While I was in sixth grade, still in New York, we had to put together a book report and supporting documents about the state of your choosing. Since I had an aunt and uncle in Illinois, and nobody else was doing a report on Illinois, I chose that state though I knew nothing about it. Many pages later, and phone calls to said aunt and uncle along with maps and other momentos from the state, I gave my report to the class. Within the year our family made the trek to Illinois as dad changed jobs. Did that report really prepare me for such a move? Not really. It's one thing to learn facts about a state and another thing entirely to find yourself living there. In truth it was the 43 years spent in the state of Illinos that gave me a full understanding of what it was to live in the Midwest.
Joliet Church
We arrived in Joliet (Joe-Lee-Et not Jolly-Et) Illinois at the beginning of 1970 in the month of January. I went from being a seventh grader in New York where high school was grades seven through twelve, to a seventh grader in middle school of only grades six through eight. The very first day of class the teacher pointed me out as the new kid and said that I would be taking the test of the day but I shouldn't worry about not doing well on it. Well, I nearly aced it with a 99.5 score and figured there would be a bunch of us with a high grade. But no, the next highest score was a 79 with several down under 50. Was that the end of it? Unfortunately, no, as the teacher went on to explain (mostly to me) that in her class the highest grade will get the amount of points needed to reach 100 and everyone else in the class got that same number added to theirs. If I hadn't been in the class the student with 79 would have had a score of 100 and that extra 21 points would be added to everyone's score. It seemed to me that the students didn't have much of an incentive to study much as they would get a better grade anyway. But with me in the class that extra half point didn't help them either. You can imagine how popular that made me! (Sarcasm alert). I don't remember much about middle school except the cute girl every guy liked that sat across from me in lunch every once in a while, though she had no interest in conversation with me. I do remember an event after school when I had gotten into the car with my dad, waiting for the other siblings to meander out. We watched in horror as a guy (middle schooler) picked up a large rock and threw it about twenty feet where it hit another guy (another middle schooler) right in the head. Dad and I went over to help him up, wait for the ambulance, and I think dad even visited him in the hospital.
The high school years were even rougher for me. A guy in the gym swimming class tried to drown me but a huge guy in class saved me and put the other guy in his place, never to bother me again. A group of guys took exception to me and broke in to ransack and steal everything from my locker. The school office gave me a different locker but they found it and stole everything again. This happened several times until they must have moved on to another freshman. Welcome to high school. On the other hand I mostly enjoyed learning new things and having electives for choose from. I took photography class, shop class where we learned woodworking, and drafting. All these things were interests of mine and would help me in the ministry later on. I did get into trouble with the English Literature teacher one time, an older woman who was still living the 60's. I took a picture of a light pole, developed the film myself, put the negative in the enlarger, dodging and burning in various parts of the negative to get rid of the light pole and leaving only the light at the top, make it a rather convincing photo of a UFO hovering over the town of Joliet. That photo made it to the teacher as all the kids were talking about it and the teacher went on to give a lengthy talk on the validity of UFO's. When it came out that I had faked the photo she was not amused. But it gave me a bit more cred amongst the high schoolers. Nowadays it's nothing to Photoshop images to look like something else but in 1972 I was a rebel.
Take out the entire pole and leave the UFO
In sophomore year we had a semester of gym replaced by drivers ed class which was exciting for me, both to learn how to drive and mostly to get out of gym class. We first had a month of studying the Rules of the Road book from the Illinois Secretary of State office. Then we spent a month in the simulator that looked something like a larger old-style video game machine with a dashboard and steering wheel. You watched the movie looking out of the windshield on what was happening on that particular drive. You turned the wheel when the car turned, used the turn signal, accelerated and braked, and made sure you weren't speeding. It was great fun to hear as the "cars" crashed all over the room. Then after that we went out to the special parking lot that was set up with cones for roads and all types of driving and parking scenarios. Finally we could actually drive a real car. We were supposed to go find a car when we got there and pair up in the front seat. I remember one day when a classmate asked me to save a seat in my car, and while I was waiting for him the cutest girl in the class opened the door and asked if she could join me. Did I throw the friend under the bus and enjoy driving around with the cut girl? Au contraire. I kicked her to the curb to let some random classmate guy get in. Present-day David would like to go back in time and smack high school David in the head for such lunacy. But alas, high school David was not the smooth guy he is today. (I jest, I jest!). My first car was the 1969 Pontiac Grand Prix and the second was the 1972 Pontiac Grand Ville. Both cars were Grand!
