1970 Move to Akron

As mentioned, I was in my own business.  I would keep track of my time on the calendar, to charge different clients.  The month of January was nearly filled with “O’s”, representing Overhead, time lost just day-dreaming of the church, and not being able to work.

About mid-month I received a newsletter from Akron, advising of the arrival of the first of the families moving there, looking for houses.  I thought, am I really going to just sit here and miss it all?  Finally, the Lord provided a business trip for me to go to Ft. Wayne, with a stop in Cleveland.

I recalled that one of the brothers with Witness Lee visiting us the prior month was Titus Chu from Cleveland.  So when the plane stopped in Cleveland, I called him, and he said “Oh praise the Lord, brother, we’ll be right down and pick you up!”  I said “No, no, I’m just on the way to Ft. Wayne, but on the way back I’ll stop.”  And that is what I did.

Brother Titus prevailed upon me to stay for three days.  We went to a Lord’s Day meeting in Mansfield, Ohio, and then accompanied saints as they considered a building suitable for meeting, and searched for houses.  The search for houses continued during a rainy Monday in Akron.  As we were driving around the streets with closely-spaced houses I asked Titus “Where do the children play?”  The answer was “In the street.”  This was rather the low point in my entire visit, and a blow to my soul life which we term “the old man”.

When it came time to go home, Titus asked me what I was going to do regarding Akron.  I asked him what I should do.  He said “I don’t know what you should do.  The Lord knows what you should do.  You know what you should do.”  And immediately I was clear.  I should move to Akron.  At that time the way we were meeting in East Hartland, Connecticut was considered by brother Lee and Titus as the church in East Hartland.  For me to leave there without the approval of the leading one(s) was considered comparable to a sister who left her husband to move to a locality where there was a church.

I flew home and walked into a meeting in progress at our house and said that our family was moving to Akron.  Marjorie immediately started crying, and our pastor bounced right up and said “Now just a minute, you have a responsibility here!”  Later Marjorie said that her tears were tears of joy, because she had felt that I had not been following that close with the Lord and this was an answer to her prayer.

The situation ultimately resolved itself.  I remember visiting Akron again, driving the New York Throughway, singing to myself the hymn “We have a Most Glorious King”.  At one point in a visit to Akron I applied for and got an Ohio driver’s license.  To do that I had to turn in my Connecticut driver’s license.  To me this was a reality check, and it really hit home.  In the spring I moved into the Brother’s House in Akron.  Marjorie stayed behind until the end of June because our second daughter, Yvonne, was graduating from high school then.  I rented a building for the business in Akron.  I had several employees, but none wanted to move to Ohio.  Since I had several projects going, I had to do some hiring in Akron. 

After I had rented the building for business but before I had moved in, the church in Akron was having a mini-conference, and I volunteered my business facilities for it, and we rented chairs.  The phone was already hooked up, and in the midst of a very moving hymn somehow Bill Barker and I were on the phone.  I know it had an effect on him, because the next day, totally unplanned, he hopped a plane and was there with the church.

I hired some saints to continue my several projects, and I was also helped by other saints, in particular, Jim Young and Bill Barker.  So my business continued in Akron instead of East Hartland.  I sorely missed my family.  I can’t tell you how many times I flew back to Connecticut during those months. 

I told everyone I was moving to Akron to “die”, meaning that I was dying to self, for the Lord’s interest on earth.  The situation in Connecticut that I was leaving, was for the “natural man” nearly ideal.  Consider that all the meetings were in our home (in a 24’ x 32’ attached heated and well lit garage).  My business was also in our home.  The location was out in the country on a hilltop in northwest Connecticut with clean air.  On any cloudless night you could always see the milky way.  One spring, just outside my office window there was a large apple tree in full bloom, early.  Then there was a drop in temperature, and that tree stayed in full bloom for a whole month.  Of course I hated to leave all this.  Our family physician said sarcastically, “I presume you are moving to Akron for the air pollution”.  (In those days, pollution was bad.  Earlier that year the Cuyahoga river in Cleveland caught fire).  One night in Akron at the Brother’s House the smell of rubber from the tire plants was so bad it woke me up, and I was wondering how much worse it would get before an evacuation was called.

But the joy of meeting with all the saints far outweighed all these distractions.  Though all our children had come to the Lord, one by one, still they were restless and ready to go off in different directions.  When the family moved in June 1970 our oldest son, Gifford Jr., had already left home, gotten married, and had a son of his own, Gifford Neill III.  So we had to leave them behind.  Our oldest daughter Patricia was away at college at John Brown University in Arkansas.  Our youngest son John was six months old.  The hardest part of the move was to pick him up off the clean grass at our home in Connecticut and bring him to Akron.

The church life was pure joy.  Except for the one left behind, all our children were initially captured by it.  Even Patricia, when she came home from Arkansas, came home now to Akron.  She held out against the church life for exactly one week.  The most enjoyable times were when we gave hospitality to saints coming to Akron for conferences.  Other times of great enjoyment of fellowship included the Moving Service, where some of us brothers helped families move their belongings off moving vans into houses they had just bought.  We were forever having saints over for the evening meal, and all our friends were in the church.