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I have included on the website excerpts from a book I am writing for my grandchildren, called This Little Life of Mine. Articles that may be of interest to those with whom I shared my Lincoln Park years are listed below. Click on the title to go to that article. Keppen School Four Fabulous Years (LPHS) Senior Year (LPHS) Becky The Education of a Journalist (WSU) The New Baptist in Town (FBC LP) Going Steady (FBC LP) Me? A Pastor? (FBC LP) A Broken Heart (FBC LP) Ozalid and Oswald (WSU) Oops! (WSU) The Scattering (FBC LP) First Car My Future (FBC LP) I think everyone our age should write their story so that future generations will know what life was like in the years we have lived on this earth. What successes and failures did we experience? How did we handle life's challenges? Our grandchildren and great grandchildren can benefit from our experiences written down for them by us. Visit my page Write Your Story for more information. Click on the link below to see a complete listing of all the articles and materials on this website: Photos: next column: [1] the interior of the Detroit Institute of Arts where Mrs. Mann took us in sixth grade and where I left my imprint on the art world. [2] Copies of our high school newspaper, the Railsplitter. Far right column: [1] my high school graduation picture. [2] Linda and me at our wedding in 1968. [3] Our three daughters, Mandy, Jenny and Kathy. [4] The family God has given me.This column: [1] Our house in Lincoln Park when I was a student at LPHS. [2] Old Main at Wayne State University where I spent many hours in the early sixties.	STORM CLOUDS THREATENED as the hot June day wore on toward evening and the event for which we had waited four years. Behind the high school, on the football field, crews had erected a wooden platform across which each of us would walk to receive a rolled up piece of paper that signified the completion of a major portion of our lives. As the heat of the day wore on, the excitement within us grew. So often in life, as we have learned, anticipation is more intense than the event anticipated. So it was that on that hot and stormy Wednesday night of June 10, 1959, we, the class of Lincoln Park High School 1959, set out to change the world. How that world has changed in the half century or so since that night is no doubt more due to the nature of the world than it is to our being set loose on it. The changes were not necessarily what we hoped would happen as the result of our impact on the world. In our world then, television reflected a world as black and white as the images on its small screens. In our world today we can witness in full color and wide screen the violence of blood, fire, war and terrorism. In our world then, we could not conceive of twin towers that stretched so far into the sky, nor could we fathom their fall in a matter of seconds. In our world today we watched in horror as those two twin towers collapsed in a horribly violent attack that robbed us of the security and sense of safety we once held. The class of 1959 has witnessed the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy, presidential candidate Robert Kennedy, civil rights leader Martin Luther King and the attempted assassination of President Ronald Reagan. When we were sitting in classrooms at LPHS, we understood the greatest threat to American freedom was Communism. But we have seen the fall of the Berlin Wall, the failure of the Soviet Union, and the rise of capitalism in China. The world has changed, but not because of us. We discovered that we could not change the world any more than those who preceeded us could, nor those who follow us will. Idealism was replaced by the practical day-to-day needs of making a living and raising a family. From changing the world we proceeded to changing diapers and raising the next generation eager to bring change. But they have a much more challenging world to confront than we did. Our hats are off to our progeny who face challenges we never dreamed could exist. Now as we are in our late sixties, our life work mostly completed, our raising of children done, we have become people with more of a past than a future. We have done many things and accomplished much, but each of us has not had the opportunity to do some of the things we dreamed of on that stormy June night in 1959. A few of us did not accomplish some things because death came to us earlier than expected. More than 40 of us had that word deceased next to our name in the last directory of our class published in 2004. How many more of us have followed them in death since then? Many of us simply found our lives moving in a different direction than what we anticipated when we shared our days at LPHS. The path we set out to follow somehow turned into the path we did follow, and it led us far from the goal we had originally set out to seek. Such is life. But we have not failed. Life is not about changing the world. Even the greatest people in history have not been able to change the fundamental truths about the world. The world is violent. The world is restless. The world is a dangerous place to be. And, since we all face what more than 40 of us have already experienced, we know the world is a temporary place, or at least we know our place in the world is temporary. Our successes were not world-changing successes, but they were important successes. We have been successful in building businesses that help people have a better life. We have been successful in creating art that makes life