Heaven Was the First Methodist Church

When I was a child, the year 1941 was a black and white memory in my mind except for the red sky in the evening in December around five o'clock. There were a few other memories in color like the green cedar trees that I called Christmas trees back East in Clarksburg and my mother’s pale purple suit and matching hat. The hat had a lavender veil that came to the tip of her nose, and many times she wore it when we went to town to shop.I suppose the most important memory in color to me at that time was my mother’s red hair and my daddy’s dark hair, and I associated that memory with how very good looking they both were. Jerry and Jack Gunter, my mother and daddy, were an attractive couple by anyone’s standards. She was pretty, tiny, and very feminine, and he was dark and handsome, a masculine, muscular young man, average in height and strong willed. But most of my memories of those early times with them remain in black and white. The fact was that most of the 1940’s were black and white years in my mind’s eye, and the picture they drew for a child like me was a straight, unwavering line of time marching on one year after the other like the newsreels at the movies I loved to see.When I think of the 1940’s, the War Years, I think of the black nights when we lived back East in Clarksburg, and of how some people thought the Germans were coming by air to bomb us, and of how most everyone went to bed early or drew their drapes after dark. My daddy always ……..But, I’m getting ahead of myself. The most vivid memories of those times began back East in the fall of 1941.