My uncle Cary was living in Virginia, and said if I’d move up there he’d help me get a job at New Port News Shipyard. We talked it over, and took us a couple of days to get things packed up. We didn’t have much, but we were proud of what was ours.
Andrea, our daughter was about two at this time, so off we went. VW station wagon loaded and a small rental truck. Well, it wasn’t long before we were at Uncle Cary’s home, ready to go to work. Didn’t take but a few days before I went to work at that shipyard.
I went into the apprenticeship program as a machinist, and they put me in the nuclear section working on sub-marines. This was a good job, and I made over twice the money I was making before.
I stayed there for a couple of years, and learned a lot and worked even more. I got to help build the Nimitz, and the Kennedy aircraft carriers. My mentor taught me the tricks of the trade, and we worked very well together. Our job was to help install the nuclear reactors, building them one piece of stainless steel at a time.
While still living in Hampton Va., lying on the couch reading a book by Hal Lindsey, I made a commitment to God as I understood Him at the time. It was no small deal, for something real and big was happening inside of me about now that I couldn’t explain if I wanted to. The next few days proved, through temptations that what I’d received was real.
My first prayer was: Lord, “I’m coming to you, and I’ll give you my all. But the one thing I don’t want is to be an average Christian”
A few years later we moved back to Tennessee, only to move back to Hampton VA, again. This time I was working in the machine shop. This is where we’d build machine parts that were to go on the two aircraft carriers.
A year or so later I was called by Union Carbide (K25) plant to go to work in October of 1975. This is getting better all the time. Didn’t make any more money, but I sure was closer to home. (I seemed to have a problem with being homesick).
This was a great opportunity and I had wanted ‘this’ job for several years, sure did take them a long time to call me back after applying for it though.
I moved my family, all three of us, to the town of Karns for the winter and then we moved agiain to Oliver Springs in the early spring. We moved into the same home my Grandpa came to as a small child, and the same place our family would visit on the week-ends as we got older. Now my aunt Kate owned it.
When our new family was moving in, my aunt Kate was moving out. She showed me a giant pile of used lumber in the back yard next to the garbage pit. She said “Ross, you see this lumber, what I want you to do is” (at this point I was bracing myself for what she was going to say. I knew aunt Kate was going to say that she wanted me to stack that 400 tons of lumber for some future use. Not so, this ain’t happening.
Continuing, she said “as part of the deal for living here, I want you to pull all the nails out of each board”. At this point my back was stiff, and my mind was running wild with the thought of spending months and months of labor it would take to stack all that wood, not counting all the bruises I’d have pulling ten million nails out of some used boards.
This she continued, and finished by saying; “stack all the lumber in the shed in a neat pile,” Oh no! The shed was a good 100 feet away, this could take years. All this for a bunch of boards that come off a 100 year old barn. And she finished it off with “and save the nails”. And save the nails!? This lady was a hundred years old. What was she thinking; Save the nails?
But I promised her that I would do just that. The next day my aunt took off to Florida, so I burnt the pile of wood and who knows what happened to the nails, and who cares?
This house was built in 1864, and it was a big house. It had probably been built right 110 years ago, but wasn’t in the greatest shape now. A feller could see who was coming up the driveway without looking out the windows. All you had to do was move your head up and down real slow and you could see who it was by looking through the cracks between the boards on the side of the house. It did have a newly installed bathroom, and running water in the kitchen sink though so we were in business.
This was the house that my second child, Susie, was born in. What a thrill it was to have another girl to snuggle and play with, a true blessing, but not the greatest of houses for a baby to live in, but we did survive. It really was a pleasure to have Susie in our lives. Two girls, man I sure did want a boy to carry on my name, but you can’t get much gooder than two girls to snuggle with.
One winter night we all climbed in the same bed just to stay warm cause that wind and cold was whippin’ around outside something fierce that night.
I set a glass of Kool-Aid on the table next to us, and went to sleep. The next morning, I sat up and saw that the liquid had frozen and the glass had shattered. Now that’s cold.
What heat we did have come from a pot-bellied coal stove, if you could call it heating. If the wind blew, it would almost blow the curtains off the rods and the window panes shook so hard it sounded like they would break.
It was bitterly cold in the winter and equally as hot in the summer, but we loved it. The girls had a big yard to play in, and we learned a lot about each other.
There were lots of memories here in this ill insulated house, and I guess that’s what kept us from freezin’ to death.
