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Gospel Trailblazer

MOODY PUBLISHERS

Chapter One

Memories of Family, Fun and Faith

I could not believe my ears. Wanda Young, the one girl in all the world with whom I wanted to spend the rest of my life, had dumped me.

It was 1940, and I was a rising young musician in a popular dance band with a bright future. I had just asked Wanda to be my wife. I promised her fame and fortune, because I was sure one day my band would be known from coast to coast as one of the great swing orchestras. I had earned a reputation around Cleveland as a blazing young talent on the clarinet and alto saxophone. But Wanda was not impressed. Nor was she swept off her feet by my dreams of our future together. She had other ideas-ideas that were radically different from mine.

"Howard," she said, "even though I love you, I love Christ more. Therefore, unless you accept Jesus Christ as your personal Savior, I will not be able to see you anymore, because we'll have nothing more in common with each other."

What? How strange these words sounded coming out of my girlfriend's seventeen-year-old mouth. She spoke in that same tender and sweet voice I had grown to adore. But this time there was an unmistakable edge to her tone. It was an edge that left no doubt in my mind: This young woman was not kidding. Her seriousness was neither impersonal nor arrogant. It was just a matter of fact. She was telling the truth. God had done something profound in her heart. Sadly, I was still too caught up in my own hopes and ambitions to understand that.

What did she mean about accepting Jesus Christ as my personal Savior? Hadn't I been there and done that? After all, I thought, I was just as religious as she was. Wasn't I a member of a church? Hadn't I been baptized? Wasn't that enough religion for one man?

Not enough for Wanda. She had taken her "religion" to a new level. As I argued with myself for a response to her words, she challenged me further by saying, "Now that I am saved, I have a strong conviction that God has something better for you in life than a career in the dance orchestra business."

Despite her gentle appearance, she spoke with the firmness of a woman who had made up her mind. "God has shown me this jazz orchestra and all that goes with it does not really glorify Him," she said. "So, I am going to pray for your conversion, that God would deliver you from the dance band."

Whoa, now let's hold on a minute! Deliver me from the dance band? Deliver me from my dream? I wasn't sure I liked that prayer. But what could I say?

Listening to Wanda's words that night, I felt the answer to her prayers would be the end of me. Instead, it proved to be the real beginning of Howard Jones.

THE ROOTS OF THE MATTER

Before I go any farther, I suppose I should back up and tell you a little bit about where I come from. Then, perhaps, you'll understand better the slow and steady dance God used to woo me to Himself. The fact that He used the influence of a beautiful young woman to get through to me, in retrospect, was a nice touch. However, back then it felt like I was being squeezed in a vice grip.

I was born April 12, 1921, in Cleveland, Ohio. It was there I spent my boyhood and started school. My musical career began in Cleveland, as well. My father, Howard O. Jones Sr., was a lover of music and encouraged my younger brother, Clarence, and me to learn to play musical instruments by the time we were eight and six. I chose the clarinet; Clarence chose the trumpet.

My father was a plasterer by trade. I'll always remember his big, brown, calloused hands and how firm yet gentle they could be. My mother, Josephine Jones, was a wonderful woman. Besides taking care of Clarence and me, she worked as a housekeeper. After we got a little older, she opened her own beauty parlor.

We lived on the east side of Cleveland. My dad's mother, Mary Mungeon, lived in Oberlin, the picturesque little town thirty-five miles southwest of Cleveland that is home to the famous abolitionist school Oberlin College, which for a time, during the 1800s, claimed the legendary revivalist Charles Finney as president.

My ancestors had arrived in Cleveland fifteen years after the Civil War. My great-grandmother Jane Martin had been born into slavery on a Virginia plantation, but she dreamed of going north one day and dipping her hands in the waters of Lake Erie. For her, that would be a way of knowing she was finally free.

After the war, the Emancipation Proclamation granted freedom to the slaves. In time, my great-grandmother, a woman of courage and action, mobilized her husband, Henry, their two daughters (the youngest of whom was my grandmother, Mary), and other extended family members and made the trek northward. "Someday you'll drink from Lake Erie," she promised her daughters.

