sassafras Gap is on Elk Mountain just beyond Buzzard Rock. If you don't know where that is, it's about seven or eight miles north as the crow flies from Pack Square, the center of Asheville, North Carolina. I was a mountaineer by birth, and I wouldn't take anything for that heritage. It is price- less to me. All of that mountain was planted in orchard during World War I, and my father, Charles Harrison Sexton, hired out to a Dr. Carroll to look after the orchard during the war. My dad missed the war. He was expecting to be drafted in the next call late in 1918, but the war ended on November 1 1 and he didn't have to go. My mother was Mary Elizabeth Shetley, and she, like my father, was a typical mountaineer. She was part Chero- kee Indian, so I have some of the blood of that great In- dian nation in my veins. I was sixth in a line of nine children born to my parents, six boys and three girls. The second daughter, Henrietta, was stillborn. The other eight of us are still alive at this writing, and we are, in descending order: Evelyn Lind- berg, Paul, Perry, Lee, me, Raymond, Ethel Hyatt, and Frank. The eight of us have experienced almost six hun- dred years of living, and we are thankful to God for that. What a blessing! —that God would give one family that much life. 1 We were not reared in a strong Christian home, but we were like other mountain people: We had strong princi- ples and good morals. We believed in Christ and truly loved God, but were not Christians in the way we are to- day. Our home was strict, though not like a military camp. Mountaineers didn't do a lot of talking, but we did a lot of living—family living. We didn't have a family altar, and we didn't sit down and pray together, but our parents taught us respect for others and respect for other people's property. They taught us manners and grace. They wanted all those traits to be instilled in each one of us. My brother Lee, which is short for Leroy, remembers when I was five or six months old and our father built a little one-room Sunday School over on Ox Creek. Coming up the mountain from Asheville, a visitor came first to Buzzard Rock, then Sassafras Gap where he crossed the mountain, and the first creek on the other side of the mountain was Ox Creek. If we looked out the front door of that Sunday School, we saw Mount Mitchell. Ralph Poole, who ran Poole Dry Cleaners in Asheville, came over each week and taught Sunday School. Our growing-up time was rough on us. Daddy was a cleaner and dyer by trade, but he couldn't always get work, especially after our nation was plunged into the Great Depression. We lived on the mountain in Sassafras Gap until I was about five years old. Then we moved to the Asheville side of the mountain into a two-story house on Beaverdam Road, where the road forked at Webb's orchard. It was about that time that I remember first coming to Asheville. My dad drove my sister and me to town in a buggy drawn by two mules. I recall my father tying the mules on Lex- ington Avenue in front of the stores, and I remember rid- ing in that buggy through the Grace section of North Asheville. Most of my childhood memories, however, come from depression times. The problem then, especially for moun- 2 tain folk, was that of real survival. At first we had to get along as get-along can. There were no handouts. We didn't have all that modern-day welfare. We were taught that if we didn't work we didn't eat, and there were times when we went hungry for lack of enough food. We spent most of our time scrounging for things the family could eat—but we scrounged honestly. Finally, the government instituted a welfare program called "commodities," but even then we mostly worked for what we ate. Through the depression we moved many times. We lived in most sections of Buncombe County and even in adjoin- ing counties. My father couldn't always find cleaning work; so he sharecropped. He could rent a farm for ten or twelve dollars a month, but we seldom came up with that kind of cash. There were so many kids that Daddy simply paid the rent by sharecropping and we all worked in the fields. We usually raised good crops and gave part of them for rent. Many mountain families lived that way. It gave us a feeling of independence. When the banks failed in 1929, things got really rough. We kids went to the fields and picked berries, gathered apples, and worked for the neighbors gathering leaves and bedding barns. We did anything we could to get food for the table. It was during that time that we resorted to commodi- ties. We rode to town to get the commodities, and there in line were always a number of people our parents knew. Times were hard, indeed, but people managed to laugh about them. Mountaineers had a lot of laughs over grape- fruits then. Most didn't know what grapefruits were, or at least pretended not to know, and they laughed about how they ate the fruits. "My Martha didn't know how to fix these things," I overheard a tall mountaineer say, pointing to a pile of grapefruit. "When I took the first ones home, she boiled 'em and boiled 'em and never could get the blamed things tender enough to eat." Another vowed his wife boiled a 3 grapefruit till it exploded, blowing seeds all over the kitchen. No one we knew thought about cursing his luck and burning the city. We simply accepted the lot in life that had been cast to us and made the most of it.