HOME IS WHERE YOU HANG YOUR BAG

People…people who need people…are the luckiest people in the world.
That song and its, more accurate counterpart People need the Lord are my favorite songs about people (if you don’t include Short People). I always have…and always will love people watching. I guess I could just tell tall-tour-tales in this particular epistle but in my opinion one of the super cool aspects of traveling and performing is the “getting from here to there”. Meeting new folks, exchanging viewpoints and past history, and building new friendships is invigorating and stimulating. Being real…walking the walk…meeting people where they are in life. Being “all things to all people” (Paul’s words). Getting to see the cultural differences in various parts of the world is a big plus, AND…the people I meet is fodder for my nasty habit…writing.

While performing six summers with the Continentals/Continental Singers and three years with the full time contemporary Christian ministry group New Hope (1962-1972), I was a guest in approximately 2000 homes. If you are reading this you probably know the drill. We stayed with host families from the church or school where we played. The ladies of the church would provide an evening meal, often potluck, and your host family a late snack in the evening. After a comfortable (?) bed and breakfast it was sack-lunch-to-go and the cycle started all over again. “I’ll trade this interesting eggplant sandwich or my beautiful authentic Chiquita banana for your Twinkie”, was a phrase frequently heard on the bus. “oooh…can I have your lime jello?” probably wasn’t. At times it felt like grade school lunchroom all over again. The next-day stories about experiences with our host families ranged from interesting or ho-hum to great to terrifying (they were Manson family wanna-bes). I don’t know about the other young men but I was always ecstatic when I was able to stay with a family that had a daughter near my age. While playing Cam’s home church in Lansing in 1964 I was among the lucky ones that stayed with some of his family friends. This family sported two or three beautiful blonde babes our age that drove us around in a convertible and even let one of the guys drive the car.

Between 1963 and 1972 I toured the U.S. (many times), Canada, Alaska, Mexico, Bahamas, and Europe. In 1968 I was actually on a tour that went to the Caribbean too but I left tour early to go back to the Army. There I was, boney behind (this was obviously a long time ago) in a bus seat, chris-crossing the U.S. with one aggregation or another playing hundreds of churches, auditoriums, colleges, high schools, and parks. The housing ranged from a millionaire’s mansion in Indianapolis, with an indoor pool and tennis court, to the small clean home of an Indian Agent on a reservation in the hottest portion of the U.S., near the Nevada/California border. From a family farmhouse in Coshocton, Ohio and a peach farm in New Jersey to a singles apartment two streets off the beautiful Pacific Ocean in Huntington Beach, California. I spent one night with my eyes wide open in the upstairs of a mortuary with who knows what laying cold below. When we played in Boston I spent time in a Massachusetts lady’s house that was on the eastern-most point of the United States, out past Salem.

And…there was the nighttime snack that just kept on giving. I was one of four guys staying with a couple near Albany, NY the night before we flew to Europe from New York City. For some reason I don’t recall having had dinner before the concert…running late or something…anyway, by the time our gang arrived at the host home we were very hungry. As a snack, the lady of the house had prepared a scooped out watermelon full of cut up fruit, other melons, peaches, strawberry’s, etc. Boys will be boys so we ate our fill. There was an early bus loading back at the church the next morning and a mid-day flight and by the time we were boarded and winging our way to European adventures the four of us were trotting up and down the aisles. All the way to the Old Country our stomachs churned as we took turns in the lavatories.

On a more serious side I found as I got older (my last New Hope tour as director I was 25) I had a greater empathy with the adults in the household than with the kids. My geezer mind wanders to Magnolia, MS and a New Hope assembly at the high school, followed by an evening performance at the local First Baptist Church. Folks, the ‘rents had no clue. There was drug experimentation going on among the church high school kids, spoke openly about with us, but when we asked various parents if Magnolia had a drug problem they laughed at us.
Throughout the New Hope years the concept of using “rock” or “contemporary” music in churches as a valid outreach to the young’uns was a subject I defended for hours at a time with the older generation.Folks…we fought the battles out there to make way for the Contemporary Christian music of today. I’ll share two stories.