Years later my Aunt Kate died in Florida, never returning to Tennessee, good thing I guess cause who knows what she would have done if she found I didn’t listen to her one bit about removing and saving those nails.
I had a good job working at K-25, but we were poor, I mean we didn’t have any money. I had to keep my C.B. radio base station up to date, and there was that thing about keeping me in fishing supplies, but you know, we were poor besides that.
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But I learned something during this time that I still carry with me to this day.
Months earlier, I bought a trailer load of fishing gear, including a boat motor, and all the camping stuff a feller would ever need. I bought it on credit at Sears, and had fallen behind on the payments. So every Friday a young man would come out to get my payment, because Sears wasn’t going to let it get any more delinquent. He seemed like a very nice person, and some of the Fridays we’d just sit on the big front porch and talk about this and that.
I kinda of liked him, but one day I got in me that I wasn’t going to make any more payments. So. The very next Friday he drove up and said “Good morning Mr. Shultz”. At this point I knew I wasn’t a Mr. and as he got out of the car I spoke back to him; “I’m doing great, and if you step on my porch, I’m going to knock you off of it”. He didn’t say a word, just got back in his car and left.
That night I couldn’t sleep. I got to thinking, and figured out that the man in this situation that was wrong was me. This person, a really nice guy, was only doing his job, and I certainly wasn’t doing mine. The whole deal made me ashamed of myself, so I made a commitment to myself and to Nancy, that there was no more buying anything on time. One of my comments was; “if the washing machine breaks down you’ll have to wash in the sink until we can pay cash for a new one”. Low-and-behold, the next day it broke.
God had a hidden favor in this. Virtually, never did borrow money or owe for anything again.
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One day, after coming home from work, Nancy showed me an ad in the paper about this little house for sale in South Clinton. Selling for $8500.00, it couldn’t be much, but after 4 or 5 days of nagging me, I finally agreed we’d go look at it.
I didn’t expect much; in fact I pretty much expected to find a dump. But after looking at it and over an acre of land and seemed like a pretty good deal so we tried to buy it on the spot. It turned out to be a little harder than that, but we did end up buying it. Had to offer more than what the seller was asking for it, but we got it.
This is now 1978, and after a snowy winter our son Matthew was born. This was not an easy birth, and Nancy lost a lot of blood, Andrea and Susie were home at the time that Nancy went into labor and when I say there was a lot of blood I don’t mean just a little. Nancy had a crisis and started hemorrhaging and Andrea has to run get the neighbor. I can’t imagine how she felt seeing all that blood and her mom almost dying in front of her. But God being with us, Matthew was born, but he did have to stay in the hospital quite a while. This is my first son, my namesake, I already had two girls to snuggle with and found out low and behold I could snuggle up with my son too. After that scare, it was still a very nice spring. And, I had my son.
As I grew in my walk with Christ, spending as much time in church as I could, I heard God’s voice calling me to what I thought in my heart, was to preach.
After telling preacher Glenn what I was hearing, and what was going on inside of me. He began to tutor, and I rapidly grew in my new walk. He set up a time, that in a couple weeks I was to be ordained as a minister.
I studied and I grew, and these were wonderful days. Reading scriptures 6 to 10 hours a day, I probably learned more in that month than I’d learned all the rest of my twenty nine years. This was a very special time in my life, learning my Daddies voice, and enjoying my times of talking with Him.
Then came that day I had so very much looked forward to, sat in the chair at the church house, deacons all around me, it was now time to be ordained. To be a Baptist preacher had a good ring to it. Just as the ceremony was starting I heard God speak in a clear fluent voice:
“Ross, if you go through this, it will open every Baptist church door in the world. But, it will also close all the others”.
That’s all I heard, then there was just silence. A peaceful silence.
So just as the ceremony was beginning, I stood up and told preacher Glenn that I wasn’t going to go through with it. So we all went home, and that night he came to the house. “Ross, many people get cold feet, so we’ll just set the ceremony up for next week-end” he said. Responding back, I told him: “This is not cold feet, and personally I wanted this more than anything, but I heard God speak to me very clearly and this is not the route that he wants me to go”. Several weeks later he asked again, but I heard what I heard.
Late that same summer, we put our house up for sell. It sold for $18,000, in a few weeks. Hey! This was alright, paid $8500, did about fifty dollars’ worth of painting, and replaced a couple of screens in the window, and closed in the back porch, and made a $10,000 profit.
Not a bad deal!