Mission at Nuremberg (4 page)

The core group that formed this new Lutheran branch had fled Germany in 1839 after the German government forced it to merge with Calvinists. The synod's new constitution required new members to renounce “unionism”—worshipping with Christian clergy of other denominations—and “syncretism”—the fusion of different religions. Finally, new synod members had to agree to use “doctrinally pure agendas, hymnbooks, and catechisms.” On the denomination's centennial, in 1947, the church changed its named to the Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod.

During Gerecke's years at St. John's, the school held tight to its Saxon roots, largely because of instructions from Synod headquarters. The college imported textbooks from Germany so that Latin, Greek, and Hebrew could be taught in German rather than in English. Evening chapel services were conducted in German. Dormitory rules and report cards were issued in German. The local Lutheran church in Winfield offered services in German once a week. The students were given Reformation Day off.

The ministerial program was the main course at St. John's, though it also offered a classical course that emphasized the languages, literature, and “the antiquities of Greece and Rome,” and a scientific course for students interested in mathematics and science. Young women could enroll at St. John's and take business classes “and by close application soon become proficient in Shorthand, Typewriting and Bookkeeping.” Tuition was $1.00 per week and board was $90 per year. Books were $10 per year and expenses for “electric light” averaged twenty-five cents per month. Laundry was “best sent home by parcel post.”

In the fall of Gerecke's sophomore year of college at St. John's, Wichita Natural Gas Co. struck oil in El Dorado, fifty miles north of the school. The well, Stapleton #1, led to the discovery of a massive oil field that covered thirty-four square miles and became the largest single-field producer of oil in the country. The El Dorado field created its own bustling business district with the population of Butler County nearly doubling between 1910 and 1920, which created plenty of jobs for starving college students—including Gerecke.

The one-dollar-per-week tuition expense didn't apply to students in the ministerial course. Their tuition was paid by the synod with the understanding that “students who abandon the course are liable for full amount of back tuition.” Ministerial students concentrated on religion and languages, and graduates were admitted to the synod's seminaries on the basis of their diplomas from St. John's. “Such graduates,” the
Bulletin
promised, “if they have completed our full German course, will be able to use also the German fluently in the pulpit and in conversation.”

Gerecke started at St. John's in 1913, at age twenty. In the high school, Gerecke took sacred literature, beginning Latin, ancient and medieval history, geometry, biology, and three units each of English and German. He got mostly Bs in English, rhetoric, and literature. He also got Bs in Hebrew, though he hated it. In German and Greek, he earned a mix of Bs and Cs. In Latin he fared better with Cicero (B/B-) than Virgil (B/C).

When he wasn't working or studying, Gerecke had plenty of other distractions. He played basketball his freshman year, took part in the Student's Mission Society, and was a member of the student council, rising to president of the student body and of the St. John's Class of 1918. The St. John's yearbook,
The Saint,
called him “the best man for the job.” But music was Gerecke's true love—he played piano and violin at St. John's, and his senior year quote, from George Eliot, underscored his devotion to it: “There is no feeling, except the extremes of fear and grief, that does not find relief in music.” He played violin for the school's Arion Quintet and sang in the Senior Octet, which performed often “spicy selections” during literary meetings and other public occasions. Gerecke was a founding member of the college orchestra and was its president all four years of college. The orchestra bought five pianos that it rented out to fund its concerts and
The Saint
proclaimed “the excellent success of this organization must largely be given to [Gerecke's] credit.”

Gerecke, whom his classmates nicknamed Grex (“herd” in Latin, a play on both his name and childhood on the farm), also took part in the school's literary societies, whose purpose was “to extend classroom learning.” In 1915, school officials added a second society—Demosthenian—to longtime society Chrysostomos and began an annual intersociety contest, pitting students against one another in oration, reading, and debate. Two students from each society competed in each of the three disciplines and were then ranked by faculty. The team with the best overall ranking won the Faculty Loving Cup. According to
The Saint,
the ultimate purpose of Chrysostomos was not to create “stars” for the literary battles against Demosthenian, but “to produce and develop every grain of literary ability present. . . . We have persistently tried to develop hidden mental treasures in every individual member.”

