James Harrison Rhoads
& Mary Agnes Rose Keenan Rhoads

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James Harrison Rhoads was the only son of Mary and W. Berton Rhoads to survive beyond infancy (another son died in infancy). He was the middle child, with two older sisters, and two younger ones.  At the beginning of 1918 his diary records that he was 5 ft 11 inches tall, weight 155 lb.  I believe his sisters all were about 6 ft. 

Elk Point:  One of his early homes was the farm that his father bought on the bank of the Missouri River near Elk Point, South Dakota.  This farm had wonderfully rich, deep soil on three different levels, the lowest one adjacent to the river.  I suspect W. Bert bought the farm because it was cheap to buy—and the reason it was cheap is that it was being eaten away by the river.

When the Rhoads family moved to that farm, they could drive straight up a county road to the town of Elk Point.  Later, they had to detour west a mile.  Eventually, the river completely ate up the farm, and then changed course—if you go to the location of that farm today, it’s a great sandbar.  My mother spoke of going there and the desolation she felt…

James attended grade school in the public schools of Elk Point, where I believe his father W. Bert taught. So James schooled to his father, and also to his older sister Norma for one year. He then attended Plainview Academy in Redfield SD where he became very spiritually aware and decided to become a minister.   I believe the whole family moved to Redfield. 

The December entries from James diary from 1918 record that James shingled the barn, finishing on Dec 8;  most of the later entries are about the various members of the family, himself included, having the flu.  A curious thing is that the Nov 21 entry records that “Papa leaves for Germany” but the Dec 7 entry records “Papa comes home on 10:30 N. W” which I’d guess is a train designation (Chicago NW?).  I’d guess that “Germany” refers to some place nearby.  I had always heard that his sister Ruth (who had married Floyd Bresee) died of the flu, but it is not until Feb 6 1920 that he records her death of some illness.

Teaching:  It appears from his 1922 diary that he taught elementary school in 1921-22, then enrolled at Union College in Lincoln NB in the fall of 1922.  He studied there for two years, taking the ministerial course, but did not finish college.  The custom was for the more promising young men to be given calls to the ministry before finishing college.  This was in accordance with the Adventist sensibility that time was short and they needed to be getting on with evangelism.

1923-35: During this time he courted Mary Keenan and married her on Christmas eve, 1924.  She was “recommended” to him by his mother, who had received treatment at the Nevada Sanitarium and had been nursed by Mary.

After marriage, James and Mary entered into a kind of itinerant evangelistic ministry, mainly, I think, in Iowa.  I have traveled across Iowa several times on Amtrak, which follows the old Burlington route, and the town names all resonate strongly with my memories of stories from my parents:  Burlington, Ottumwa, Chariton, Osceola, Creston;   also Cedar Rapids, Ames, Marshalltown, and Sioux City. This went on for roughly 10 years, until maybe 1935.

During these years James paired up with a number of different younger and older pastors.  For a while during the Great Depression, he had the only steady income in the whole extended family, and they all came to live with them in their house, I think maybe in Chariton.  This crowd included Belle and her husband Gerald Minchin as well as W. Berton and Mary Rhoads, their parents.  Gerald was an unpaid assistant to James in evangelistic meetings there, and the whole family pitched in growing, gathering, and canning food…

Gackenheimer:  It was also during this period that James associated for a while with Ernest T. Gackenheimer (“You’ve heard of Ernie Pyle, this is a pile of Ernie,” quoting E.T.G.) I remember E.T. Gackenheimer as a large, ebullient man, with a most intriguing name.  Much later, in 2001, while I was Chair of the Mathematics Department at Andrews University, I corresponded with a young woman by the name of (Dr.) Shandelle Henson, an up-and-coming mathematical biologist then at the College of William and Mary, with a view to bringing her to Andrews to be on the faculty.  Much to my surprise, part way through this process, I discovered she was E. T. Gackenheimer’s granddaughter!  She did come and made a wonderful contribution to our department. Her grandfather E.T.G. has a memoir available on the website http://home.chattanooga.net/~henson3/moto.html.  James, and his uncle A. V. Rhoads, are mentioned in Chapter 2 of that memoir. 