The first takes place on a fall weekend in 1971 in Bend, Oregon. We had driven, to the middle of nowhere in central Oregon, to perform on a Sunday evening at a church. We did our “church”, please-the-saints program. I don’t use that phrase in a careless way. It was a meaningful and well received event aimed at the church audience. The sanctuary was small but the place was packed. We took a love offering for expenses and stayed with folks from that congregation overnight Sunday evening. We told the congregation that we would be performing an assembly at Bend High School the next day and inviting the school kids to our ticketed night concert Monday. We also offered them the opportunity to come out and see what that show was all about. Monday evening came and we had a great concert with 13 kids coming forward at the end. We did our secular rock n roll and our Jesus rock mixed with testimonies and an invitation. While our group members were dealing with the ones that come forward, two young adult couples came up to me and asked to talk. They started by saying they had been at the Sunday evening program and how wonderful it was. They said they could feel the Spirit of God right there in the auditorium. Then they proceeded to say that they had been in a rock group and had been called out of that lifestyle when they became Christians and then asked why did we feel we need to play that kind of music? Why couldn’t we just play Christian music and play churches. I said…as calm as possible…that as much as we enjoyed church music and the fellowship the plain facts are: 1. None of these teens were at the church concert because it was at a church, and 2. Our total offering last night was 38.86. Tonight we sold tickets and made a few hundred dollars. We have 11 people and a bus to propel around the country and that will not happen on 38.86 a night. We are first and foremost in business to witness to kids and to do that we need to meet them right where they are. I then proceeded to say that if they felt they need to avoid rock music, if that was how God had spoken to them, convicted them, then they should do that, but we really felt called to do what will put us in front of the most kids.

My second story is a doozie. We were playing in Moore, OK. Moore High School was large and we had to perform two assemblies a day for three days to catch all the kids. We started on Monday and by Wednesday we had invited almost 2400 kids to the Wednesday night concert at Moore First Baptist Church. It was a large church but the capacity was probably 850. On Wednesday afternoon we were eating pizza in the youth building at the church when we started noticing cars drifting into the parking lot. By 6:30 the sanctuary was packed and they started putting kids in the choir loft and putting up chairs. At 7 pm, with the concert scheduled to start at 7:30, I was in a conference with the pastor, music director and some very heated up deacons. They were upset because the church regulars had arrived for “prayer meeting” at the usual time and some couldn’t even get in much less sit in their regular pews. And to top that off the kids were mostly unchurched and so they were clapping for the group to come out and being rowdy. I had to go out before we ever started and warn them against being overly rambunctious. They didn’t know it but the pastor had warned me that if things got out of hand he would stop the program at the offering and call it a night. We made it thru the evening (with a few reminders from stage) without them pulling the plug and had dozens of kids come forward for counseling. The pastor told me that we were taking too long with the counseling and some of the folks that had promised to house us had left because they hadn’t been able to get in. As the housing was shuffled around some of our guys ended up going home with the pastor and his weeping wife. She cried in the car and said she was afraid her husband was going to lose his job. Then she asked the question. Why did you go to the school? Why not just invite some of the kids to the church and that would have left room for the rest of her friends. Basically she said she just wanted a nice church event…not an outreach. Now…what would they do with all the kids if they started coming to the church and expecting something like that all the time?
When we hit the road there were still 80-90 % of the churches in the country that didn’t want drums on their platform and weren’t too crazy about guitars either. I’m not just talking about live musicians. Trax were a really new thing and sparingly used.

Now, the singers they liked… because we could change our show to do anything they wanted. I’ve been asked to point the trumpets into the curtains so they wouldn’t be so loud. To put the drummer in the baptistery. To perform without drums. Unplug the electric guitars and go acoustic. Lots of variations. When we added horns my second New Hope year we were continually fighting the “loudness” factor. Between the amount of shows we did, the potluck dinners, the staying-in-homes, and the bus breakdowns I can honestly say that this gig was something you really had to want to do.

