Graham, saddened by the death of his younger brother, was quiet during dinner until I started asking questions about Penn State. Then he opened up. “It’s a beautiful campus. I know because I’ve walked every inch of it. My shoulder is so much better that I’ve started working out with the football team.”
Our three guests were about to leave when I cleared my throat a bit nervously and said I had an announcement to make. “We all terribly miss Dean Fleming and his sister, Hazel,” I began. “I doubt if we will ever know all that Dean did for people. Yet I must admit that he was often a thorn in my side. He would correct me when I made mistakes and challenge me if he thought my thinking was fuzzy. I didn’t like it much then, but I sure do value it now.”
I was struggling now for the right words. “If Dean was sometimes a mystery, his group of Preparers were even more so. It annoyed me that these men could always just go off somewhere whenever they felt like it to do their lofty deeds. I asked him why only males were qualified for this. He just laughed at me and said that he guessed women should form their own religious groups, that I was always trying to reach too far, too fast. As usual, I didn’t care too much for his correction.”
I paused, fighting the emotion welling up inside. “A week before the flood, Dean drew me aside one day. He said he had established a trust in the Alderton National Bank in my name for five thousand dollars. It was available to me only for education. He said it should more than take care of my tuition and expenses for four years of college, that it would help prepare me to be what God wanted me to be.
“I didn’t say anything about this at the time, not even to my parents, for I wanted to stay here and work on the Sentinel. The other night at Baker Memorial when Dad told why he agreed to be the interim pastor there, I knew what I was supposed to do. I’ve been on the phone with the enrollment office at Penn State. Since Mother and Dad have approved, I’m all set to begin my college education there on February first at the start of the second semester. I’ll find a way to make up the first semester.”
“Julie, that’s great news!” I knew that Graham would have grabbed me in his arms if the others had not been present.
Spencer looked disappointed.
Rand’s expression was one of dismay.
After an evening of animated talk about education and careers, and after saying good-bye to the three men who had become so close to me, I walked out the back door and stood there alone in the yard under a cloudless, moonless sky. The air was crisp, but I was not chilled. The vastness of the starry heavens stirred me. What a beautiful big world God had made!
As I strolled toward The Rocks, dead leaves rustled under my shoes. What was dying now in nature would revive in glorious new life six months from now, I mused. Just as Alderton would be reborn through men like my father and young Tom McKeever and Spencer Meloy and Neal Brinton and Rand and—yes, even Bryan McKeever. What courageous people they were! How grateful I was to be a part of it all.
Suddenly I marveled at my sudden and new sense of freedom. Dean had been right. I had been too eager to grow up. It was great to be eighteen.
Seven Mile Road had been widened and repaved many times since 1935, but it still was a winding two-lane passageway down the mountain. As I drove slowly, I noted the old familiar landmarks: the curve where Bryan McKeever had nearly plunged us to our death on high school graduation night, the spot where Dad had slid into the ditch during a cloudburst on the day we first approached Alderton.
So many memories, so much living bound up in this mountain and the valley below!
Then there was the turnoff to the Allegheny Community, renamed in 1938 from the Hunting and Fishing Club. Though the development was still private and exclusive, it was now owned and operated by a new breed of millionaires like Tom McKeever Jr. and his son Bryan, who welcomed the press, were open to publicity and occasionally ran for public office. Lake Kissawha was a much smaller version of the one that had devastated Alderton forty-eight years before. A modern concrete dam dispersed spring floodwaters into three separate tributaries that wound down through a hundred-square-mile radius below.
Even now, so many years later, the terror of those twenty-seven minutes on September 21, 1935, remained fresh. Oh Tim, how much we have missed you! And Dean . . . and Hazel and Margo . . . so many gone so quickly.
After several miles I turned onto the dirt road that led to the Fleming cabin, which Dean had left to my father “for use by The Preparers.” The rest of the land, where the barn and farmhouse had stood, had gone to Dean’s children.