Evangelism:  As it was told me, James and associates would go to a town where there was no Adventist congregation, put up a tent, put out handbills or any sort of publicity they could, hold evangelistic meetings, and after about six months, leave for another location.  James was not by nature entirely comfortable with this mode of operation—he did not like the idea of leaving these fledgling congregations to fend for themselves.  I think his nature was more “architectural” and “pastoral” than specifically “evangelistic” —he wanted to build carefully and make the enterprise last. 

This, I would guess, was one reason he desired to enter “departmental” work—where he would be based at the conference office and supervise one or another of the departments of the conference.  Another reason was that he had a growing family, and it was hard on my mother to continually be uprooted and go to another place.  I think I remember my mother telling me that for the first 10 years of their married life, they moved 25 times, although the number of residences listed in the front of his various diaries (see below) puts that somewhat in doubt.  Both of them craved the stability of a more fixed residence. 

The address in the front of his 1925 and 1926 diaries was Burlington, IA; 1927 and 1928 appears to be Sioux City IA; 1929 was Sioux City crossed out to Creston, IA; 1930 Creston, IA; in 1931 and 1932 it was Osceola; in 1933 it was Chariton crossed out to Marshalltown; in 1934 Marshalltown;  by the beginning of 1935 they had moved to Fargo ND and this address held in 1936, which indicates to me some settling down was occurring. 

Watertown SD:  1937 has Watertown SD but I was born in Fargo—it was explained to me that my prenatal care had been at Mrs. Camp’s hospital there, and they elected to go back there for the delivery Sep 17.  Just how this reconciles with a Watertown address at the beginning of 1937 I don’t know.  The laconic entry for Sep 17 is:  “Mary in pain most of night.  Donald Harrison born 8:40 A. M.  Weight 8 1/4 #.  Shop.  Retire early.”

I remember the house we lived in, in Watertown, at 717 N Park street.  I also remember the telephone number—3202.  I think it was the first residence phone my parents had.  I’ve been back there and it’s a nice little house in a well-cared-for older part of town.  For the four years at Watertown James was in charge of the youth work (Missionary Volunteer Secretary) and maybe the educational work, too. 

Word study:  A parenthetical note here: in his travels James often had odd times and moments in hotel rooms and he began to study words.  He apparently carried a dictionary with him, and began to copy out interesting words into a number of little spiral notebooks, with brief definitions.  He then re-copied these into another bound book, and finally condensed these entries into yet another book which contained, I guess, only the most delicious ones, titled “An Abbreviated Professional Dictionary based on Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary, approx 7000 entries.” 

These books have his customary inscription in the front, which offered a reward for anyone returning the book to the last address below.  In both cases the first address was Watertown, SD.  I have all these books in my possession.

Many years later a story, authored by Wilma (Doering) McClarty, appeared in the book College Faith, Ronald Knott, ed.  It was set in the '60s while James was pastor of Pioneer Memorial Church in Berrien Springs, MI.  Wilma was a student at Andrews University, and one day she was on her way home in a rainstorm when James happened by in his car and picked her up. 

She asked him (not an exact quote) “Elder Rhoads, I’ve wanted to ask you about this wonderful vocabulary you have—where did you get that?”  He replied “During the Second World War, I was imprisoned and they let me have a dictionary, which I studied.” I know that he was never imprisoned, and I’ve checked this out with my older brother Bert, and he agrees. During WWII, James was running hither and yon over Texas, never was away from home for more than two or three weeks at a stretch, and the dictionaries were evidently all completed in the Watertown era.  I have corresponded with Wilma and neither she nor I have any explanation for this discrepancy.  This gets ahead of the story.

1942-1945:  Texas:  In February 1942 James moved his family to Ft. Worth, TX to be the Educational Secretary and Youth Leader for the TX Conference of Seventh-day Adventists.  His duties also included the “War Service Commission” work, in which he spent a lot of time interceding with commanding officers at army camps (of which there were many in TX) on behalf of Adventist draftees in trouble for their convictions against bearing arms and Sabbath duties. James could be quite forcefully eloquent: after one encounter with a CO, the officer said to him “you’re not a ‘non-combatant!’”

