Back in Greenwood, things seem to go along nicely. Jim’s ministry is flourishing, Grace moves more deeply into church work and their home life features all the familiar juggling of a young family. Also: Grace gets her hair cut short, with bangs. Church members tell her she looks 15 years younger. “Jim likes it all right, but said I have lost my natural dignity.”
In a November 1949, letter to the parents, Grace writes of Jim’s article in a journal published by Union Seminary: “To me it is the high point in Jim’s career. This article is the result of all the reading and clear thinking he has done since he was in college. He has an unusual ability of absorbing and assimilating what he reads. He puts it through the mill of his mind, mixing it with ingredients from many books and magazines and conversations, letting it simmer, and then produces thoughts and ideas of his own. He thought this article out one night when he couldn’t sleep. Went to the church next morning and wrote it all down without having to struggle too much over the phrasing. The editors accepted the article, writing him, ‘We certainly want it; it’s tops.’”
In a Christmas 1949 note to herself she reflects on their decision not to travel to Ohio to be with Jim’s parents, staying at home instead and getting “modest gifts” for the children. “But our wise buying was not enough to stretch our meager funds. We have had a difficult time this last year trying to make our finances satisfy our simplest needs. A week before Christmas, we were faced with the undeniable fact that there wouldn’t be enough money to go through until our next check came. We figured what our expenses would be, counted our money, and we lacked about $6 having enough. The only thing we could do was to borrow from the Lord — which meant going to the tithe box, opening the church envelope already filled for next Sundays offering, and taking out the $8. One thing which had taken the last of our funds was a ton of coal. The national mining situation affects people like us in ways John L. Lewis isn’t bothered about since we are not his particular flock.” Their own flock, she notes wryly, has sent eight different fancy-fruit baskets.
February 1950, to her parents: “We were down in the dumps about a month ago when we heard Evans Brown, our friend over here at Anderson, say with great excitement that the Corpus Christi church was to call him. He is about Jim’s age and certainly no better preacher than he is — about average I should say, although he is very friendly and affable. We hadn’t really thought about going a lot, but it did seem sad for the church to go within 43 miles of us and get someone, didn’t it?” On a happier note, Jim and Grace have been enjoying local outings — to Columbia to see foreign films, to Anderson to hear the Buffalo symphony, to Greenville to hear the Cincinnati symphony.
Then comes a February 1950 letter to her mother, with arresting news: “Jim wants to finish his thesis next summer if he possibly can, the two months we are in Richmond. He has been able to write some of the first chapter. Most of it was done by his staying at the church until 11 two nights a week, because all day the interruptions are almost constant. If he does this and gets through with the comprehensives, he should get his Th.D. in 1951, May. Then, we want to go to Europe for him to study and get the continental background for the theology he sorely needs. If he has a doctor’s degree plus training, even for a few months in some of the European universities, he can be in line for teaching in a seminary if the call comes.
“In order to go we will have to sell almost everything we have except dishes and silver — even the car, or mainly the car. We hope to be able to save a little something, but what it will be I can’t see now. Jim has written to the Board of Education in Louisville asking for a try at a $500 scholarship. He would probably spend about six months in Europe. He doesn’t want to go without me; perhaps the best thing to do would be to prevail upon you and the Overholsers to help take care of our children during one summer; I would come back in September and live with one of you all and send the children to school while Jim lived over there more cheaply than we all could. This is just theory yet, of course.”
What a theory.
Meanwhile, their lives perk along. April 1950, to her parents: “Thursday we will have Dr. Miller (a visiting church official) for dinner. Tomorrow Jim has a luncheon engagement and I have my garden club luncheon. He will go for A. at 12, taking G. along and dropping me at the luncheon. Then he will come back and let them eat the lunch I will prepare before I go. When they finish he loads them in the car and takes them to Mrs. Lucia Smith’s where they will stay until I pick them up after my luncheon at 1:45 or 2. Thursday he has a Salvation Army luncheon and meeting. Friday I have to go to Newberry for Presbyterial. My final report as Secretary of Assembly’s Home Missions I must do tonight if I can find the necessary hours after church.” Meanwhile, her ”children’s work in the Synod has taken up a lot of time lately.” Grace ends with the thing she says she’s proudest of: She has made coats for both her daughters — although she confused “interlining” and “interfacing,” leaving the collars “a bit limp.”
The visiting minister, it seems, was satisfyingly complimentary: “His comment Sunday night during the service really endeared him to us, gratitude-starved as we sometimes say we are. Dr. Miller said something like, ‘It has been a real pleasure to be more closely associated with your fine pastor and his lovely family this week. And I want to tell you something — whenever a man has been in a place 3½ years, he is free to move. Before that it’s too short and a church is just stealing that calls a man sooner. But that timing is legitimate, and whenever any good church asks me where a good pastor is, I’ll know where there is one. Now you better be watching out and take care of them, because churches are going to be casting eyes on your pastor. And I want to say this, too. The minute I laid eyes on that girl [referring to 37-year-old Grace] I knew there was something extraordinary about her. And then I knew what it was when I found she came from Texas. You here in South Carolina are going to have to send a lot of people out West to take the place of this one you have gotten from Texas; they don’t make them any finer.’
“It certainly does make your heart feel good to hear things like that. And we can tell the difference all this week. People had been taking us more or less for granted. We have one member of our staff who blows her own horn and no one is in doubt of her good qualities, but we seldom hear anyone say what a fine pastor and his family we have. We were walking on air for a few hours.”