So by foot, oxcart, train, and boat, the family finally arrived in Ohio in April 1881. They had no friends, no place to stay, and little money, but they had each other and were getting ever closer to fulfilling my great-grandmother's vision. Grandma Mary remembers her mom's reassurances: "Jesus is with us and will provide for us," Jane Martin would say. Then she'd begin to sing, "Where He leads me, I will follow."

After short stopovers in Huntington and Cincinnati, the Martin family did make it to Cleveland, where they triumphantly walked the shores of Lake Erie. And, oh yes, they took a drink!

Two years later, the family moved to Oberlin, where they joined other black families in organizing the historic Mount Zion Baptist Church. There were about four hundred black folk in Oberlin at that time-one-fifth of the population-and my ancestors soon took a prominent role among the Negroes of the community.

My great-grandparents died in the early 1900s. Grandma Mary, who was twenty years old when her family moved to Oberlin, had married my grandfather, Goglin Jones, in Cleveland before settling in Oberlin. A wig maker (and all-around businesswoman), Grandmother Mary ran a shop on Main Street in Oberlin. After my grandfather's death, she went on to marry Samuel Mungeon. Samuel Mungeon was an interesting fellow-6'3", 250 pounds. He was a farmer through and through. He ate a bowl of rice every morning and credited that habit for his sturdy health. He was from the Deep South and couldn't read or write. But he had a good heart and taught us practical life lessons.

Grandma Mungeon built two beautiful homes on Quebec Avenue in Cleveland-one in the front and a two-family structure that sat farther back on the lot. We lived in the first house, and the second house was rented out. Grandma asked her son, my dad, to manage the property, which he did.

CHILDHOOD REFLECTIONS

Our neighborhood was a lovely, middle-class community. It was an integrated neighborhood. That's not to say there wasn't racial friction in our community-but more on that later.

Clarence and I grew up knowing children of different races. Across the street and to the left of us, lived Italian families. To the right of us, lived a black family. On the corner, there was a Jewish store. In another section of the neighborhood, there were Bohemian families. We grew up playing with kids of different cultures and colors. As I look back, I'm thankful for that because it prepared me for the many cross-cultural situations I've faced throughout my ministry.

Clarence and I were generally good kids. We'd get into mischief like any other little boys, but our parents instilled in us a good sense of right and wrong. Our rebellion was the short-lived kind that was easily cured by a swift spanking.

Our "running buddies" were the boys from next door and across the street. We had a great time playing ball, shooting marbles-you name it. Occasionally, we'd get into a scrap if someone attempted to cheat in a game or for some other forgettable cause. But for the most part, we were a united group-black, Italian, German, Bohemian. If a strange kid wandered into the neighborhood and attempted to "put us in our place" by calling the black kids "niggers," we'd all beat him up and send him flying out of our area. Our social contract didn't allow much room for racial ugliness.

We enjoyed visiting our grandparents in Oberlin. Oberlin was a smaller town, yet there seemed to be more to do there for two young boys who loved to run in the woods and play baseball.

One summer we were visiting our grandparents in Oberlin, when Grandpa Mungeon recruited us to help him with farm work. On this particular August day, we had plans to participate in a ball game down at the park grounds. But Grandpa Mungeon had other plans. "I want you boys to come out and we're going to plant some late corn," he said. Late corn was the variety of the plant that was sowed for a late-summer harvest.

"But, Grandpa, we got a game at around one o'clock," I said. But the urgency of our appointment failed to impress Grandpa Mungeon.

"Your ball game can wait," he said. "You're going to plant corn."

And that was the end of it.

So we went out to the cornfield, and he gave us buckets of corn seeds that had been soaking in water overnight. This made them very soft.

This was the plan: Grandpa would form several rows with his hoe, making holes at regular intervals. Our job was to drop three kernels of corn in each hole and cover them up with soil using our spades.

Grandpa took his hoe and formed three long rows of holes for us to plant the seeds in, and then he went on the other end of the field. Resigned to our fate, Clarence and I went to work, putting three kernels of corn in each hole and covering them. We had nearly completed the second lane when the sun really started to beat down on us. Grandpa was prepared, though. He signaled us to take a break and brought us cups of cold lemonade. This provided temporary relief-but it was still brutally hot and getting hotter. So I devised a plan. I said to my brother, "Clarence, let's start putting four kernels of corn in each hole." He liked that idea, too.