The first house we had in Ft. Worth was a concrete block structure at 2200 Lipscomb St. The picture in this link is of a newer house—when I was there in the late seventies, the lot was vacant.  When we lived at this address, we were close enough to some rail yard that I remember hearing steam engines switching at night.  You would hear them starting up and slowly speeding up then slipping their drivers.  I also think we were close enough to Forest Park Zoo, that I could hear the lions roaring in the zoo. 

I don’t remember any of these sounds from our second house (the first house which James and Mary bought), which was only two or three blocks away, at 803 W. Arlington, behind the Adventist Church.  There was a little Adventist community there—behind us lived the Essigs, and across the street from them, the Kings. James busied himself tearing down the old garage on the back of the lot and built a new one. (Where did he get all this energy?)

I remember going to Weatherford with James to buy some watermelons to feed the participants in a “teacher’s convention.”  Two of them, I recall, were about as long as I was, and weighed over 90 pounds apiece.  James just about went wild when he saw the seed harvesters going down the rows slashing the big red melons open, scooping out the seeds, and leaving the melons there to rot.  I remember him following the workers and gorging himself with watermelon hearts, and profusely lamenting all this waste.

James sometimes took Gayle with him on trips around the state.  It was on one of these, to San Antonio in July 1945, that the family car, a 1939 Chevrolet, was stolen.  It was later recovered in a rather sad condition.  We never got it back.  This was during WWII and new cars were unavailable.  The next month James bought a 1941 Ford from Elder Albert Griffin, father of Josephine Benton, whose son Roy was later my student at Andrews and made a fine career in mathematics and logic. 

During this stay in TX, my brother Bert was attending academy at Keene.  At some point, Carol Kvinge (who later married Melvin Sample) came to Keene.  She was a convert from James’ efforts in Watertown, I believe.  She became like a sister to us.

I think James was known as a quite successful youth leader. He was intense, energetic, threw himself into his work, and went over quite big with the Texas folk.

College and Masters:  Part of the inducement to go to Texas was that he could finish his college degree.  He did this at Texas Christian University in Ft. Worth, completing a degree in Educational Administration, I think, about 1943 or 44, and I believe the Conference probably paid his tuition.  His professors there encouraged him to continue on and take a master's, which he proceeded to do, without informing his Conference President Elder L. L. McKinley or the Union President, Elder J. W. Turner.  He did this all while maintaining a full schedule of work. Some time in late 1944 or early 1945 the Conference was looking for a new building to house its offices, and came into conversation with the owner of a building which appeared to be a prospect. This owner was a professor at TCU, in the Education School.  When he heard that it was Adventists, he said “Oh, we have a very fine student finishing up his masters, who is one of your people.”  “O, who might that be?”  “James Rhoads.” 

Next day James was “called on the carpet” and reminded that the “brethren” had not given him permission to pursue graduate work.  James asked if there were any complaints about his work and pointed out that he was paying the tuition, but to no avail.  The conference officers (who had anti-intellectual tendencies, to say the least—“they were ignorant and proud of it” quoting James) huddled and voted to put James on unpaid leave until he finished his masters. I have not found any hint of this in James’ diary for 1945, although I have not studied it exhaustively with that end in mind.

I remember going to the commencement and seeing my dad hooded and of course at that time didn’t know of any of the above—he told me about it maybe 30 years later.  I think what irritated him the most was the attitude of the “brethren” that put different people in different categories—Walter Howe, who succeeded James in the education job in TX was sent off for his PhD.   “This man is ok for a bachelor’s; this one can go for a doctorate...”

1945-1946:  Minnesota:  Naturally, James took the first “call” out of there, and we ended up in Minneapolis, Minnesota. We lived at 3740 Bryant Avenue S, a nice big two story house in a good neighborhood, with, delight of delights, a double-track streetcar line in front.  I had a bad school year that year, got sick early and didn’t attend most of the year.  It was a bad polio summer, and James and Mary played it safe, didn’t let me out much. 

It was about this time that Bert and Angela Handy married, in Houston.  Their wedding, which occurred the same weekend as Josephine and Elvin Benton’s wedding at Keene.  It was so hot in the old church at Keene that all the candles in the candelabra bent double, bowing down like the sheaves of Joseph brothers. 

