“FAITH OF OUR FOLKS”

Recently I had reason to visit the online presence of the church I grew up in. It’s no longer located on the trolley stop corner of Plum and Clay Streets in Lancaster, Pennsylvania as it was when Elvis and I rocked rompers.

Thirty years ago, Mount Calvary Lutheran Church, after 90 years in my hometown’s Sixth Ward, moved Bibles, hymnals, coffee urn and baptismal font out of the city into the suburbs. Today, they’re residing and rejoicing at 308 Petersburg Road, Lititz, but I was pleased to see, their website remembers the congregation’s Lancaster City origins. A menu button offers home page visitors what it calls “Our Story.”

I tapped on those entrancing words and soon read: “”Two educational wings were added over the years – one in 1955 and one in 1969.” 

Cool. That first Sunday School addition, I remember being built. I had just turned 14 and Elvis, not much older, was still playing raunchy country carnivals out back of Tupelo.

On ground-breaking Sunday, we lusty Lutherans in Lancaster’s North End – I probably the youngest voting member – all trooped out into the vacant lot behind the fifty-year-old church immediately following the morning service.  Venerable worthies lined up with Pastor Sanuel S. Shore – a shovel in his hand – and NEW ERA photographer and fellow church member Eddie Sachs snapped their picture.

Did we sing? Of course we did – probably “The Church’s One Foundation,” still one of my favorites and, I’d like to think, a favorite of Gospel-loving Elvis, too.

That hymn reveals in its opening lines the secret of how Christians build and care for their houses of worship: “The Church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ, Our Lord.”

 My mother Susie Hambright’s favorite hymn carries the vision further: “Jesus loves me, this I know…. for the Bible tells me so.” With her primary class, Mom’s dear friend Jane Banzhof sang those words, too, I’m sure – every single Sunday – to her three-, four- and five-year-olds.

Maybe that’s why I was particularly moved to read in “Our Story” this bit from Mount Calvary’s early history: “By June 1905, it was apparent the chapel would soon be too small, so in faith” – in faith – “two lots on the corner of Plum and Clay streets were purchased. By February 1906, construction had been authorized for the new church which was subsequently completed and dedicated on November 4, 1906.”

“In faith” – we’re told – the tiny congregation acted – including, for some of us, our grandparents and their parents. Dimes were collected. Dollars, raised. And within a single year at the heart of Lancaster’s Sixth Ward, the church so many of us would come to love as children first raised its beautiful Lord-of-the-Rings tower to the heavens.

Faith accomplished that miracle in the year of the San Francisco earthquake – faith in Jesus Christ, and his Gospel message, and – Pastor Shore would remind us – the saving work of his death and resurrection. Faith not only moves mountains, it digs foundation holes, raises brick walls, installs stained-glass windows. And hangs a bell to bring in the faithful.

 I saw that work firsthand in the summer of 1955 when my father and I every evening would walk from our home two blocks away to check on things at the new Sunday School wing’s construction site. Some nights it seemed nothing had happened. Other days, we couldn’t believe how quickly new bricks had gone in, new walls had sprung up.

 We soon got inspired to pitch in and add labor of our own. While Wohlsen Construction workers banged and clattered outside, Dad and I cleaned up the old church basement.

For decades my father John E. Hambright Sr, had presided over that low-ceilinged room as Sunday School superintendent. And just that spring in its fluorescently lit mildew, I’d completed two years of weekly confirmation classes – memorizing the entire LUTHER’S SMALL CATECHISM and endless verses from the King James BIBLE – under the no-nonsense drill of Pastor Shore, whom no one ever called Sam. 

It seemed only meet, right and salutary to be praising God by kneeling down beside my Dad. I felt blessed. We bonded. Together we got high on intoxicating floor adhesive while laying out Armstrong linoleum tiles made just blocks away on West Liberty Street.

One morning as we arrived for work, we met elderly church member George Sachs, Eddie’ father, at the side entrance to the church. He’d dug foundation holes of his own all along the grassy strip from the corner of Plum and Clay down to where the Wohlsen boys were working next door to the Kissinger’s house. Beside each one, Mr. Sachs had placed an evergreen bush he intended to plant that hour.

 George Sachs, a jeweler retired from Appel & Weber, was one of the last survivors of Mount Calvary’s founding members. As director of the church’s orchestra – when churches still had such things, in the days of silent movies – he had taught my father, as a boy, to play the violin – or, as my father’s youngest sister Ruth always called it, “Bud’s screechbox.”

Our family’s matriarchs – great-grandmother Lilian Harnish Miller and her daughter, my grandmother, Clara Hambright – joined with John and George Sachs, two of Lancaster educator J. P. McCaskey’s legendary “Jack’s Boys – to sign Mount Calvary’s constitution the year Puccini debuted MADAME BUTTERFLY.