In 1973 Dad had retired from the Sentinel and bought the property nearest the cabin, where he and Mother built a home. Mother’s death in 1978 at eighty-two had been a grievous loss to us. Her strength at our lowest moments had kept the family intact. Ever since the Alderton flood Mother and Dad had been extremely close, enjoying their proliferating family, which now included five grandchildren and fourteen great-grandchildren.
Dad, at eighty-eight, amazed me: clear mind, good eyesight, straight body. He loved to walk the mountain trails, still wrote a column for the newspaper, and did much of his own cooking. Only his hearing was deteriorating.
With a sense of quickening excitement at the prospect of seeing my father, husband, son, and grandson—four generations in the cabin at the same time—I parked my car in the parking area and walked briskly toward the front door.
“Grandmother!”
Startled, I turned toward the voice. Dean, our tall, blond, eighteen-year-old grandson, was running up the slope from the cabin. He hugged me, then drew back and looked at me solemnly.
“Good book you wrote. Only one problem,” he said with a grin.
“What’s that?”
“Not enough sex.”
“You can get that anywhere today,” I replied, giving him a playful poke in the ribs.
The cabin door opened and the three other most important men in my life came outside. My husband was the first to embrace me. Then he laughed.
“Julie Wilkinson, I saw you strike our grandson. Aren’t you a bit old at sixty-five to be giving out corporal punishment?”
“Never, Rand. Not as long as they need it. Right, Timmy?”
Our thirty-nine-year-old son chuckled and kissed me on the cheek. “You picked a good one, Dad.”
“I sure did.” Then Rand placed a short-stemmed pink rose in my hair.
The Editor was standing on the steps, gazing over the family scene with a look of contentment. “Come on inside, all of you,” he said as he kissed me tenderly.
The five of us sat down in a semicircle in front of the fireplace, catching each other up on recent family news. Randolph had flown in from London two days before. I had driven up from our home in Virginia, where I had holed up the past three months to finish my manuscript. Our son Timothy had been made publisher of the Alderton Daily Sentinel six months before, taking over from Randolph, who had then gone to England to supervise renovations on Harperley House. Our daughter Mary Louise, her husband and children would arrive tomorrow. Harperley House, the manor residence I had first heard about from Randolph in the Sentinel office, had become our home for part of each year. Yes, Scottish harebells still grew there in profusion, and the mahogany balustrades had survived several more generations of Wilkinson children sliding down them. And what fun to watch a child’s delight in discovering Harperley’s secret passageway from the house down to the River Wear, an escape route Rand’s ancestors had used to elude Cromwell’s advancing troops.
Anne-Marie, that irrepressible sister of mine, was due in tonight, along with her husband, Spencer Meloy. Their marriage back in 1945 had been a surprise to many, considering the eighteen years’ difference in their ages. But not to me, who knew them both so well: Anne-Marie had been in love with Spencer throughout her teens. After rearing three children while Spencer pastored a church in a small coal-mining town in West Virginia, the Meloys had accepted a missionary assignment in Guatemala as a joint venture, even though Spencer was in his ret
irement years.
As I looked about the cabin at four generations of Wallace-Wilkinson family, a wave of gratitude overwhelmed me. How had we been so blessed! The Daily Sentinel had grown into a multimillion-dollar publishing business which now included two other Pennsylvania newspapers, a national home and garden magazine, and an international book publishing house.
My mind drifted back to the agony of trying to choose among Rand, Graham, and Spencer during my college years. After graduation from Penn State in 1940, I had come very close to marrying Graham Gillin. When World War II started we decided to wait; then Graham had joined the Navy pilot training program in 1941.
During the battle for Midway in June 1942, Graham was killed when his dive-bomber was shot down after scoring a direct hit on a Japanese carrier. Graham was an authentic and publicized American hero.
In the year after Graham’s death, I became very close to Spencer, but something stopped me from marrying him. Was it my sister’s adoration of him? My inner confusion? Or because the fire between Rand and me had never died down?