1946-1948:  Union College Academy:  A year later, in 1946, James was called (insistently) to Union College to be the Principal of the Academy.  His Masters in Education seemed to be paying off.  He purchased an old house built by one of the pioneers at Union, a man by the name of Morrison, which was situated hard by the public high school at the corner of Bancroft and 46th St.  (This was the place where I learned to ride a bicycle.  Gayle bought one for me and I paid him some fraction of the price he had paid.  In the process of learning I once went over the handlebars, but eventually got the hang of it.)

James soon found himself in an untenable situation at Union…we prepared to move back to Texas.

Bert and Angela lived with the family at Lincoln for a year, I think the year 1946-47 and Bert attended Union College.  Then they left and went to CA where Bert enrolled at UC Berkeley, finished his bachelor’s degree and eventually obtained a Masters in history there.

1948-1955: Keene TX:  At Keene, James and Mary bought a 37 acre farm about a mile west of town, for $5,500.  It was on Old Mansfield Rd, and at this writing (2005) it is still largely intact.   By this time, Gayle was in academy and I was in the 7th grade.  I walked back and forth to school across the fields, or rode my bicycle.  The house was way back from the road and it was a very quiet place.  On summer days I would hear the vast silence of the Texas countryside punctuated only by a faint buzzing, which came from a test flight of a B36 bomber high in the sky.  They were made about 25 miles north of us in Ft. Worth.  A couple of times during our stay there, one of them came over at night at treetop level.  Boy, that was something else.  Talk about waking the dead!

James bought some cows and calves and started small-scale farming.  The land was not very good—very sandy pastureland.  At that point the family owned a car—a 1942 Chevrolet (I learned to drive on it, at age 14) but we had no farm machinery such as a tractor.

The move from Lincoln to Keene was an adventure.  James bought a 1946 International truck, I think 1 1/2 ton rating, equipped with a 16 foot long “combination grain bed”, with a hydraulic lift.  The bottom half of the sides of the bed were solid boards, the upper half was “stake” construction.  Gayle, the mechanically adept one in the family, was designated to drive the family possessions to Texas in this truck, which he did. 

Gayle was James main assistant in the early years on the farm.  He was big and strong enough to be of some use.  They proceeded to tear down some old shacky outbuildings and a garage, all of them full of rats, and then built a fairly large building behind the house which was intended as the main chicken house, and another smaller building with a concrete floor intended as a milk house. The cream separator ended up on the back porch of the house and I (Don) claimed the little house as my bedroom and shop. I called it "the  bunkhouse." It was cold in the winter--no insulation--I lined the inside with big sheets of cardboard but it didn't do much good. It was in this place that I indulged my interest in electronics (a radio repairman had given me a lot of old Majestic and other old radios to play with—I ended up getting one of them to work, also built a radio from scratch, ended up building a Heathkit amplifier, constructing a turntable, and somehow James managed to find money to buy me a hi-fi loudspeaker, a University Diffusicone 12, which I mounted on a piece of masonite for a baffle.) My interest in electronics led me in the direction of physics when I got to Emmanuel Missionary College (Andrews University) and thence to mathematics.

…[James] was very “stressed out,” being under the financial gun of trying to generate income from the farm as soon as possible.  Speed in building the buildings and getting set up was essential. He was not a great mechanic— tending toward the crude in his workmanship, but he tried to do things at least somewhat right.  He poured concrete foundations under the buildings he built (the house itself was set on cedar posts, a very common construction in those parts). Fortunately, the ground did not freeze there, and it was sandy to boot, so he could get away with digging shallow trenches and forming up foundations and pouring them.  He set bolts in the tops of the foundations.  I don’t know just how he leveled the foundation tops, probably the best he could with a regular spirit level.  He didn’t have a telescope type level and I don’t think he did the hose trick, either. 

Challenges:  Gayle and James made a trip to east Texas to a sawmill where they bought a truckload of pine dimension lumber for the construction of the buildings.  It was not prize or first class material, to say the least, quite crooked and some of it full of pitch.  The studs in the walls of the buildings were not at a standard spacing, but at least there were studs and the two buildings mentioned above are still there, as of this writing (2005).  

