Jonas Salk was in the news a few weeks ago, fifty years to the day after announcing his vaccine which halted the epidemic of polio in its tracks. How well I can recall the dreadful plague known officially as infantile paralysis. Every time you turned around, you heard of another precious child being afflicted. “Don’t swim in that pond,” we would hear. Our parents were certain that the disease was caught or spread through infected swimming pools. As a child in the 1940s, I joined with others from our school as we filled the little March of Dimes cards with coins to help fight polio. And we breathed a great sigh of relief when Salk’s announcement was made.

Now it comes to light that Dr. Salk was only the point man of a vast team of researchers and scientists. While that is not particularly surprising, what is unusual is that none of them got any credit for their part in the discovery and perfecting of this vaccine. A half century later, those researchers and their families are still hurting over the slight. Dr. Salk is long dead, but his son now apologizes for the glaring oversight.

Continue reading →

On the plane returning to New Orleans from Atlanta, I found myself seated beside a Catholic priest making an overnight trip to my city to speak at a local church. We fell into a conversation about our respective ministries in a brief attempt to understand each other better. At one point the priest said, “What’s it like being a Baptist in New Orleans?”

While I was formulating an answer, the lady in front of us–we had no idea she was listening–turned around and said loudly, “I’ll tell you what it’s like. It’s like being a Catholic in Atlanta!” A dozen passengers around us, also tuning in, erupted in laughter.

Outnumbered is the point. Maybe overwhelmed sometimes. And, if we’re not careful, overlooked.

Continue reading →

Five years into our marriage, Margaret and I had a honeymoon. That’s what happens when you are a) poor and b) in seminary all the time, trying to earn your credentials as a pastor.

Anyway, I was just graduating from seminary and pastoring a little church on a bayou some 25 miles west of New Orleans and we decided the time had come for a real vacation. We did something that was so unlike us that it seems a little foolhardy now and I wonder that we did it at all. We hired a lady to come in and stay with our two small boys for the week. (Okay, it wasn’t quite that scary. Leola was a lovely Black lady who helped Margaret with the housekeeping one day a week and our boys adored her.)

We were driving a 1964 red Ford Falcon with no air conditioning, but hey, it was 1967 and that’s how most people lived. And so we went to Texas.

Continue reading →

Have you ever fainted? I did once, in a cafeteria. I had taken my sons and daughter-in-law to dinner while my wife was out of town. Standing in the line, I began to feel queasy. By the time we started selecting dishes, all I could think of eating–and holding down–was jello. At the table, I asked the waitress if they had a couch where I could lie down. They didn’t. The next thing I knew, I was flat on my back under the table being attended to by two physicians who had been dining at the next table. Later, my son Marty teased, “Dad, if we had gone to Taco Bell, there wouldn’t have been no doctors at the next table!”

I was doing a wedding once where the bride fainted. At first, I thought she was just swooning against her beloved father, but then she dissolved into a pile at the groom’s feet. The best man carried her to the church parlor and laid her out on the carpet and someone broke a capsule of smelling salts. She opened her eyes and said, “Oh, mother, I’ve embarrassed you in front of all your friends.” Mom said, “Hush.” I asked if she wanted to cut short any of the wedding material. She said, “No, not after all the planning we’ve done. But talk fast.”

Continue reading →

Among the people in my past I give thanks for most is the small parade of friends who loved me enough to confront me about some area that needed my serious attention.

As a freshman at Berry College in Rome, Georgia, two-thirds of a lifetime ago, I was approached by classmate Bob Cornell who asked if I would like to help him a couple of afternoons washing windows at the president’s home. I casually answered, “Sure,” and walked with him the next afternoon across the highway to the president’s mansion where we cleaned windows in preparation for an open house the school’s first lady had scheduled. Now, I grew up on the farm and certainly knew what hard work was, but washing windows was not the way I wanted to spend my autumn afternoons. So, the next day, I just simply did not show up, and thought nothing about it.

“Mrs. Bertrand wants to see you,” Bob said to me that evening in the cafeteria. “Me? Why?” I said, without a clue. “She says you had made a commitment to help me wash windows and you let us down.” I laughed and shrugged it off. To my way of thinking, I had agreed to help my friend wash windows that one afternoon, but I did not sign on for anything more, and I surely made no commitment to the president’s wife. I put it out of my mind.

A couple of days later, the hall phone in our dormitory rang and someone yelled my name. It was Mrs. Bertrand. “Are you busy?” she asked. “I’ll be by in five minutes. Meet me in front of your dorm.”

Continue reading →

I’ve been thinking lately about the way the lightning of public awareness strikes unexpectedly and how abruptly private citizens may become household words.

What if you had told Terry Schiavo when she was a healthy young woman living a normal life with her nice husband, maybe trying to diet a little and shed a few pounds, that she was going to be featured in every newspaper in the country and become the subject of untold hours of news television. But that she could do nothing to prepare for it. It was just going to happen.

What if you had told Laci Petersen that before her 30th birthday the world would know her, would thrill at her lovely smile, and would learn more details about her history and her marriage than almost anyone anywhere. But there was nothing she could do to prepare, that it would just happen.