more enjoyable. We have been successful in creating children and raising them to take the place we once sought for ourselves. We have been successful in our families, in our communities, in our institutions, and in our daily lives. We each have experienced our share of failures and sorrows, but all in all we have been successful at living life. When we walked across that platform a half century ago, the only storm we knew about was the one rumbling and blackening the sky over that football field. Now as we look back, we see many storms we faced and survived. Some of us have lost children or grandchildren. Some of us have lost spouses. Some of us have lost health, or fortune, or dreams. But all of us have lived, and all of us have loved, and all of us have succeeded in ways we never dreamed possible. My hat is off to the class of 1959 from Lincoln Park High School. I am pleased to be counted among you. I am glad to have shared those four important years with you. And I am glad to be able to say what we used to sing: Hail to orange and blue. Thomas Michael Parsons, LPHS Class of '59 What I Remember MY EXPERIENCE WITH SOME of the members of the class of '59 actually goes back to Keppen School and the fifth grade, when my family moved from Windsor, Ontario to Lincoln Park and I was enrolled at the school. I remember Mrs. Mann, our fifth and sixth grade teacher, and Mr. Hill who taught seventh grade. I remember Mrs. Mann took us on a field trip to the Detroit Institute of Arts on a cold March day, and I remember my experience in the Egyptian display room. The talk of rotting mummy bodies and my heavy coat in the warm room after lunch took its toll. I can now say I had a work of art displayed at the museum, if only for a brief time until some employee with a mop came to erase the work I had created from my heart, or, I suppose, more correctly, from my stomach. I remember Mr. Hill's "Board of Education" which he used on several of the more unruly members of the class, but never, I might point out, on me. I remember Scottie, Keppen's kindly custodian, and his thick Scottish accent. It was Scottie, if I remember correctly, who assigned Troy Smith and me the job of delivering milk to each classroom each day. I remember Mr. Hill's venture into newspaper publishing when he began the Keppen Chronicle and I got my first taste of journalism, a passion I had within me from as far back as I can remember. I wanted to be the editor, but that honor went to Dee B. However, I was on the staff, and soon a few of my early articles found their way onto the spirit duplicated pages of our school newspaper. I remember that Mr. Hill set up his room with desks in pairs instead of in the traditional rows. I am sure he regreted that decision as Troy S, Sue P and I got to be real talkative friends in our little corner of his classroom. But the real adventure began in the fall of 1955, when all of us came from our various neighborhood schools to meet for the first time in the hallowed halls of LPHS. Well, actually, I don't know how hallowed they were, but I do remember they were halls. I remember Mr. Curry, the young English teacher who encouraged me in my writing offering suggestions for improvement. He also helped me appreciate Shakespeare for the first time in my life. I remember Mr. Frasier, who we all said didn't just teach history, he remembered it. We could be sarcastic when we wanted to be. I remember Mrs. Blume, another English teacher, who threw her keys at Jim O because he was talking, and he ducked and I, innocently sitting behind him, got hit. I remember Mr. Morley, my driver education teacher, who told another student to sit up straight while driving the car. That student now has seat belts to help him sit up straight, something we didn't have then. I remember Mrs. Hurley, the pretty math teacher who was able to spark my interest in her class, but not in math. I remember Mr. Moser, who led the choir I joined in my senior year. I remember singing Blessed is the Man (Psalm 1) at our baccalaureate service. (You may have to explain to your grandkids what a baccalaureate service was.) I remember sitting in the bleachers on cold Friday nights while the football team battled our latest rivals and my friends and I talked and laughed and tried to spot girls we liked. I remember the time Cathy M and I were co-editors of the Railsplitter and we had a deadline coming and no news articles for the front page. We really were in a panic searching for items from various sources to fill our blank front page. I think it was Irene B who came to our rescue with an article she wrote for us. I remember watching the Flamingoes, the girls' swim club, performing to the music of Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein III, music I love to this day. I distinctly remember the high school orchestra playing Rodgers' Beneath the Southern Cross from the television series about World War II Victory at Sea. Later Rodgers used the same music in Me and Juliet and retitled it No Other Love. I remember sitting with friends on the bleachers in the gym for lunch period, standing in the hall waiting for the jam of bodies to clear, and walking across a wooden platform on a stormy night to receive my diploma. My friend from Keppen, Sue P, was my walking mate that night as we formed two lines to parade before the parents and grandparents assembled to watch us during our finest hour. I remember after graduation, congratulating Sue with a hug and then sending her on her way to her waiting boy friend whom she later married. I