Frances Stebbins
Correspondent
{This is a chapter in a Memoir, “Give Light…” of the six decades the author has spent writing about faith communities in daily, weekly and monthly news publications covering the western third of Virginia.}
At mid-20th Century in downtown Roanoke there existed a store known as Easter Supply. Its title had nothing to do with the most sacred Christian holiday but was the name of its owner, John E. Easter, an active member of South Roanoke Methodist Church.
As I entered upon my duties as the new Church News reporter for the afternoon daily newspaper, “The Roanoke World-News” and went twice monthly to the meetings of the Roanoke Ministers Conference, I soon encountered this elderly and genial man who occupied a pew with the ordained at the meeting place of First Baptist Church.
Soon I learned that his presence was an honorary tribute to this businessman who for many years had treated the membership to a spring day-away. It was known simply as “an outing” and was held in late May. The group then recessed until September.
In my early days of attending the conference to let the reading public know of what actions the collective white, male, Protestant clergy took on moral issues, these events were paid for entirely by Mr. Easter. Wives of the ministers were included.
The pastors traveled in alternating years to The Greenbrier resort in southern West Virginia or The Natural Bridge Hotel closer by in Rockbridge County.
Since Mr. Easter’s stationery store handled books on religion and supplies needed in church offices, one today might find such treats for likely customers inappropriate. Were the elegant lunches preceded and followed by a nationally known theologian a bribe? If so, I never heard that suggested. Though they surely set back financially the benefactor, they were treated as a gift and naturally were much enjoyed. Loyal church people know their minister hardly chooses his or her vocation for money, and the day offered an opportunity for not only an elegant meal but the chance to hear one of the important figures in the field.
The outings came to an end several years after I began my dual career of motherhood and occasional coverage of special events. With the closing of the store and the benefactor’s subsequent death, they were not replaced until decades later when one-day retreats – paid for by participants, however – were often held at a nearby church conference center.
Two memorable events at the outings remain with me from these mid-century days.
Soon after my 1953 arrival, The Greenbrier was the destination. Unable yet to drive, I begged a lift with a pastor and his two companions. With the meeting starting at 11 a.m. and the mountain roads to White Sulphur Springs unimproved by speedy interstates, we did not get out of Roanoke until past 9:30 p.m.
The pastor, nameless even after all these years, took the curves “like a bat out of hell.” Without seat belts, I held on and silently prayed the Spirit would get us there alive. If the trip by U.S. 220 was bad, coming home by Virginia 311 was worse. In the coming years, my husband drove us.
Of more significance was what happened the next year on May 17, 1954. By then the racial unrest and pressure to require the South to rid itself of segregation of negroes was making itself felt.
The clergy, most of whom took a liberal stand on the need to bring about the mixing of the races in all public facilities, had just issued a statement looking to that as hope. As was the custom in those days before instant communication, I found a typewriter at the Natural Bridge Hotel, wrote my story and called it into the City Room. As I dictated it to my colleague Frank Starkey, he told me the news had just come on the Associated Press wire.
The U.S. Supreme Court had acted to bring about the clergymen’s desired end.
The repercussions would last for decades with my own denomination in the forefront of conflict in the years to come. It’s history now but sadly repeating itself like a wound picked from healing.
In the years after the spring outings ceased, the ministers moved, not only to broadening the conference membership to include African-American pastors but also to an outreach which continues, attention to those behind bars.