Or take Ashley Smith, Brian Nichols’ hostage in suburban Atlanta…

Continue reading →

I’m not the one you want to ask about Terry Schiavo’s situation. After all, according to all the professional pundits and the know-it-alls who expound on talk shows and in letters to the editor, since I don’t know the lady and never heard her express her wishes about not wanting heroic measures to prolong her life, I am not qualified to register an opinion. Which makes me one of the few not chiming in on the matter. Until now and only here.

God bless this poor lady and her grieving parents. In my early morning walks on the Mississippi River levee, the prayer I send up most often on their behalf is, “Father, thy will be done.” I think of that terrific promise in Romans 8:26 that sometimes we do not know how to pray as we should, but in those cases the Holy Spirit does our praying for us. I’m cashing in that red card right now. “Lord, pray for this lady and her parents, please.”

I am not normally a merciless person, but I have to tell you, I feel zero pity for the husband. As soon as I learned that while his wife has lain there between life and death, he has fathered two children with a lady he is not married to, that did it. I’m outa here. At my house, that fellow has zero credibility.

Odd that this issue is coming to a climax at Easter, isn’t it. At the very time we are all rejoicing in the hope of eternal life, some are calling for an end to this lady’s life.

I do not have all knowledge on anything, but if I were a wagering man, I would bet you that most of the people who favor unplugging the feeding tubes are the same ones who defend what they euphemistically refer to as “a woman’s right to choose,” and the rest of us call killing the unborn.

Continue reading →

My Dad is Carl J. McKeever. The J. doesn’t stand for anything. He was born April 13, 1912, to 17-year-old Bessie and 19-year-old George McKeever. They would have 11 more children, with the last, Georgelle, arriving some months after George’s death in the 1930s as a result of a heart attack. George and his brothers were coal miners in tiny, rural Alabama “push mines,” which means they were not electrified or automated, but lit by carbide lamps and the coal cars moved by mules. It was a punishing way to earn a living.

Carl dropped out of school after the 7th grade and took a job carrying water to road workers to help put food on the table for a large family. Two years later, at 14, he began work inside the mines, laboring alongside his father and uncles. As a teenager, he did the work of a man. Every dime he made was turned over to Grandma Bessie.

At 18, Carl and the brother just younger, Marion, forever called “Gip,” were looking for a little social activity on a Saturday night when someone told them that a singing was going on at Possum Trot. New Oak Grove Free Will Baptist Church, a couple of miles in the country out from Nauvoo, Alabama, was colloquially known then as Possum Trot for some reason. That night, Carl and Gip walked in on a group of 20 or 30 teenagers conducting their own singalong. Fourteen-year-old Lois Kilgore and her big sister Ruby, 18, were in front singing a duet when the guys entered. Carl said, “I’ll take the one on the left.” He did. As of last March 3, Carl and Lois have been married for 71 years.

Continue reading →

Recently I wrote an article on Mardi Gras that elicited a lot of comment. Some of the remarks can be read at the end of that article on our website, at http://www.joemckeever.com/mt/archives/000091.html. Three of the responses started me on a whole new line of thought.

First, two of my good friends, Donna and Larry, more or less defended the Mardi Gras parades. While she does not approve of everything that goes on, Donna enjoys attending some of the early parades–before the tourists arrive and everything gets crazy–especially those that run near her house and on St. Charles Avenue. She and her teenage daughters join another family and stake out a spot about 5 am, and they spend the day eating Popeye’s fried chicken and biscuits and king cake while trying to catch as much “stuff” as they can. They donate the beads to a charitable organization which cleans and recycles them and makes a little money for their ministries.

Larry rode in the Endymion parade, and admits to spending $800 for the beads and paraphernalia he threw to the crowds. He wanted us to know that not everyone riding in the parades is a pervert or an alcoholic. “My float had a bunch of great guys,” he said. Larry invited a client of his to ride with him. The man professes to believe in the Lord, although his language and actions say otherwise. Larry had an opportunity to talk with him and discuss his faith. The man was receptive and even said he would like to visit Larry’s church, having grown disillusioned with the church of his youth.

Both Larry and Donna, I need to point out, are “good Baptists” and active in their respective churches here in the city.

Continue reading →

I’ve always thought of Focus on the Family’s Dr. James Dobson as something of a perfectionist. I suppose that’s because no matter what problem people throw at him, he seems to have an answer. But I will tell you, the best answer I’ve ever heard from him, the one that gave me the most satisfaction when I heard it, was when the mother of a teenager posed some perplexing situation to him and asked what in the world she should do about her child in the teenage years, and the great psychologist replied, “Well, ma’am, you just try to get through it.”

That’s when I knew that James Dobson lives on the same planet and in the same world as the rest of us. He knows the frustration and the scariness of that dangerous but necessary stage all children go through, and he understands that the ultimate goal is surviving it. Just getting through it. There is life on the other side of adolescence. For parents as well as for the kids.

Continue reading →