The Santa Fe shops were nearby in Cleburne, and one of the things done in those shops was rebuild old boxcars. Local people could go with a truck and get a load of oak shiplap, 1-1/2 inches thick, for one dollar.  From this material James built a stout enclosure to incarcerate the occasional stray bull that would get into our pasture, as well as two sheds for the cows and calves and hay, and one other low building used as a henhouse.  My guess is that none of these buildings survived very long…

There were setbacks.  James and Gayle would use the truck to get sand and gravel for the construction.  The first time they did so, they got (I forget exactly how much) say two yards (maybe 3 or 4 tons) of gravel and it dumped just fine.  That worked ok, so the next time, they got three yards.  Gayle was in the cab, James outside supervising the dump, I was watching the process.  When the bed began to raise, it raised higher on the right side, and the load did not begin to slide right away.  James told Gayle to go on up with it. 

He did so, the load did not slide, and the truck capsized on its left side.  The drivers’ side door was hanging open, Gayle hung onto the steering wheel, and was not hurt, the door kept the cab from going flat on its side, and the frame was bent.  The cause was that there was an old crack in the yoke connecting the hydraulic ram to the bed, and the cracked place broke in two (this truck was built to dump grain, which would slide easily, not for gravel and sand.)  James called a wrecker and had the truck moved to a shop that worked on such things and they straightened the frame, which cost, I think, $114.  That was a lot of money.  I think James sold the truck shortly after that. 

And fun:  Not all was discouragement and sorrow on the farm, some was just fun.  One day James called to me and asked me to observe something.  The calves we had fed in a little barn had been “kept up” all their lives in just a small pen.  James had completed a much larger pen, I suppose 60 x 100 feet, and he let one calf at a time out into that larger pen. Very gingerly the calf started exploring the pen, and did not find a fence where she expected it, so took off running, believing there was no fence at all. Too late she saw the fence in front of her and piled into it full speed, a foolish tangle of legs. Then he let out another one, who did exactly the same thing. We got plenty of belly laughs out of those calves.

Shortly after we moved to the farm, one of those wild Texas thunderstorms came up and we stood on the front porch watching the cows in that front field. It was lightning like crazy and the wind was blowing, I recall, hard from the north, and they were all (maybe 6 or 7 of them) huddled next to the south fence. One of the calves, Smoky, (Gayle's calf) decided to fight it, and so she backed up against the wind and got almost all the way across to the north fence, and then let fly and ran back to the other cows. We saw this all in the lightning. 

There was a big old oak tree just to the NE of the NE corner of the house which had been damaged by lightning.  There was a returned missionary, Reginald Mattison, who came around soon after we moved into that house.  His family was quite famous among Adventists in that area. He visited us about 1948 or 49 and told us stories.

He and his brother farmed there and they raised a lot of berries. One day, they were working down in front of where the house is now (I think this would have been in the '30s, and the house wasn't there then--at that time the farmhouse was to the north and maybe a little west of where the present house is, partway up the hill) when a storm came up, so they went and stood under that tree until it passed.  

A while later, another storm came, and instead of going for the tree, they headed for the house.  When they were right across from that tree, a lightning bolt hit it.  "If we had been under that tree we would have been killed dead as hammers" was his comment. 

There were two large oak trees farther north on the hillside, and one more up behind the well, near the W. property line.  Gayle slung a wood bedframe between the twin trees, hammock-wise, and put two army surplus shelter halves over it tent-wise, and would go up there when it was raining.  When he was gone I would sometimes go out there and sleep at night. 

The well was interesting. It was dug/blasted through solid sandstone, maybe 20 feet down.  During the big drought about 1950-53 James had the bottom blasted out of the well.  I think that was a mistake--that broke through the bottom of the sandstone into clay, and the water got all cloudy.  There was a windmill pumping water into a big wood tank that leaked a lot--had to keep it full to expand the boards so it wouldn't leak more.  The top was open—a couple times we fished a dead squirrel out of it (and just kept on drinking the water).  Eventually James replaced that tank with a steel tank and that was a mistake—it had been used to contain natural gas, apparently, and the water smelled bad after that. 