One more story before wrapping this up.
In August of 1969, just before I went into New Hope I was flown out to New York City to meet up with Steve Hilson’s tour coming back from Europe. Dan Burgess had been assistant director but had to fly to L.A. to help get things ready for the fall tours. So I flew in from Portland OR where I had been staying with my sister after getting out of the Army. I arrived at JFK shortly before 2 pm, schlepped my bags over to the International Terminal, and guarded my stuff for 7 hours. When the group finally came in the bus driver and a truck driver got thru customs first and hustled out to the parking lot to recover the vehicles and have them ready when everyone else got thru. I joined the throng and as I met these kids I walked with them to the bus, dropped my hang up bag with all the rest, to be loaded in the truck, hand delivered my suitcase to the bus bins and boarded to be introduced to everybody officially.

We were staying at Sloan House, sort of a YWCA/YMCA, in downtown NYC. We arrived there and because I didn’t need my bag, just my suitcase, I never gave it another thought. Sometime during the next day as we are tooling around sightseeing a group member comes up and introduced himself and says, “Did you have a hang up bag when you arrived?” Not appreciating the past tense in that question I said yes. He started to apologize and I knew I was in trouble. Seems that he was loading the bags at the airport and noticed that one didn’t have the same tags as all the others…and not knowing about my arrival, since he was in the truck, he had taken it back INSIDE THE TERMINAL!

My first experience driving in the total bedlam of NYC was driving that truck back out to the airport and visiting all 13 of the terminals searching for a bag that disappeared off the face of the earth. Houdini couldn’t have done it better. Four jackets, 13 shirts and 8 pairs of pants…all my clothes for New Hope tour as well as show clothes for this current Continental tour were gone. We were then headed to a small town in New Jersey or Pennsylvania where I proceeded, at a local Penny’s, to try to get enough clothes together to get on the risers. I think a kind orchestra person lent me a coat since they’re not as visible as the choir. The valuable lesson I learned…one that stuck with me thru the next twenty years of performing professionally, was to never assume anything. The devil is in the details.

I didn’t take many photos but the memories of my tours are all colorfully vivid. The eye-popping New York World’s Fair in 1964, where we performed both in the Oregon Pavilion and the Billy Graham Pavilion; a cruise ship performance on our way to the Bahamas to do a performance for the Governor; three and a half weeks in Europe in 1965 with the unbelievable treat of staying in hotels for the whole trip! We enjoyed castles in Germany, Stratford-on-Avon in England, the exciting opening of the Salzburg Folk Festival in Austria, and the charm of Lake Lucerne, Switzerland and youth hostel in Amsterdam. Everett King and I saw Queen Elizabeth and Prince Phillip coming out of Buckingham Palace gates just hours after arriving in London! Seeing the Colorado Rockies, Red Rocks and Garden of the Gods, outside of Denver and Colorado Springs; performing and staying at the castle Glen Erie owned by the Navigators. We recorded the album SOUL at Capitol studios in Hollywood with Ralph Carmichael in the same studio where he worked with Nat King Cole. We even went to his house in Bel Air to swim and listen to the yet-unfinished-tapes. I had great fun (though we only sang a couple times) on my first visit to Lake Tahoe, Disneyland, Tijuana, and Palm Springs during a December 1963 Mexico YFC missions trip. New Hope worked in a secular show with Bob Hope and the Brothers Four AND with youth evangelist Bill McKee in the dead of a Minnesota winter in 1971, and witnessed hundreds of high school kids make decisions for Christ at rallies. We had special teaching sessions with Dr. Dave Breese and stayed a week at Campus Crusade headquarters in Arrowhead Springs, CA, followed by a show.

And how about the magnificent splendor of British Columbia and Alaska in the summer of 1970? The Steve Hilson-led Continentals sailed the inside passage of British Columbia and Alaska on a 140 foot converted minesweeper, drinking in the breathtaking scenery and soaring mountaintops. The glaciers and whales were so close you could almost reach out and touch them. We performed in Indian villages, city halls, and sometimes right from the top of the ship.
These people and places memories…and I have a truck load of ‘em, will stay imbedded in this ol’ brain forever.

Wes Turner
Original Continentals 63-65, Continental Singers 67, 69, 70, New Hope 69-72