In the 1918 intersociety contest, Gerecke—who grew a beard and began smoking a pipe while in college—was one of two students on the Chrysostomos oration team. He placed fourth of four, and Chrysostomos lost the Faculty Loving Cup to Demosthenian. “Let us nourish the hope that Chrysostomos may ever uphold that beacon of thoroughness for which she has always stood,” the society's members wrote in
The Saint
. “May she hold firm to the spirit of diligent application, which in due time spells progress.
Vivat, crescat, floreat
(Live long, grow, flourish) Chrysostomos!”

When the United States declared war on Germany in 1917, the need for oil grew dramatically, and by 1918, the El Dorado field was producing 13 percent of the country's oil production and 9 percent of the world's. By the end of the war, the Kansas oil fields were among the most productive in the nation. While Gerecke's job in those fields may have been contributing to the war effort, he was young and patriotic and wanted to do more. During one visit home to Missouri in 1917, he decided to enlist in the army and lined up outside the recruiting station in Cape Girardeau.

By then Herman had leased the farm to a relative and moved Lena, Fritz, and Nora into a house on Pacific Street in town. Herman found Henry at the recruiting station and yanked his son out of line. Herman's views on war were even more unfavorable than his views on religion, and no son of his was going to volunteer for battle.

“You can't go to war,” Herman told him. “You're in divinity school.”

In 1942, when Herman was on his deathbed, he asked after his grandson Hank. Henry couldn't bring himself to tell his father the truth: that Hank had joined the army and was fighting the Japanese in the Aleutian Islands. Instead, he told Herman that Hank was “on a trip.”

By the time Henry left Kansas in 1918, he'd picked up a nickname, improved his German, gained some weight, and obtained the first college degree in his family's history. (
The Saint
said Grex hadn't “been ‘Hooverizing' very much,” a reference to President Herbert Hoover's request that Americans cut back on their eating to help the war effort.) He was twenty-four years old and ready for seminary at Concordia in St. Louis. Gerecke moved to the heart of Missouri Synod scholarship just as the church was celebrating the four hundredth anniversary of the beginning of the Reformation, an exciting time to be studying to become a pastor.

Soon after arriving in the big city, Henry met a seventeen-year-old Famous-Barr department store candy counter girl named Alma. She was lively and beautiful, with big brown eyes. Their children later called the meeting “Dad's Waterloo.”

 

REV. F. W. HERZBERGER,
the Baltimore-born son of a Civil War chaplain, founded the St. Louis Lutheran City Mission in 1899 after conducting a church service for the homeless in a tavern on South Second Street in St. Louis. Herzberger was educated in the Missouri Synod system in schools and seminaries across the country.

“He had a genuine sympathy for all classes of unfortunates, and was instrumental in his institutional work to bring many a wanderer back to the Fold, and bring Christian solace to the sinner in the dying hour,” wrote Gerecke's friend “Woods” Holls, who began working with Herzberger at City Mission in 1919 and was instrumental in recruiting Gerecke.

Another pastor wrote that Herzberger had “an understanding love, and compassion for souls even among the lowliest and the poorest.” Herzberger's motto came from a famous verse in the Gospel of Matthew: “I was naked and you gave me clothing, I was sick and you took care of me, I was in prison and you visited me.”

Herzberger died in August 1930, at age seventy-one, less than five years before Gerecke took his place leading City Mission. When Gerecke joined the organization, the Reverend Walter Ellwanger, who had joined City Mission in 1930 after Herzberger died, was running its school and first mission chapel on the Mississippi, a few blocks south of the site where Eero Saarinen would build the Gateway Arch thirty years later. When he joined the mission, Ellwanger had discovered that children were not bringing their lunches to school because there wasn't anything to eat in their own kitchens. He found many of them behind a nearby pickle factory next to the river, scrounging for scraps in the factory dump. By 1938, he was running a school lunch program that fed St. Louis kids fourteen thousand meals a year.