Our grandfather, in the meantime, was admiring our handiwork from afar. "How are you boys doing?" he hollered from across the field.

"Oh, fine," we replied, trying to conceal our satisfaction over the new planting system we'd engineered.

"When you finish that pail of corn, then we'll knock off, get some lunch, and then you boys can go play ball," Grandpa said.

We smiled and started dropping even more seeds in the holes-four became five, five became six, until soon we were dumping fistfuls of corn in the remaining holes. In no time our bucket was empty, and we were released to eat lunch and play ball.

We went home to Cleveland the next day. And of course, we never told Grandpa about our little timesaving technique. We didn't have to.

A couple of weeks later, Grandpa was tending to his fields when he noticed something peculiar about his corn crop. "I see some of my corn is coming up great," he said to himself. "But what happened up here?" As he moved through the field, the corn went from perfect single stalks to weedlike bushes of the plant. His crop was ruined. It didn't take him long at all to know what had happened. "Those little rascals," he said.

Needless to say, Grandpa was angry. The sun was beating down, just as it had been two weeks earlier. And he just stood there, massaging his forehead with one hand, leaning on his hoe with the other. Later, he told us his first thought was, "Oh, I'd like to get those rascals. I'd wear their bottoms out." But then he started laughing. And he called my dad and told him what happened. He said, "Howard, don't whip them. I guess I worked them too hard."

If only Dad had taken his advice.

There were darker memories, too. A few blocks away from our home in Cleveland was a large bakery that specialized in cookies and breads. On a nice day, you could smell the sweet aroma of freshly baked oatmeal cookies drifting in the air.

On one side of the bakery there was a store where people from the neighborhood bought day-old goods. On the other side of the building was a dumping area where the bakery would leave its garbage and refuse materials for the city to pick up. One summer day, when I was about ten, my brother and I and a couple of our friends were exploring this dumping ground, poking through the trash with sticks, looking for some "buried treasure." We were having a good time. Then I saw it-a large shoebox that looked like it had just come off a department store shelf. And when I mindlessly kicked the box, it felt like there might still be a pair of shoes inside.

Thinking I had hit the mother lode, I picked up the box and removed the lid to see what looked like a white baby doll. It was adorned in a pretty little dress with a cute hat on its head and pink booties on its feet. I wondered why such a nice doll would be left in this dump. But when I touched the doll's cheek, I knew that it was not a doll but a real little person-a lifeless baby girl. I stepped back in fear, and without thinking dropped the shoebox. I called Clarence and the other boys over to show them my discovery. We were all frightened.

I ran to get my father. When he arrived, he examined the shoebox's contents. He could tell immediately that it was a baby. "Some poor woman has discarded her child," he said.

Dad called the police. They briefly questioned us, and then took the little body away. We imagined that we would eventually read about the police's investigation in the paper, but we never heard anything about it again.

To this day, I can see the image of that precious little girl, dressed so beautifully, abandoned in a shoebox coffin. Nowadays, you hear about discarded babies being discovered all the time. When I hear these reports, it breaks my heart in the deepest way. But back then, for a wide-eyed little boy, it was especially jarring. I remember saying to myself how glad I was that my mother and father hadn't thrown my brother and me away when we were born.

I can't think of any kids I grew up with who did not have fathers at home. There might have been one or two exceptions, but as a rule all the dads in our community took care of their children. Our neighborhood was composed of loving families-not perfect ones, of course. But, unlike so many neighborhoods today, we had community. Everybody looked out for everyone else. The lawns were maintained, flowers were planted around each home, and everyone took pride in his house. That meant a lot to us.

Mind you, this was during the Great Depression. Money was scarce, jobs were in short supply, and the value of a daily meal was not taken for granted. Some of the people worked hard to make do on what little they could afford.

Still, in our neighborhood we didn't have any slums. The people sacrificed. The fathers went out and got jobs.

Continues...

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Excerpted from Gospel Trailblazer by Howard O. Jones Copyright © 2003 by HOWARD O. JONES
Excerpted by permission. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

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