remember entering LPHS as a shy, awkward boy, and leaving four years later as a young man with strong hopes for the future. I remember four years of classes, some of which I enjoyed and some of which I did not, four years of teachers, some of whom I respected more than others, and four of years of friends, all of whom I have missed for the past half century. I am very thankful for the Internet, something we did not have when we were in high school, but something which now has enabled me to find out where some of my old friends are, and even to be in contact with a few of them. But most of all when I think back to the last half of the 1950's, in spite of those years having their portion of unpleasantness and distress, I remember four fabulous years of growing to adulthood with people I remember with great fondness to this day. Thank you to all of you who played a part in those four years during which this boy became a man. - tmp I Wish I Was 18 Again! COMEDIAN GEORGE BURNS was booked to play London's Paladium Theatre on his 100th birthday, but, although he did live to be 100 years old, his health was failing and the booking had to be canceled. One of his last films was I Wish I Was 18 Again. In that film, Burns' character trades bodies with an 18-year-old. "Boy," Burns' character says, "did you get the worse of this deal!" In the song of the same title recorded by Burns and used in the film, Burns sings, "I wish I was 18 again and going where I've never been." Our graduation from Lincoln Park High School occurred just five days after my eighteenth birthday. I was 18 and going where I had never been. That was exciting. I had plans, like most of us did, but I had no idea where life would take me. There is something attractive about that position in life, of looking forward instead of backward, of anticipating instead of remembering, of having a future instead of a past. But I do not want to be 18 again. No way! It is exciting to look forward and ponder where you are going, but it is also exciting to look back and see where you have been. The years that have transpired since graduation are filled with good things and not so good things; the path I have travelled has twisted and turned and taken directions I never dreamed imaginable when I was 18. When I was 18, there were many people who have played a significant role in my life who were not yet in my life. Most notable of these is my wife, Linda. When I was 18, she was 11 and a half and living in Beech Grove, Indiana and in love with her horse, Becky. I would not have given her a second look, and I would need two more legs and a mane to get her attention. If I were 18 again, I wouldn't know the most important person in my life. My three daughters would not be born yet, nor would the young men who are now my sons-in-law, or the grandchildren each of these three couples have brought into my life. It is hard to imagine a world without them, now that I have them. To be 18 again would put all of these people in my future; they would not be in my life. All of us have been through difficult times in our lives since that June night in 1959 when we were 18 and new graduates. Although we survived these challenges, I for one would not want to be 18 again and have all those challenges yet ahead of me. In the innocence of being 18, I didn't contemplate the difficulties that lay in my path. My father's death. My mother's death. My wife's hip replacement surgery. The challenges in other peoples' lives that became my challenges because I was their pastor. I would not want to put people through all those things all over again, and I would not want to face all those challenges again. I am glad they are in the past, and not in the future. But there is more to it than what would still be ahead of me if I were 18 again. This stage of life that the Class of '59 is now in has its own rewards. More time. More money. More friends in a variety of places. More opportunities. Grandchildren. Yes, I am aware of the challenges our age group faces. Less energy, more health problems, more medications, more doctors' visits, more pain. It is all part of growing old. My mother-in-law, who is in her 80s, commented a few years ago that "old age isn't for sissies." And, it certainly isn't. But that's part of the pleasure of being in the so-called golden years. We aren't sissies; we are survivors. What hasn't killed us has strengthened us. We have accumulated a life wisdom we may have thought we had when we were 18, but now know we did not have then. Such wisdom is acquired by facing the challenges of life and surviving them. And there is one more thing. As a believer in Jesus Christ, I believe I am closer to being in Heaven then I have ever been before. I may not be too happy with dying itself, but I couldn't be happier about what follows. The Bible, which I believe is God's Word, says that in Heaven there will be no sickness, sadness, pain, or death. All the unpleasantries of this earth will not be part of my experience in Heaven. I believe I will be reunited with my father and mother, and with others who have preceded me to Heaven. And God will wipe all tears from my eyes. But most of all, when I get to Heaven I will see Jesus Himself for myself, with my own eyes. What greater bliss can there be than that! To see personally the Person around Whom the world's history and my personal history has centered is beyond imagining. What a day, glorious day, that will be. That day is much closer to me now then it was when I was 18. I was glad to be 18 once, and going where I'd never been. I am glad to be 68 now and knowing where I have been, and where I am going next. My regrets, Mr. Burns, that you did not get to play the London Paladium on your 100th birthday. Perhaps if you had set your sights higher?	