Holls was doing most of the institutional work, visiting hospitals and sanitariums around the city. The men ran City Mission from an office on Fourth Street, next to its mission chapel and underneath the Municipal Bridge that brought trains across the river. When Gerecke took over as executive missioner, the organization bought a second chapel, for $5,000, in north St. Louis. They called it Good Shepherd Lutheran Church, and Gerecke became its pastor, holding services at 10:45
A.M.
and 8:00
P.M.
each Sunday.

He installed a cross on top of the building and opened the doors for business, recruiting the destitute from the local neighborhood as his congregation. “The large neon cross lights the way on 10th St.,” he wrote in the City Mission newsletter. The City Mission office moved with Gerecke to Good Shepherd, enabling him to organize the nonprofit more efficiently. He hired a secretary, Dorothy Williams, who worked every day but Saturday and who kept all the mission's records organized and answered the office phones.

Gerecke designed a new City Mission letterhead and listed the organization's departments as “Gospel Preaching in City Institutions,” “Missions and Mission Schools,” “Prison Welfare,” “Court Work,” “Social Service and Christian Charity,” “Child Saving Work,” “Follow-Up Work,” “Care for the Aged and Incurables,” and “Rescue Endeavors.” The letterhead gave each missionary's home address and phone number (Gerecke's was GRand 8858). A City Mission stamp that decorated its newsletter showed Christ, arms outstretched, floating above the Mississippi with St. Louis in the background. “Rebuild Lives with Christ,” the stamp said in bold letters at the top. And below: “The Gospel is unchanged and unchanging, but it changes men.”

The Lutheran Deaconess Association provided the missioners with one full-time nurse to help with its visits to Robert Koch Hospital, one of several sanitariums the missioners frequented. Gerecke managed about eighty-five student volunteers working for City Mission throughout the city and another sixty-five from Lutheran congregations.

“Ours is the busiest little one-man office in St. Louis,” Gerecke wrote. “Your City Mission business is God's big business in St. Louis.”

Just a few months after taking the job, Gerecke realized that if he was going to help the city's poor during the Depression, he had to do something to create jobs to lift their spirits. In the fall of 1935, he registered Lutheran Mission Industries with the state and began asking congregations, and anyone else, for old newspapers and magazines, rags, old clothing, and broken furniture.

He borrowed a broken-down Chevrolet paneled truck and hired two men from Good Shepherd to drive it and collect the donations. He opened a warehouse to store the donations, then sorted and stacked the paper, cloth, and glass into lots, which were then sold at two storefronts Gerecke opened near both mission chapels. The goal was employment, and Gerecke hired men from Good Shepherd and Ellwanger's congregation as drivers, sorters, and sellers. Eventually, Lutheran Mission Industries had three trucks, with two men each driving through the city and suburbs—north and northwest on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays; south and southwest on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, making an average of twenty-five stops a day.

More men worked in the warehouse unloading the trucks, sorting, breaking glass into lots, and reloading trucks for delivery to the stores. Two men worked in each store, which were open every day. Men were paid a dollar a day for their work. Foremen were paid two dollars a day. “Whatever the business brings in is divided among the help after operating expenses have been paid,” Gerecke wrote. “This is Christian Charity in the real sense of the word because the men want work and not sympathy.”

Gerecke advertised that Lutheran Mission Industries sold “the lowest priced second-hand goods in the city.” Poor families at the two mission congregations qualified for help to buy clothes or other goods through Mission Industries by obtaining a “charity tag” from Gerecke or Ellwanger. Men who needed clothes could come to the organization and “work the value of their needs in our warehouse,” Gerecke wrote. “They always get a bargain.”

Clothing was important, and several St. Louis stores donated clothes to the Lutheran Mission Industries cause. In order to keep this side business going, Gerecke constantly badgered Lutherans to either contribute or buy. He hit people up for everything from trucks to their address books.