 Many of the young church founders were barely out of their teens and most were newlyweds and young parents. Those years, all over our fair city and across our fertile acres– and throughout the nation – a religious revival among young American families built churches like Lancaster’s Otterein EUB, St Andrews E&R and Mount Calvary LCMS – just to name three within minutes of my house.

 By the time I knew them, most of Mount Calvary’s pioneers walked down the aisle with snow-white hair and a totter and carried canes. Mr. John Sachs, long retired from the umbrella factory, sat up in the second row and held to his ear throughout Pastor’s sermon a radio receiver on a stick that he had hand-crafted and wired to a mike on the pulpit.

 Steadily, throughout my early years, those gently failing old folks melted away one by one. Among the departed lay my great-grandmother, born the year Lincoln passed through Lancaster on his way to the White House.  The year after Grammaw Miller’s death in December 1947, her daughter, my grandmother, joined our tiny, sweet matriarch in the company of heaven.

By 1955, John Sachs’s younger brother George was among the few of the old-timers still around to welcome Mount Calvary’s new Sunday School addition. He stood up beside his last-planted evergreen that hot July morning we encountered him and mopped his brow.

 “You might wonder,” I remember him telling Dad and me, “why I’m planting bushes already when the new Sunday School’s not done. Gotta work fast if I want to see them grow up.”

 My father loved telling that story after Mr. Sachs was gone. I’m sure he thought of it every time he walked by George’s full-grown evergreens – not least in the summer of 1969 when the congregation added a second story to the ’55 Sunday School wing.

 In faith, George Sachs planted his shrubs. Just as years before he’d joined with young friends to plant the church itself.

In faith. 

But lest we get carried away with these tender tales, let me not forget to relate a dark chapter that took place before the shovel in Pastor Shore’s hands ever upended a single clump of sod. Voices were raised in Mount Calvary’s chancel and sometimes the rafters seemed to shake.

 At congregational meetings after Sunday morning services in 1954, members divided and debated – sometimes hotly – any number of agitating issues. Most of them came down to money. The Finance Committee tried valiantly to hold the line against the dreamers on the Sunday School staff and the ladies looking to win themselves a bigger kitchen to cook in for church socials.

 Where could Mount Calvary Lutheran Church find the means to meet a budget that threatened to shoot like a space-age rocket up, up and away into stratospheric heights. Fifty thousand dollars – where could Mount Calvary find fifty thousand dollars?

 Then, next meeting, revised figures were presented. A mistake had been made. Sixty thousand would be needed. I remember members raising their fists and shouting: “Enough. Stop.”

But the majority that day voted to begin a capital campaign. Pledges got made. Architects submitted plans.

Wohlsen Brothers came on board and found time for Mount Calvary among their many other projects which then included finishing up Lancaster’s new public library on North Duke and getting started on the new public safety building on East Chestnut. The busy contractors estimated final construction costs would come in at around $75,000, maybe $80,000 until all was said and done.

 For the first time in my fourteen years, I heard the word mortgage. My father shook his head at the dinner table and said he never thought he’d see the day. “The builders are just rounding off figures without any explanation,” he said. ‘It’s never just a few peanuts more, it’s another jumbo bag.”

The final tab for Mount Calvary’s beautiful new Sunday School building – I’ve never forgotten it – was a whopping one hundred thousand dollars. To this day, the number gives me the shivers – although I just read rock stars get charged that amount now just for new dentures.

 But six figures never shook the resolve of Mount Calvary Lutheran Church at the corner of Plum and Clay Streets in Lancaster, Pennsylvania. In fact, our people didn’t stop with the Sunday School building.

 The very next year – the country prosperous, the world at peace, Elvis a star – it was decided to re-do the old church auditorium which hadn’t had an upgrade since my father’s baptism. The organ was rebuilt, thanks to the musical Sachs family. And stalwart Chester “Chet” Wilhelm, an Armstrong executive, cleverly enlisted the services of his company’s crack design staff who came up with astonishing new Idea House colors for Mount Calvary’s chancel.

 Mauve was decorator Hazel Dell Brown’s choice. Had any of us ever heard of mauve?  It’s a muted, slightly neon, purple, Ms. Brown attested: it will complement to perfection the new walnut altar and lectern, ministers’ chairs and baptismal fount.

 Spectacular, our refurbished church would be. As we met for worship temporarily
at the YMCA downtown, we envisioned all our Sundays to come. Thrilling as Elvis. Glamorous as Marilyn Monroe.  And as novel as the peach fuzz on my fourteen-year-old cheek.

 Even we high schoolers were provided for. A new Youth Choir was set up under the direction of Mr. George’s Sachs daughter, organist Ann Robey – my buddy Butch’s mother – and we early rock and rollers were decked out in robes that matched awesomely Mount Calvary’s brand-new neon purple walls.

“Cool,” we teens all said. “Very cool.”

By John Earl Hambright