Where have we been for half a century AFTER I WALKED ACROSS the platform on that stormy June night in 1959 and received my high school diploma, I went to Wayne State University in Detroit and earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Communications. Since my childhood in Windsor, Ontario, I had dreamed of becoming a writer in general, and a journalist in particular. In fact, my early course choices at WSU were headed toward Journalism. I had served three semesters as editor or co-editor of the Railsplitter at LPHS, and some people said I had ink in my blood. But I made a decision in my Senior year at LPHS, a decision which eventually took my life in an entirely different direction than I had planned. Influenced by several members of our class, principally by Jim S, I began attending the Friday morning meetings of the Voice of Christian Youth (VCY) that met on campus. Before long, I made the decision to trust Jesus Christ as personal Savior and let Him lead me wherever He desired to take me. Toward the end of my Sophomore year at WSU, I began to grow very uncertain about the path I had chosen for myself. It was not that writing and journalism were growing any less attractive to me; it was that something else was growing more urgent. I honestly felt the Lord was leading me into His service, probably as a pastor. When it came time to declare a major, I chose communications. I took courses in writing and in public speaking. I had never been very comfortable as a public speaker. Some of you may remember I was rather shy, at least my first year at LPHS. That shyness slowly gave way to a desire to be in some kind of leadership role. The classes at WSU helped me to learn the techniques of communication I would need as a pastor. During the time I was at WSU, I was also a member of the First Baptist Church on Fort Street in Lincoln Park. The pastor then, Dr. Charles MacDonald, saw that God was leading me in the direction of ministry and encouraged me and helped me to learn some of the theological principles I would need. But I knew I needed more, as did he. So, after graduation from WSU in 1964, I enrolled at the Grand Rapids Baptist Seminary for classes that would begin in the fall of 1965. Before classes began, however, I received a notice from the draft board that I was to report for a physical. A military life was not in my plan; was it in God's? I went to the draft board in Melvindale, and showed the secretary a letter from the seminary stating that I was enrolled. The lady looked at every piece of paper in my file. When she picked up the very last piece of paper, she said, "Oops!" I like to think I am one of the few men to receive a formal apology from a draft board. She said she had missed my enrollment at Grand Rapids, and that my order to report for a physical was canceled. She wished me good luck. But I don't believe in luck. I believe in a God Whose plan for me was not what the draft board wanted it to be. God always wins! While a student at the seminary, I met a young lady who was a sophomore in the college that shared the campus with the seminary. We had our first date in December, 1967, at a Grand Rapids Pizza Hut on a snowy Grand Rapids evening. Few do snow as well as GR does! We continued to see each other, and in the spring of 1968 I asked her to be my wife, and in December of 1968, Linda Rhea Hubble and Thomas Michael Parsons were married at the First Baptist Church of Beech Grove, Indiana, her home church. I received my Master of Divinity degree from the seminary in 1969, but it was not until November of 1970 that Linda and I received our first ministry position. I became the assistant pastor of Emmanuel Baptist Church in Flint, Michigan. My duties were to assist the pastor in hospital and home visitation, preach occasionally, and, later, to edit the weekly newsletter sent to members and friends. My interest and experience in writing and editing were put to use there. After four years at Emmanuel, the day after Thanksgiving, 1974, Linda and I moved to Oglesby, Illinois, a small town about 90 miles west of Chicago where I became the pastor of the First Baptist Church. This was to be our ministry and our home for the next 21 years. During our 21 years in Oglesby, we brought our three children into the world: Mandy in 1976, Jenny in 1978 and Kathy in 1982. In the 1980s, I was asked to help with a new Christian school in LaSalle, Illinois, across the Illinois River from Oglesby. I taught Bible classes there, and also served as the sponsor of the school's year book, all while continuing to pastor the Oglesby church. Our three daughters all were students at the school; our oldest daughter, Mandy, graduated from the school in 1994. Early in 1995, my wife and I made a decision that we had been contemplating for some time. We decided it was time to leave Oglesby and move on to another ministry. In January of that year, I announced to the church that I was resigning effective in June, the end of the current school year. It was a scary announcement to make, since I had no other position to go to. If I were not the church's pastor, I could not expect them to pay me a salary or allow my family and me to live in their parsonage. But we were convinced it was God's will that we move on. It was scary for our children as well. Mandy was