My Autobiography

Back when I had just become a teenager my dad gave me his old family Victrola complete with some old records from his family in Virginia. Some of these old records were gospel songs of famous quartets like 'The Carter family', 'The Chuck Wagon Gang' and 'The Smokey Mountain Boys'. Of course that type of music was different from what we heard over the radio back then and even now.

I grew up in a typical middleclass neighborhood on Mulberry Street in Daytona Beach, Florida. Mulberry Street is on the mainland side of town, east of US 1, west of Beach Street and the part we lived on was south of Madison Ave.

My family never went to church so neither did I. Therefore I grew up American pagan. But one day I stopped by a church in our neighborhood. These church people were singing old fashioned gospel songs just like I heard from that old Victrola my dad gave me. This church was of a holiness denomination called the First Church of the Nazarene. They had a song leader who was a very big man. He was both very tall and very heavy; he must have weighed over 400lbs, and he had a booming voice.

Sometimes I would stop by that church when they were singing. The song leader, that big man, would tell them the page number of the song and hum the key so that the congregation could start to sing. But once he started singing too, no one could hear anyone else but him. His voice carried up and down the street and even across the street. His singing somehow made me shake; I liked the feeling even though I did not fully understand it back then. Folks in the neighborhood said that he was an anointed singer set apart by God with the gift of praise. Others said that he was the only truly sanctified man that they had ever seen. In any case this was the first time I ever felt God. No one had ever told me that it was even possible to feel God. So I must have had that old 'hard shell, hog and hominy' Baptist belief drilled into me; that any religious experience or relationship with God was based on rules, regulations and laws of scripture or faith that one just accepted as true instead of any feelings at all.

Around the same time a TV Program came on the air each week called: 'The Happy Goodman's'. They sang the same old gospel tunes that that church sang. So I thought that that same feeling like exhilaration with shaking might happen again as the wife of the evangelist, Vestal Goodman also sang with an anointed voice. By this time I had learned by experience that the anointing on others somehow made me shake. One day they described how this anointing had come on Vestal.

Vestal Goodman and her husband Howard were holding revivals in a small town in Louisiana. A bad hurricane had come through, torn the tent and things up and rained all over the electrical equipment so that they had no working microphone. Vestal got up to sing anyway by faith with her soft soprano voice. Just then the Holy Spirit came upon her and her voice boomed throughout that tattered tent, everyone heard her. Her shocked family was astonished and asked what had happened. An old woman replied that the Spirit of God had just anointed her with power to do what God wanted done.

Since that day the fame of this woman and her voice has gone throughout the land and even onto television, which was just black and white back in those days. Although I was still not yet a born again Christian, nevertheless I watched that show religiously every week because it made me feel good and I got to shake just like a 'holy roller' even though I was just an unsaved street kid.

About that same time, a Baptist evangelist who drove a new Cadillac car put up a big tent to hold revival in Holly Hill, Florida, the town next door. I remember that his tent was put up in a swampy area which is now filled in and has luxury homes built there. I guess those people living in those luxury homes would be horrified to know that their expensive homes were built on filled in swamp.

These Baptist people sang those same gospel tunes, but without any feeling in them. Nevertheless I went forward to get saved anyway since I wanted to get closer to God in order to shake. But since there was no feeling in that experience and I never shook there, it did not seem to last.

It lasted a little while though and I even got adopted by a well to do childless couple named O'Brien who took me to every Sunday service at White Chapel Church of God where I was baptized in water in 1961. But since there was no feeling there in time I fell away into naughtiness, common to the street life I grew up in. Gradually my bad behavior sank into open sin. In time I was convicted of forgery and sent away to serve a couple of years in the Florida State Prison. But then my second chance to experience God and shake 'big-time' began right in that prison.

This was really weird but before I share it, let me describe my prison experience first. At first I was somewhat apprehensive because I was a good looking former surfer with blonde hair. Back then I was already a high school graduate with some college and could also type, therefore the classification supervisor of the Florida prison system had me become his new clerk. This was a trustee position complete with a white uniform and a special pass to go anywhere in the prison without having to be guarded.

My prison job involved my assembling of all important papers on each new inmate for the classification committee. Only free people, employees of the State of Florida get to do that same kind of work now. But back in those days I got to do it. These papers I had to acquire and assemble included official court commitment papers with any pre-sentence investigation reports or probation and parole papers, psychological reports made by the prison psychologist including IQ tests, social reports of the classification officer, chaplain's report and custody recommendation of the prison guards and whatever else was pertinent to that particular case including ID pictures and all demographic data.

Working with these papers required personal trust. I was not allowed to disclose whatever I saw. I remember one strange case that appalled me back then and still troubles me some as I wonder how a person created in the image of God could possibly do such an evil act. I'm talking about a young Black man who told everyone that he got twenty years for robbery when the court commitment papers showed he had sexually assaulted an infant by sticking his finger into her. If I had ventured to set the record straight, that guy's life would have been forfeit and I did not want his blood on my hands so I kept my mouth shut.

Otherwise this prison job was just like any other nine to five office job. Only we...