Randolph had tried to enlist in both the British and the American military forces during the war, was rejected by both because of his leg injury, and then served in the British Home Guard for several years. When he returned to Alderton in 1944, our love was instantly rekindled. We were married in December 1944.
And tomorrow at the annual family picnic there would be a moment of silent memory and gratitude for Tim, whose boyhood exploits had grown over the years into almost legendary feats.
Dad interrupted my nostalgia. “Let’s begin with an important announcement from Dean.”
I turned to look at our grandson, whose main interests in life so far had been sports, cars, and girls.
Dean was slightly embarrassed. “It’s no big deal,” he said. “I just spent a week at a conference of Christian athletes. They convinced me that the Lord wants men with a real spirit of adventure. So I decided it was time for me to get with it. I’ve always admired Dean Fleming and the way he lived and died for his faith. I’ve been proud to carry his name. And so I want to be one of The Preparers.”
“I think that is a big deal, Dean,” I said.
As we congratulated young Dean, I realized suddenly that this was the missing piece in my manuscript. Now there were four generations of our family in The Preparers. Once I had resented the men-only character of this small group. No longer. Over the years I came to accept and then support this exclusiveness as its main strength. The quiet impact of The Preparers in developing leadership in men had constantly amazed me. Dean’s decision was the perfect ending to the story begun so long ago . . .
Not Quite the End
. . . At this point the Editor rose and picked up a hand-carved wooden box from the table. He stood before his family, body erect, eyes intent. At eighty-eight there was no diminution of tensile strength in his spirit. The man who arrived in Alderton weak and vacillating back in 1934 to face a watershed year of personal testing had been for almost half a century a bastion of strength.
“Let me begin this little speech by paying tribute to Dean Fleming.” He paused. “I met him at the lowest point in my life. He challenged me, just as he had been challenged by Big John Hammond, and just as each of you here in this room has been captivated by a compelling philosophy of life.
“We’ve learned that we can overcome our frailties by giving ourselves to Someone bigger than we are, who becomes our life, our strength, our purpose. Once I was ready to die for Jesus Christ, I could begin to live—with boldness and direction.
“As you know, Julie, that ax above the fireplace has been the symbol of The Preparers ever since Big John’s time. The ax is not used so much today, but it still stands for hard work, personal involvement, and the preparing of land for better living. This ax was first presented by Big John Hammond to Dean Fleming. At Dean’s death, it was given to me. When I die, it will go to Rand, then to Timothy and after that, we hope, to young Dean.
“Julie, perhaps without realizing it, you have been a part of this work for years. You have used your special gifts as a writer to share your spiritual discoveries with millions of people. We decided it was time to give recognition to this. Therefore, we present you with this gift.”
Inside the wooden box, lovingly carved by four generations of Wallaces, was a small but exact replica of the ax over the fireplace—in jade. A line of small diamonds, inlaid and spaced evenly from top to bottom, sparkled like the stars at night.
“Each of those nineteen diamonds represents a book you have written, including this one,” the Editor continued. “Each of your books, like diamonds, has shown the light of the Lord to people hungry for spiritual truth. In each one, Julie, you have been a true Preparer as you readied our hearts for the coming of the King.”
by
Nancy Oliver LeSourd
Gripping accounts of catastrophic floods from Hurricane Harvey in 2017 galvanized the nation’s attention on Houston. Over one trillion gallons of rainfall over four days flooded a third of Harris County. The nation watched the many heroes rescue thousands trapped by the floodwaters. It reminded us of the horrific ravages of the 2005 flooding from Hurricane Katrina, where over 1,800 people died and over 80 percent of New Orleans was underwater.