a freshman at Cornerstone University, so it may have not had the same effect on her it did on Jenny, who that fall would become a senior at the school she had attended since Kindergarten. How difficult is that, changing schools just before the beginning of your senior year? Kathy would be in eighth grade, and young enough that the change would not be as much of a burden to her as it would be to Jenny. We were all reluctant to leave the friends we had made in the 21 years we were in Oglesby. And none of us enjoyed the prospect of packing up a 21-year-old household and moving all our belongings to we didn't know where. It was mid-summer of 1995 when I became aware of the possibility of a teaching position at a Christian school in Columbus, Ohio. I would be teaching seventh through ninth grade English classes and a senior Bible class. I had not been thinking about teaching; I was looking for another pastorate, but the Lord seemed to be leading in the direction of this new ministry. I must confess, when I was sitting in Mr. Curry's English class fifty years ago, I never thought for a moment I would ever have - or want - an English class of my own. Teaching was as far off my radar screen as it could get. But, after prayer and consideration, we packed up all our stuff and stuffed it and ourselves into a rented truck and our Dodge minivan and crossed three states and came to rest in Columbus, Ohio where I began teaching in late August of 1995. It didn't take me very long to realize that God had made a mistake, though. At least I thought He had. Sometimes people have asked me why I left the pastorate to teach school. It seems to them to be a step down. I always answer, "When pastoring got too hard, I decided to become a junior high teacher." That is supposed to be a joke, of course. Teaching is much harder than pastoring. At least I found it to be so. But as I faced my classes each day during that first school year, I learned how to get my students' respect. Every teacher has to earn that. Our LPHS teachers did. And once I earned it from them, teaching became easier and more productive. So I taught for ten years. Twenty semesters. Seven hundred eighty weeks. Thirty-nine hundred class days. Thirty-one thousand two hundred class hours. And I found out that God did not make any mistakes. Of course, I already knew that He never fails. It was me who failed; it was me who lacked the confidence to do successfully what He called me to do. Then we found it necessary to close the school. Enrollment was down. It was getting more and more difficult to meet the school's million dollar annual budget. Our last graduating class was on June 4, 2004. This class did not have a thunderstorm rumbling in the background. The ceremony was held in our gym, not outside on a football field. But for the last time I helped send twenty-some young people out to do what I set out to do forty-five years earlier. And on that night, I ended the thirty-two years of my life spent in education, twenty-two of them for myself and ten for others. At the age of 63 as I was then, I retired from full-time ministry. My wife, who is six and a half years my junior, still works as the secretary of the church which operated the school, the church we still are part of. I have served as a deacon, an adult Bible school teacher, a men's Bible study leader, and a small group leader. I am still actively involved in ministry. Since retirement, I have had more time to devote to that which I wanted to do as a child - write. I established my website, tmpministries, to provide a place to publish my articles and short stories. And I wrote a book. It was published in April of 2007 by Trafford Publishing in Victoria, British Columbia. My book is called Windsor's Child, and it is about the first ten years of my life when I lived in Windsor, Ontario. It is about how God used a series of tragedies to reveal Himself to me. As of this writing I am just 999,966 copies away from selling the millionth copy! Oh, well. At least I fulfilled a life-long dream to publish a book. If you still have a dream from high school days, a dream you have long ago decided would never happen, give it a try. Most of us have more time now than we have had in decades, and some of us have more money than we ever had. Dreams don't die until we do. Or until we give up on them. Although the path I have followed for the past half century is not the path I set out to follow, I would not want to change any of it. Through good and bad, through challenges and victories, through laughter and tears, God has led me all the way from that wooden platform erected on a football field under a thunderstorm threatening sky to this article which I have posted here to tell you where I have been for the past fifty years. So, where have you been? Where did your path take you? I would like to hear from you. Please send an email to me at Or write to me at Father of three, grandfather of nine Moving to Columbus, Ohio as we did in 1995 was a wise decision. Two of our daughters met their husbands here, and the other met her husband in Utah through a missions trip involving several from our church. All three of our daughters and their husbands are active in local churches today. Pete and Mandy live here in Columbus. They have four children, Hannah, Noah, Talia and John. Christian and Jenny live in Michigan. They have three children, Evelyn, Fiona, and Annalise Seth and Kathy live here in Columbus and have two children, Ethan and Elijah.
Copyright © 2010, Thomas M. Parsons, All Rights Reserved. - 750