Water flowed down to the house by gravity. The pipes ran up the outside of the house, and James built a rough enclosure about them and filled it with sawdust, to prevent freezing in the winter. 

I learned to drive on the 1946 Chevy car, and got my license at age 14, which would have been 1951.  All that was required for me to get a license at that age, beside the usual driver’s test, was to have a judge sign off on the need for me to help my father with the driving.  Not long after that  James traded in the Chevy and bought a tan Studebaker pickup for our family transportation.

I could recount many adventures on the farm, but I think for James it was pretty much a trial.  I remember seeing him sit by the dining table with a worried look on his face, wondering how to make ends meet. Evidently there was some question whether Gayle and I could continue in church school but they somehow managed it.

Bascom Church Furniture: The thing that bailed us out financially out was Mr. Raymond E. Bascom, a kitchen cabinet maker who set up shop as a church furniture manufacturer there at Keene about 1950. James became his first employee in the plant on the east side of town that he rehabilitated for this work, and stayed with him for at least five years until we left Keene. Mr. Bascom gave me my first “real” job as a draftsman—I apprenticed to the Reese brothers, Forrest and Harold, who taught me perspective drawing and mechanical drawing.  

After living on the farm for six years, James and Mary sold it in 1954 to the Hills.  James had had a feeler to go back into the denominational work about then—I remember being very much opposed to it—I thought the farm was such a neat place. But my brother Bert talked some sense into my head—he explained to me that what happened to me in the next few was not so critical as what might happen to our father, who was in his fifties—if he was to re-enter his profession he would need to do so soon. 

In 1954 James and Mary bought a house in Keene, the second south of the corner, right across from the end of the women’s dormitory.  It had originally been built by Elder Griffin, we bought it from the Wickwires, I think—or did we sell it to the Wickwires?  I don’t remember.  We lived there only a year.  In 1955 a call came for James to be the Principal of Battle Creek Academy. With some trepidation, I think, he accepted.  He was actually quite successful as principal there…

Berrien Springs:  James really wanted back into pastoral work, so in 1956 he was assigned the Charlotte/Eaton Rapids/East Lansing district.  He stayed there several years, then was called to the Berrien Springs Village church.  In 1959 he became pastor of the Pioneer Memorial Church on the Andrews University Campus, staying until 1966 when he retired to Hendersonville, NC. On the PMC website he is given some credit for the installation of the great Casavant organ in the church, but he told me once that what he really felt he contributed, in the way of a concrete achievement, was the construction of the Pathfinder building down by Lemon Creek.

While at PMC, he began having some cardio-vascular symptoms and his physician advised him to get a lot of physical exercise. He found a plot of rich ground owned by the Clough’s [spelling doubtful], on Tudor Rd, and began making big gardens. He became famous among the students in the Garland apartments for coming to the parking lot, blowing his whistle, and giving away his produce.  

At some point, I think it was after he retired, he had a heart pacemaker installed and later it proved defective and he had to have it replaced.  He “never was quite the same” it seems, after that episode at Union College, and in his retirement he had a series of mini-strokes after which he would suffer partial amnesia.

Retirement:  When James and Mary moved to Hendersonville, they contracted with Lester Smith, a retired industrial education teacher from Andrews and an old friend, to build a house for them, which they lived in until they removed to Lodi, CA in October 1973, where Gayle and Bette Jewell lived at the time, Gayle being principal of Lodi Academy. 

In retirement, James was happiest gardening.  He preferred the eastern style of gardening (not so dependent on “hose dragging,” as he put it). In 1987 James and Mary moved to Bloomington and I (Don) commenced building a house for them, next to mine.  At that time, Mary showed signs of Alzheimers—with fairly severe memory loss.  Once, when I came over to my house from the construction site, she said to me “I know you’re Don, but who’s that old man over there?” (Her husband.) She was pretty mixed up.

The story ends:  About six o’clock in the morning of February 13, 1988, she came upstairs and told me that “Your Daddy is sick.”  I went down to their bedroom and he said it felt like there was a heavy weight across his chest. He had been up and down all night. I went out to warm up the car to take him to hospital, and when I came back Mary told me “I think your Daddy just died.” He had grimaced with pain and then was still. 