In developing Julie, Catherine researched not only employment conditions of steel mills and worker settlements and the rise of unions, but also the history of the famous 1889 Johnstown, Pennsylvania, flood. When the South Fork Dam failed, twenty million tons of water thundered mercilessly towards the town. Walls of water as high as thirty feet slammed into homes and buildings at speeds of up to forty miles per hour, destroying everything in their path. Over 2,200 people died in this historic flood.
As she did in Christy, Catherine relied on her keen ability to transport readers back in time through careful attention to historic details undergirding the fictional story. Julie is enriched with her in-depth research of the very real 1889 Johnstown flood. The History of the Johnstown Flood, published just months after this deadly disaster, provided details on the events leading up to the flood and its aftermath.
Many townspeople of Johnstown, like those of the fictional town of Alderton in Julie, were employees of the local steel mill, Cambria Iron and Steel Company. The Company owned much of the land surrounding the town and a network of two-story frame tenements rented by its employees.
The Company also owned a reservoir created from an old canal. It repaired the middle of an old earthen dam and increased its height to enlarge the reservoir into the beautiful Lake Conemaugh. To demonstrate the Company’s faith in the dam, it built the road across the dam to the exclusive summer resort, the South Fork Fishing and Hunting Club located on the lake. Pittsburg industrial tycoons of the time, Andrew Carnegie, Andrew Mellon, and Henry Clay Frick, were frequent visitors to the resort.
But many feared the dam would not hold and the waters would pummel the flatlands. One observer noted in 1889, “We were afraid of that lake; . . . We were afraid of that lake seven years ago. No one could see the immense height to which that artificial dam had been built without fearing the tremendous power of the water behind it.”
On May 31, 1889, that tremendous wall of water was unleashed:
“. . . there was a sound like tremendous and continued peals of thunder. Trees, rocks and earth shot up into mid-air in great columns and then started down the ravine.”
Mr. Crouse, proprietor of the South Fork Fishing Club Hotel, said, “When the dam of Conemaugh Lake broke the water seemed to leap, scarcely touching the ground. It bounded down the valley, crashing and roaring, carrying everything before it. For a mile its front seemed like a solid wall twenty feet high.”
The destruction was swift and mighty.
Those who made it to the hills were witnesses to the terrifying destruction. Mr. O’Brien, a storekeeper, reported that he “saw a town before him, then a mountain of timber approaching, then a dizzy swirl of men at the viaduct, a breaking of the embankment to t
he east of it, the forming of a whirlpool there that ate up homes and those that dwelt in them, as a cauldron of molten iron eats up the metal scraps that are thrown in to cool it, and then a silence and a subsidence. It was a quarter of four o’clock. At half past three there had been a Johnstown. Now there was none.”
Stories of survivors and their heroism and self-sacrifice are replete in the 1889 account as they are about the fictional townspeople in Julie. Where there is a love of God and a love of neighbor, even the worst disasters will be punctuated with stories of faith and love—and yes, even hope.
“America’s most inspirational writer”
– The New York Times
Catherine Marshall, New York Times Best-Selling author, is best known for her novel Christy. Based on the life of her mother, a teacher of mountain children in poverty-stricken Tennessee, the story of Christy captured the hearts of millions and became a popular CBS television series. Christy’s impact is seen in the hundreds of individuals who became teachers in underserved communities after reading the novel. Her powerful second novel, Julie, is set in the 1930s in a Pennsylvania steel mill town prone to flooding. Danger increases as Julie and her father challenge the treatment of immigrant workers by steel mill owners in a town whose very existence depends on the strength of the dam controlled by them.
Catherine first heard Dr. Peter Marshall preach as a student at Agnes Scott College. They were married after her graduation in 1936. Dr. Peter Marshall, the endearing Scottish preacher, was one of America’s best-known preachers and also served as Chaplain of the United States Senate. In 1940, their son, Peter John, was born. From 1943–45, Catherine struggled with the ravages of tuberculosis, for which there was no known cure at the time. Confined to her bed, she spent hours reading, studying Scripture, and journaling, which nurtured her later writing career.
Julie Page 39