So that's a bunch of teenagers from the 70's? Leisure suits?
After graduating from high school (ranked 3rd out of 623) we all moved to Quincy, Illinois. It was a town of about 40,000 people right on the Mississippi River. After getting settled in that house, I headed off to college in Minneapolis, Minnesota. My major would be pastoral studies at a place called North Central Bible College, one of several Assemblies of God colleges. (It is now called North Central University). Coming from Illinois it tended to be the location that young people in the Assemblies of God attended for ministerial education. I had attended a couple banquets that NCBC hosted in Illinois to familiarize prospective students with the benefits of attending this college. There were at least three reasons that drew me to NCBC. The first was that Minneapolis offered many part-time job opportunities within a short drive from the school as I had wanted to graduate debt free. The second was that NCBC was the least expensive of all the Assemblies of God schools for tuition, room, and board. And third was that it was a smaller campus with everything about one block away. Downsides? It was an older campus and in rather rough shape when I arrived. You can't believe everything you see and hear at the banquet, and I never did one of those visits during high school. It was Fall 1976 and my dad drove up with me to get me situated and then I dropped him off at the airport for his flight back to Quincy, Illinois.
(Break 1 - If you'd like to keep this story chronological then head to the start of the Minnesota section and read about my freshman year. At Break 2 I'll send you back here when the freshman year is finished. If not then just imagine I left for college and now I'm back.)
It was now May 1977 and I had just returned from Minnesota and my freshman year in college. All I could think about was that last conversation with a fellow student and the idea of continuing my college education but at a location that wasn't Bible College. At this time I didn't even know if Quincy had a community college. So I went about finding out for myself and got out the phone book. For those of you who remember that archaic form of searching for information you'll understand how it got to be the go-to solution. It would still be some years until the internet but until then the phone book would have to do and right there in the "Community College" section was John Wood Community College. I had never hear of it and there was a good reason for that. It had just started up three years prior with the first year centered around getting it up and running. In 1975 they started with their first year of classes and by the time I returned to Quincy they were finishing up their second year of classes. In order to give them time to get a new campus up to speed they collaborated with Quincy College, the other college in town, which began in 1860. So I drove out to the main office and asked for information. They were very helpful and gave me one of those college handbooks with all the classes listed. What I found were those very same classes that were offered at NCBC, usually with the exact same name. I mean, American Literature is the same no matter where you take it and I went through the list of classes that I needed for the next semester and wrote (yes, with a letter, no email yet) to the Admissions Director with the classes from JWCC that matched with those from NCBC. They sent back a letter to let me know they would all be accepted in transfer. And so I signed up for classes in the fall at JWCC.
In the meantime there was the small matter about finding another job. Since my parents lived here they knew people who helped direct me to checking out several businesses. Broadcast Electronics was one that I interviewed with and I was hired on the spot. The business was in the process of starting up so I got in on the ground floor, so to speak. It's not as if I was investing money in them, just my sweat and tears. I don't like giving blood. Here's the Wikipedia version of Broadcast Electronics 1977 through 2024, the true Cliff's Notes:
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Broadcast Electronics (BE) is a manufacturer of AM and FM transmitters, Marti Electronics STL and RPU equipment, developer of the AudioVAULT radio automation system and parent company to Commotion - a social media company for radio.
Founded in 1959 in Silver Spring, Maryland, BE initially manufactured endless loop cartridge "cart" machines. Through the years, BE also manufactured turntables, audio consoles, and program automation equipment which was the precursor to today’s automation systems for radio stations.
In 1977, BE relocated to Quincy, Illinois and it was there that BE began designing and manufacturing FM and AM transmitters. Initially the offering was for tube transmitters but their line also expanded to solid state broadcast transmitters.
The AudioVAULT automation system was one of the first digital audio storage and playout solutions for radio. AudioVAULT compensated for the slow PC processing speeds at the time by manufacturing their own sound cards and using off-bus technology. Today, AudioVAUL is in its 4th generation architecture since the time the technology was known as a "cart" machine replacement product.