As I look back on my father’s life I see that he was an extraordinarily energetic and passionate man, who threw himself into all his enterprises with a whole heart. He had a wonderful, imaginative sense of humor.  I remember during his darkest days…I would go in on his bed in the morning and ask him to tell me stories, and he would come up with the craziest, wildest, funniest, most bizarre tales you can imagine, people with such characters as Zack Whistlebritches, and ole Doc Shinglebuttons.  I wonder if he could have written this stuff down he might have been famous as a Dr. Seuss or an A. A. Milne. But of course he didn’t think it was worth much.

He was proud of his sons, I think, in part because they all earned doctorates, but I think we distressed him a good deal, too…

The course of James’ life was heavily shaped by his strong commitment to Adventism.  I just wish he could have espoused a somewhat less absolutist, more relaxed kind of religion than he did, or a little softer brand of Adventism.  Warren Becker (whom he worked with closely in his years at PMC, and admired as a genuinely pious and devoted man) told me once that James was “a staunch Adventist.”  Whatever he was, he was staunch about it, and integrity was a big, big word with him. Would that could be said of all of us.  

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Notes on the life of [William] Bert[on] Rhoads [from GER computer file] As a child lived 2 miles from State Center, IA. At age 10 moved into the town of State Center. At age 14 moved to Sutherland,IA. Met Mary Ellen Rowland at Sutherland High School After graduation attended Teacher's Institute at Primghar, IA. (15 miles NW of Sutherland) Qualified to teach. Took position at O'Brien City, IA. Began teaching 6 students on 4 Sept 1890. Age 19. Fall 1891-Taught at Hogland, IA - South of Sutherland. Fall 1892- Taught at Kundel, IA - West of Sutherland. Spring 1893-Took 160 acre land claim, Crow Creek Indian Reservation, near Pukwana City, in Brule County, SD. While on land claim, taught at Whitmore, 9 m. NW of Pukwana. The school was within walking distance of his shack. Remained on or near claim for 18 months. Sold claim to his brother and returned to Iowa. Married Mary Ellen Rowland at Sutherland, IA, 25 Feb 1898. Taught at a nearby school. Summer 1895 - Both baptised at Iowa CM near Des Moines, IA. May 1896-Moved to Kansas to teach school, but failed to get position so farmed. Bert's mother died in July of 1898 at Nebraska Sanitarium, College View, (Lincoln) NB. 1899-Moved to Hartley, Iowa, taught school. 1902-Moved to Madison, SD 1904- Lake City, SD Elk Point, SD, SDA Intermediate School (later "Industrial Academy") Served a Principal of EPIA for 3 years. 1907-1917-Taught Elk Point "Pleasant Grove School # 20" ("The Corn School") 19 students 1917-1932-Served as Conference Educational Superintendent in Iowa, South Dakota, and Kansas. While in Iowa, lived at Nevada, IA near Oak Park Academy Lived at Redfield, SD while in that state so children could attend Plain View Academy, the successor or Elk Point Academy. Residence at Enterprise, Kansas near Enterprise Academy Grandmother Rhoads was the Sabbath School Secretary of the Kansas Conference doring this time. (Conference Office was a Topeka). 1932-To Iowa, farmed for three years. 1935-Taught church school, Council Bluffs, IA. 1936-Moved to Hawarden, IA., taught church school. 1938-Retired July 1, 1938 Lived near La Sierra College, Arlington, CA. Built a home of surplus ammunition boxes. The house is currently owned by La Sierra University, and is known as "The Rhoads House". Lived here for ten years. 1951-Lived with daughter Norma at Saratoga, Ca. Mary died here in her sleep, Feb 1954. 1954-Spent 6 mo. with son James, in Texas. Then to Red Cloud, NB, with daughter Mildred. 1955-To South Lancaster, MS with daughter Belle. 1956-Moved with them to Washington, DC. On 85th birthday walked to top, and down, the Washington Monument - 898 steps. 1963-To San Jose, CA. Lived with Norma til death in 1967.

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