"It was the best of times, and it was the worst of times."  

That's the introduction from Charles Dickens's Tale of Two

Cities.  But this also applied to Rockingham back in the early

1950's.  The terrible and expensive World War II had just been

won, and all the returning veterans encountered a hero's

welcome.  There was a feeling of euphoria, where we couldn't

do too much for our soldiers or our veterans.  Now on the

other hand, the Russians had just stolen the secrets of the

nuclear bomb, and they had an offensive air force that was as

massive as our own Strategic Air Command; plus the Korean

War was not going well.  Some people in the larger cities were

building fallout shelters.  There was a stalemate between our

armed forces, which led to the "Cold War".   It was to be the

mid 1990's before the "Cold War" was won, but there were a

lot of rocky pathways to get there.  Now what does this have

to do with LD's fan?  Nothing.  I just thought it was a nice

introduction.  The names below are their real names.

 

LD was Mr. L.D. Bailey, Joel's uncle.  He was one of the

deacons of the Pee Dee Pentecostal Church back during the

early 1950's.  They referred to themselves as members of the

board of the church, but I like calling them deacons.  The

dictionary defined a deacon as a layman in a church ranking

below the minister or priest.  Other deacons were Mr. H.A.

Bailey, Jr. (Joel's father), Mr. Archie Warnock (Secretary &

Treasurer) (my father), Mr. Oscar Avant, Mr. Sam Coble, Mr.

Jessie Sheppard, Mr. Claude Swails (Sunday School

Superintendent) (Bonnie's uncle) plus the minister was always

on the board of directors.  Also Mr. H.A. Bailey, Sr. and Mr.

A.G. Jenkins were deacons emeritus (previous deacons, but no

longer active).  Mr. Sheppard is the only one of these deacons

surviving today.  These deacons may not have all been on the

Board at exactly the same time.  The ministers that I can

remember were Rev. John Hopkins (prior to 1950), Rev. N.B.

Stevens (1950-1952) and Rev. McNeil (1953-after I left).  These

ministerial time periods are estimated.  Some of the pictures

on Joel's website show Rev. Stevens and Rev. McNeil (always

wore a bow tie).  There was a parsonage rented over on

Randolph Street for Rev. Hopkins, but a parsonage was

purchased by the time Rev. Stevens arrived which was situated

where the current parking lot is located.  Today the old Pee

Dee Pentecostal Holiness Church is called the "New Covenant

Christian Fellowship Church", but I think it is still affiliated

with the Pentecostal Holiness denomination.  Many of the

Church people today are the children from or descendents

from the old congregation.

 

The old church building had been donated to the Church by

the Pee Dee Mill.  I think it previously housed a different

church such as the Methodists or Baptists, but was taken over

by the Pentecostals when the first occupants built a new

church.  In any event there was no mortgage to worry about. 

In the 1950 picture you can see where a previous sign had been

posted on the top front of the Church building.  They had

painted this by the 1952 picture; plus in that picture you can

see the fan above the front doors.  The church was medium in

size; it had about ten pews on each side.  The 1954 picture

states they had 142 in attendance that day.  You would be hard

pressed to get two hundred people packed into the building

including as many as fifteen adults in the choir and a lot of

children in the congregation.  Looking at Rev. McNeil in the

1954 picture, and assuming he was six feet tall, the ceilings

were a good eighteen feet above the floor.  Now that's a lot of

extra space to heat or to air-condition.  In the same picture you

get a good inside picture of LD's fan.  We used a coal stove for

heating.  It was located on the congregation's left hand side as

they entered the church in row four from the front.  It can be

seen in the 1954 picture inside the building.  I was hiding

behind the stove when this picture was made in 1954.  I don't

remember why I was hiding, but I was.  I never was much of a

conformist.  My mother was in same pew I was, but much

nearer to the center aisle.  She would have been upset had she

noticed what I was doing.  There wasn't much of a problem

with the heating.

 

The problem was how to prevent it from getting so hot in the

auditorium on those hot summer days of July and August

mostly for the evening services as it was not that hot by noon

when the Church dismissed from the morning service. 

Air-conditioning was available commercially, but was

prohibitively expensive back then.  There were only one or two

department stores in Rockingham with air-conditioning at that

time.  I think Ivy's Department Store was one of them.  I don't

think either the First Baptist Church or the First Methodist

Church had air conditioning yet, or else I would have noticed

that or at least the apparatus for that while I was detached

there from the old Grammar School in the third and fourth

grades.  The "Silver Meteor" trains ran by Seaboard were

air-conditioned; my sister and I rode it to Florida in 1950.