In 1994, BE acquired MARTI Electronics. Today, Marti Electronics equipment is also manufactured in Quincy, Illinois.
BE is the largest radio only equipment manufacturer in the United States.
In December 2017, BE was acquired by Italian manufacturer Elenos.
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Notice in the article above that BE relocated to Quincy in 1977, just before I arrived back in town. My job was to be in the parts department, unboxing electronic parts, and stocking them onto all the shelves in the back of the building. All the workers out on the floor would come and have us fill out their parts needs to build specific items and we'd gather the parts for them. When the machines were completed they were boxed and sent out, or they'd send me or someone else to deliver it if they were close. I let them know that I had already signed up for college in the fall and they said no problem. All they asked was that I check out when I leave and clock in when I get back. Since some classes were at night it didn't interfere with work all that much. Plus, it was closer to a full-time job which would help me save money for when I went back to NCBC. Win win.
I found out that Quincy College was a Catholic College eventually. Here I was a Pentecostal minister-to-be that was going to have a few classes at a Catholic College. I was especially taken aback when a couple of my professors were Catholic priests, but any fears disappeared quickly when I could see they were teachers who cared about teaching, and truth was truth. In the end I had men and women teachers in both Quincy College and out at the John Wood Community College campus. I still regard that year as one of the best of my life, especially since there were things learned that did indeed prepare me for the classes to come. The only class I had trouble with was Major American Writers, which sounded a lot like American Lit which I did not get at all, seeing as it was nothing like the Bible. I was on my way to failing the class when she gave me a stern talking to along the lines of "suck it up buttercup" and then gave me some actual helpful advice that enabled me to finish with a C in the class. To this day I am not a fan of poems and if anyone decides to quote "Ode On A Grecian Urn" to me there will be words. The only day that made sense to me was when she got to Jonathan Edwards, the American revivalist preacher, philosopher, and Congregationalist theologian. I was all over that, though she yelled at me for making it too religious. I guess she forgot he was a preacher.
All was going swimmingly that first semester and as I started to prepare for returning to Minneapolis, I had a few conversations with people that asked why I wasn't doing the entire year in Quincy. Why indeed, I thought. I just hadn't found exact class matches for a whole year so I returned to the handbooks and found another bunch of classes that might work. Since I needed enough classes to make for an entire year now I ran into when those classes were available and found I could only take two of them as summer classes. That was fine by me so I wrote another letter to the Admissions Director and was approved to do another semester. The worst class? Speech class. Here I am preparing to be a minister and I hated giving speeches and didn't to them particularly well. That would come as soon as I took my first ministry job and had to speak a lot. That'll loosen up the tongue in a hurry.
I would have to say that I continued keeping to myself most of the time, but the difference here was that my job brought me into contact with people that I had to interact with, and I was in church where there were even more people to interact with. And eventually I interacted with a girl I suppose and we were an item for a few months. She was my first girl friend though I wasn't particularly good at being the boyfriend. We had a good time together and I liked her but it wasn't meant to be. One of the craziest things that happened after a night class at Quincy College was when someone came up to me and said everyone in the class was going bowling and I should join them. My spidey senses were tingling at the thought of human interaction but then they said it was in the basement of the college and it was free. Well there's a favorite word of mine. We all descended into the humid lair in the depths of the basement and discovered two lanes that had been there for a long time. Still one of the best days of my life. I should make a blog about that list sometime.
The whole point of this exercise at Community College was to save money. Student loans may have been available at that time but nobody ever brought it up, not anyone at high school or college or even my parents. The college and my dad had other plans and that was for me to work part time while going to school with the hope of graduating debt free. While NCBC was about $2,5000 a year in 1976 ($13,900 in 2024 money) it only cost me $500 for the year in Quincy. With no room and board cost it was only cheap tuition and used books.
Here's an interesting tidbit for you. John Wood Community College started up in 1974 with the first class starting in 1975. I was a student in the third year of the college in 1977 and half my classes were at the local Quincy College. JWCC did not yet have the facilities to hold all their class load so they did some class sharing with Quincy College. I very much enjoyed my year at both those colleges. During the year the school opened up a contest to design the cover for their student handbook and I entered and won. There were only fifteen entries, but still a win is a win. At the end of the summer I packed up the car and drove back to Minneapolis.
