Mission at Nuremberg

by Tim Townsend

  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, Luthera
n 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.

  “Since the first of November, prices on paper hit the bottom and at this very moment because of the RECESSION we are struggling desperately to keep Mission Industries going,” he wrote in 1938. “We ask a favor of you. May we have your family mailing list in order to contact all our people with a card or letter asking for cast-off materials such as old clothing, broken furniture, cardboard, newspapers and magazines? . . . We keep fifteen men at work whose families would have been in desperate circumstances without your help.”

  Nearly everything—the trucks, the warehouse, and the store space—was donated by Lutherans, but there were expenses. Trucks broke down, warehouses burned, pipes froze.

  “We can’t keep up with the calls and are badly in need of another truck,” Gerecke wrote in another plea, suggesting pastors put a free ad for Lutheran Mission Industries in their parish paper. Expenditures exceeded $700 a month. “There’s no allowance for up-keep of our cars or rent. The situation is desperate. What shall we do? We need the encouragement of your prayers more than you realize. Our work is with the unfortunates, discouraged, the poor, the sick and the dying. May He bless you richly.”

  Less than a year after joining City Mission, Gerecke began working with prisoners in the downtown city jail. He held services at the jail at 9:00 A.M. on the first and third Sundays of each month. At first, about fifteen to twenty prisoners showed up. Gerecke began to bring in music—“the Gospel Songbird, Loretta Rolfingsmeyer,” the Girls Gospel Harmony Trio from Overland, Missouri, and cornet and piano players. By the third year of this program, more than a hundred prisoners turned out for the services.

  “Without boasting, the Lutheran services are the only protestant [sic] services well attended in that institution,” Gerecke wrote in a newsletter. “The prisoners know without special announcement that the Lutheran services are holding forth. . . . Sometimes the guards join in the service.”

  By 1940, Gerecke was “much excited about the attendance at Jail. Remember, the prisoner is not compelled to attend church. The average for Nov. was nearly 160. Even the guards pick up a hymnal to join in singing those fine old Gospel hymns. Does that crowd sing! Sorry we can’t invite your people to these services. With Wilma at the piano, Ralph on the cornet, and the pilgrim singers adding their harmonies, believe me, brother, that crowd sings. Even killers will listen to a blood-bought Gospel.”

  Gerecke also made his way to the Missouri State Penitentiary in 1940—a visit he called “a high spot”—where he spoke to eleven hundred fifty men. “They seemed visibly touched,” he wrote. “When Chaplain Lindsay asked the men about a return visit, they answered with a tremendous applause. We shall see them again. This may be the opening of a large field. God has been good to us.”

  Unsurprisingly, money was a constant issue for a charity operation during the Great Depression. Two of the synod’s districts contributed to the agency’s budget, which was $11,000 in 1938, about $175,000 in today’s dollars. But at the end of that year, City Mission was $500 ($7,500 today) in the red.

  Gerecke wrote to the delegates at each Lutheran congregation in the district: “We must have better financial support of work if we are to carry on with the present arrangement. Where shall we get it? Under what circumstances and when? If no financial help comes our way, we will be compelled to retrench our activities in the very near future. Some of you say ‘NO’ to this, but what can we do about it? . . . You say, ‘Have faith.’ Thank you we do, but how long shall we go on deeper and deeper into debt with no reasonable assurance to be able to pay back?”

  The lack of funding was not only a business issue; it influenced the morale of the three missionaries. “When we see only money matters in our work we become terribly depressed because of low funds,” Gerecke wrote at one point, “but when we think of spiritual matters we know the command of Jesus that we are to go out and find the lost and wandering for heaven.”

  When eight hundred people attended City Mission’s fortieth anniversary service, the collection plate brought in $208.64. Gerecke called the haul “a grand success.”

  Ellwanger ran the mission day school and original chapel on the south side. Holls was responsible for about 230 Lutheran patients out of 3,700 who suffered from “mental and nervous disorders” at the City Sanitarium on Arsenal Street in south St. Louis, and 120 Lutherans at the City Infirmary, which housed “the aged, infirm and poor,” next door. Holls also traveled to the U.S. Veterans Hospital in Jefferson Barracks, about fifteen miles south of the city, and conducted services at St. Louis’s Lutheran Convalescents Home, Barnes Hospital, and the Home for the Friendless. Gerecke, who also ran the business end of City Mission, was in charge of the Lutheran Mission Industries, pastored his congregation of one hundred at Good Shepherd, and did as much missionary work as Holls.

  On Wednesdays, Gerecke went to the City Workhouse, a medium-security prison, at noon, and gave a sermon to the men as they ate in the mess hall. Wednesday evenings, he visited tuberculosis patients at the City Hospital and attended the spiritual needs of those in isolation wards. Three times a week, he made the rounds at Koch Hospital, visiting the two hundred patients under City Mission’s spiritual care. On Friday mornings, he visited the isolation patients at Mount St. Rose, a Catholic sanatorium on the far south side of the city. Sundays were Gerecke’s busiest days. In 1941, he wrote in a City Mission newsletter about a typical one:

  First service, fifteen miles from home, at 6 a.m. Another at 7:45 a.m. A hurry up trip to Jail for a 9 a.m. service. Then Sunday School and Church service at 10:45 a.m. at the chapel. Several hospital calls in the afternoon. Evening devotion at 6 p.m. at another institution and evening service at 8 p.m. at the chapel. Your prayers keep us going. God shall supply strength on the way.

  A seminary student who worked at City Mission wrote in a 1941 newsletter about the long hours the missioners put in:

  The work of a city missionary taxes a man’s energy to the utmost. Pastor Gerecke and the other men sometimes preach as many as seven or eight sermons per Sunday (5 is normal) and they often are called to the death beds of two or more patients in one night at some city hospital or institution. They never seem to complain, however, because of the personal joy which one receives in administering to sick brethren and sisters who need comfort from God’s Word.

  Gerecke also made weekly visits to the government’s Marine Hospital, west of the city in Kirkwood, and once a month he conducted a service and Bible class for unmarried mothers at the Bethesda Hospital and Home for Incurables, just a block from his former pulpit at Christ Church.

  The missioners kept track of everything and a
nything they could—lists of sermon attendance figures, visitation requests, baptisms, confirmations, marriages—for their annual report. For Gerecke, it would turn out to be good training for the army. In 1937, for instance, Gerecke counted 17, 614 “hearers”—those who’d heard him speak in some capacity about the faith. The three men together baptized 28 adults and 59 children, confirmed 28 adults and 17 children, communed 1,480, married 13 couples, and buried 52 dead that year. “The Gospel has been taught and preached,” Gerecke wrote. “We leave the fruits of our work to the Holy Spirit.”

  Like the number-keeping, Gerecke would use much that he learned during his City Mission years as an army chaplain. In a pamphlet handed out at a service and dinner at the fortieth anniversary of City Mission, worshippers were given an overview of some of the work the missioners did each week.

  At the Municipal Workhouse, the pamphlet read, Gerecke “preaches a brief Gospel sermon to a large audience in the ‘mess hall’ each Wednesday noon where men of both races listen with deep and grateful appreciation and God alone knows how many of these law violators have changed their manner of living as a direct result of these sermons and returned to Christ.”