 

Now Mr. L.D. Bailey was the closest person we had to a

mechanical or civil engineer in the Church, and his counsel

was highly regarded.  In the backyard of his home, he had a

homemade sawmill.  He had a saw blade connected with a

large belt to an old tractor motor's drive shaft.  I think he may

have sawed the wood used in his recently built new house.  He

proposed that the Church should purchase and install a

whole-building fan such as the one you can see in the 1954

photograph.  Most of the other deacons agreed with him on

that point.  However, things started getting interesting when

they were deciding where to install it.  Looking at the fan

pictures today, you can tell the fan was about five feet square. 

I remember someone mentioning that if you had

air-conditioned the Church you would have the expense of

air-conditioning three Churches since the ceiling was so high. 

Today I know that's not true since heat rises and cool air falls

to the bottom; all you would have had to do was to have

air-conditioned the bottom six feet.  That didn't matter since

they couldn't afford air-conditioning in any event.

 

To demonstrate the lack of engineering skill of some of the

other deacons, my father with two of the others helping him

attempted to install a new outside water spigot on the south

side of our house on Sand Hill Road (now South Caroline

Street).  The purpose was to be able to irrigate our family

garden to the south of the house.  I still don't understand the

need for this additional spigot since one already existed about

twenty feet from this new one, but it was more toward the

front of our house.  It would have been much cheaper to buy

an additional hosepipe to connect in series to the existing

hosepipe.  Anyhow, they were able to cut and groove the pipe,

install a T-joint and then extend a small pipe to the new

outside spigot.  And they soldered the joints to prevent

leakage.  They were so proud of what they had accomplished

until I went over to test the new spigot.  In about a minute, the

water turned out to be hot water.  In was still hot water when

we sold the house in 1956.  I often wonder if it is still that way

today?       

 

Mr. L.D. Bailey wanted to install the fan middle-way on the

south wall of the Church (at the same height as it was in the

back wall proposal).  At least several of the other deacons

wanted to install the fan in the back of the church, which it

eventually was as you can tell from the 1954 photograph.  The

reasoning behind the middle of the Church approach was to

provide more air circulation for the front of the Church for the

benefit of the minister and choir.  Also most of the Church

elders had a tendency to set near the front of the Church; so

this would be beneficial to them.  The other deacons were

concerned with the noise interference from a sidewall mount

since there were no amplifiers or loud speakers in the Church

back in those days.  They were commercially available, but not

within the budget.

 

Looking at this with my today's knowledge, I could tell you one

of the better solutions would be a back mount, but to then

open the side windows proportionally.  That is, open the

rear-most pair of side windows say two inches; then open the

next rear-most windows say four inches; and likewise all the

way to the front of the Church which would have been opened

say ten inches.  That would provide equal drafting throughout

the Church.  You could then adjust these setting manually

until you found the optimum ventilation.  However, although

the back-enders won the discussion, they then raised all the

windows the same amount.

 

At most churches there are usually two or three cliques. 

Usually they are family groups, but they could have other

reasons to form, sometimes for very trivial reasons.  In

Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels", he speaks of a mythical

county of the miniature Lilliputians.  These people fought a

war over which end of an egg you should use to break it.  They

were known as the "big-endians" and the "little-endian".  The

message is that it doesn't take much of a reason to form a

clique.  Although many young kids like this novel as a

children's story, Swift intended it as a political satire of the

English Parliament in the early eighteenth century.  It is

human nature to form cliques in any type of social

organization; churches seems to be very fertile grounds for

them.

 

So at Pee Dee, we could have had the "side-winders" and the

"back-enders".  That is one clique wanting to install the fan in

the back of the church and the other in the side of the church. 

There are some churches where a schism would develop over

something as trivial as this.  I know of several congregations

that split into two congregations for unknown reasons.

 

However, Pee Dee was the exception.  There were no cliques

and no family groups that tried to dominate the whole Church.

 I remember they had a special Board meeting one Sunday

afternoon.  Everyone was given a chance to voice his or her

opinion.  All suggestions were considered.  It was a long

meeting, but when it was over, it had been decided to put the

fan in the back of the Church.  When the final vote was taken,

the matter was settled and final.  I don't know how any of the

deacons voted including my own father.  No one ever talked

about this.

 

When it came time for this same group to install the fan, Mr.

L.D. was there with the rest of them lending his engineering

skills and labor to the installation.  They were all cordial and

cooperative.  They installed the fan, and no one was injured.  I

wonder how they got that fan up there without a crane; it had

to weigh about a hundred pounds.  Back then a crane would

have had to come from Charlotte.  I would have heard about it

if they had used a crane.  I assumed they used some sort of

scaffolding.

 

In conclusion, I would like to say that I think the people at the

Pee Dee Church in the early 1950's was an exceptionally fine

group of Christian men and women.  (Actually we children

were fantastic too, but I'm not supposed to say that).