My design for the Handbook
(Break 3 - If you are doing the chronological order reading schedule, head back to the Minnesota page and continue where you left off. Read the section of the final two years of NCBC and then back here to finish up the Illinois page.)
After the wedding and the sort-of-honeymoon we camped out in the basement of my parents' parsonage. The next step for us was to find a job, a place of ministry. In those days the older ministers were revered and the newbies like us were usually ignored. Getting your foot in the door and getting that first break was what you needed to be seen as a worthwhile addition to the brotherhood of pastors. I had a bit of an in since my dad was a pastor in Illinois do he talked to the leader of the Illinois Assemblies of God pastor and his friend, Richard Dortsch, about my plight. As the Illinois District Superintendent, he sent out about 30 letters of introduction to that many senior pastors in the state to let them know about us available for ministry. Three pastors responded to the letter, we interviewed at all three churches, and the Belleville Church offered us the position of Youth and Children's Pastor.
We moved to Belleville, Illinois within days of hearing from the church. They wanted to introduce us during the special weekend of services so we made it happen. We stayed with a family in the church over that weekend. The pastor had found us a place to check out and we moved into a one bedroom apartment two blocks away from the church and lived there six months. Our next place was across the street in a two bedroom apartment where we stayed for two years. Then we purchased a mobile home for the final two years in Belleville. We were responsible for the Children's Ministry, the Youth Ministry, and the Young Couples Ministry (I called this one the YMCA for Young Married Couples Association), the boys and girls Midweek Ministries, sang in the choir and played in the orchestra. I also taught a Sunday School class and filled in with preaching ministry when the pastor was gone. Pretty much did whatever they asked us to do, the unlimited job description. We made a lot of friends here, some that last to this day. While I spent most of my efforts on the younger crowd, I was able to devote some time to adult ministry. I felt my calling to be as a senior pastor. The cars I had during these 4-1/2 years were the 1978 Buick Limited, 1982 Chevrolet X-11, and 1984 Honda Accord. It was also the time period in which we were gifted the 1968 Ford Mustang that had little life left in it. All those stories are in the "Automotive Stories" blog.
Belleville First Assembly of God
In 1985 the senior pastor at Belleville announced his resignation as he had been called to another church. I submitted my resignation as well since that's what you did. Associate pastors, whether in youth or music or any other, were asked to submit their resignations so that the new pastor coming in could select their own associates. The option was open for the new senior pastor to ask an associate to stay on if they knew them and felt comfortable doing that, but we felt called to the next place, wherever that was. On Monday, the day after the resignations, I got on the phone to the District Office and asked to speak to the District Superintendent. I knew him and we were friends so I told him what happened and if he knew of a church that might be a good fit for us. He immediately mentioned Warren, Illinois and the fledgling church there. For prospective ministers had visited and preached at the church and said "no" to being the pastor. My wife and I knew that this was the place for us and when we were offered to job after talking with the congregation we accepted.
Warren Vacation Bible School 1991
We packed up our mobile home and drove up to the northern Illinois border to unload everything into the old house (built 1879) across the street from the church. It was in rough shape but my wife fell in love with it's charm. Me, not so much. Old is just old. You can read more about that home in "Home Sweet Home, Part 2." The church had purchased it for $28,000 which was probably a bargain. While I got involved in the ministries of the church and the town, my wife busied herself with making this a home. We both worked to strip wallpaper and patch and paint the walls and ceilings. We removed the walls between upstair and downstairs which had made it a duplex for renting. We put in new carpeting. We put in window air conditioners. She made it cute; I don't do cute. Warren was the town our little boys grew up and we had seven years here to get them in school and sports and friends and so on. We had a community Vacation Bible School that I believe our church was in charge twice. I learned computers and helped the town and a local lawyer with their computer problems. We paid off the church and the parsonage near the end of those seven years. We started with 25 people and we ended with 25 different people. It was hard but that's where we knew we should be. And then God called us to move again in 1992.
Lincoln Faith Assembly of God
Lincoln, Illinois was in the geographical center of the state and we were one of three ministers the church was considering. They chose us though I was never privy to the reasons why. One of the questions they asked me was whether I'd be willing to lead either a move to another suitable building or perhaps lead a building program. My dad had done this all his life and I was in a number of those projects and I felt that might be in my future, so I said I'd be willing even though I never thought it would happen. For the 21 years that we were at this church that building program took up the bulk of 17 of those years. It was in the second year of ministry that the board said they wanted to start the process. I was a bit surprised it had come so soon as the church had it's problems in the past with relocating and building a new church. There was never any agreement by the congregation to do this. Our church seemed to be with us so we started a building fund to get the project going. I visited a number of buildings around town but none of them fit the bill. The closest one was 10,000 square feet of building and a large parking lot on five acres of land, but they wanted $650,000 for the property and I felt it would cost $250,000 to make it work for us. Then we discovered that our District offered a program for churches like ours to get volunteers from around the state to help build new buildings. We shifted to looking for land and found six acres in the middle of town. The architect who designed the Belleville church worked with us on this project and the church was built over the space of 7-1/2 years with mostly volunteers at a cost of $600,000 for six acres of land, a 12,000 square foot building, parking light. sign, landscaping, and all interior furnishings. That works out to $50 a square foot although just considering the building comes out to $35 a square foot.
The house we purchased when we moved to town was our first home and Kathy went to town making it her own. We had siding and shutters put on the exterior and it looked so much better right away. We didn't do much more than cosmetic upgrades and after twelve years she decided she needed another project. Two months after the church was dedicated in the fall of 2003 she wanted to check out other homes for sale in the area. This time she wanted a fixer-upper that she could leave her mark on and she found it all right. It had been for sale for seven years and scared all potential buyers away. But my wife saw what it could be now that the church was finished and I could work on her project. It took almost seven years to get that one done but it turned out well, like a new house. You can check that one out on another blog as well. During this time all three of our sons graduated high school and moved out into their fields of interest. With the church built and paid off and the boys out on their own, it was time to move on again. We spent the year of 2012 in transition and moved out on December 31.
The outdoor deck, furniture, and gazebo
We moved to Rockford, Illinois that last night of 2012 and early morning of 2013. We had far more stuff to move than we realized. I had picked up the moving truck to be ready for packing up and was ready at 5:00 in the morning. Volunteers came to help carry boxes into the truck and we had filled it up by noon so we drove off to leave that load at the house. We hired a crew on the Rockford end to get it off quickly and then drove back to Lincoln for the rest. The crew at Lincoln came back and we grabbed everything from several locations we stored items. Finally, at 10:00 pm we drove off for the last time and we haven't been back in the intervening years. My brother-in-law went with me on that trip and we arrived in Rockford at 2:00 am of the first day of 2013. We left the truck in the driveway and crashed for the night. When we woke up that morning my wife and I were sick as can be with the flu and did nothing New Year's Day. We eventually got the truck unloaded and I started my new job as store manager for a shipping business. I had been unable to find any job, either ministry or secular, for the entire year of 2012 and at the last possible minute a friend of my brother-in-law asked me to come to help him in his business endeavors. Rockford was in a good location for extended family to visit so we had numerous family get-togethers so they could all visit Grandma. That's what that photo of the deck and gazebo represents, an outdoor oasis for conversation with family. We enjoyed it a lot.
Our first grandchild arrived in our second year at Rockford, a little girl, and we were so excited. We made numerous trips to Georgia over those first few years, usually making a four-day weekend with one day driving down, two days visiting, and one day driving back. On one of those trips in the summer of 2016 we went with our daughter-in-law on her visit to the doctor. It was the day for the sonogram and my wife might have been more excited thant the DIL. As the doctor ran the wand back and forth we eventually heard "Oh!" That didn't sound like a good Oh and then she said "Hmmm" and then she said "well there's one and there's two." Yep, twins she said. Totally unexpected, though later we discovered there were twins on both sides of the family. Who knew? Not us. Anyways, we decided to make the move to Georgia and be with family as twins would need double attention.
So that is where our time with Illinois ended. From a twelve year old right up to pre-retirement. It was a good run but grandchildren were calling.
Until next time,
Arktander
(aka David Andreasen)
