WITHIN DAYS OF THE ARRIVAL OF THE WOODBRIDGE FAMILY in Salisbury in 1937, Teen Palm moved to town to work for the Commercial Credit Company. He was twenty-four, handsome, and loaded with charm and considerable musical talent. He rarely missed an opportunity to attend a dance, usually with his saxophone case tucked under his arm so that he could indulge the frequent urge to take to the stage and commandeer the microphone to the delight of his new friends.
His showmanship was not confined to the evenings, as he began to fashion himself a “business entertainer” and could frequently be found on golf courses nurturing clients or wooing prospective ones. Over the next two years, he ably and enthusiastically played the role of the witty bachelor whose smile was quick and easy but not without a hint of mystery. Few disagreed with the sentiment of one young woman in Salisbury who referred to him as “the most handsome man in town.”
Still, as he moved from party to party, and from the first tee to the eighteenth green, he also moved from job to job. It was almost as if he saw his career as merely a means to have an income that would allow him to sustain a lifestyle of entertainment, parties, and socializing. He lasted less than eighteen months at the credit company before jumping to Hardiman & Son Hardware Co. in the nearby town of Spencer.
Hardiman was the source of all manner of goods, from automobile tires and batteries to hammers, nails, wrenches, saws, paint, and bicycles. He also took a turn at the lone gasoline pump out front of the store, filling cars with fuel, polishing windshields, and checking the oil. Within a year, he changed jobs again, going to work in the Salisbury office of an automobile-financing company based in Raleigh.
Was he drifting? Or was he merely taking the opportunity of his youth and personality to live a life of comparative ease during a time of great financial strain across the nation?
In early 1939, the first of two events that would shape the rest of his life occurred when he and a friend went on a double date. It was a blind date for Teen and his pal, Jack Busby. Busby was paired with Helen Raney, and Teen was paired with Helen’s roommate, Eunice Smith. But what began quite innocuously turned into something else. Raney was smitten, and so was Palm — but with each other, not their dates. Teen may not have realized it then, but he had found his soul mate.
Raney was almost three years older than Palm, born in 1910 in Faith, North Carolina, less than ten miles south of Salisbury. She had been raised in a simple, wholesome atmosphere on a farm where dinner plates were filled with the bounty of the family garden and her chores included feeding the pigs, gathering eggs, and picking cotton. Unlike Palm, she well knew the aching back that comes with a hard day’s labor in the North Carolina heat and humidity.
Shortly after Helen’s mother, Mary Rusher, was married, her husband, Baxter Raney, abandoned her and moved to West Virginia to take a railroad job. Mary, who was pregnant with Helen, moved back with her parents and two siblings, a brother and a sister. There Helen was born. Mary and Helen lived there until her mother eventually remarried and they moved into a place of their own. But life there was difficult for Helen — her education was sporadic at best, and after falling behind in school, Helen moved back in with her grandparents. Her grandmother, Ruth Ann Elizabeth Peeler Rusher, was a strong God-fearing matriarch, and she raised Helen like she had raised her own children — with a deep, abiding love and a strong sense of right and wrong. Ruth Ann was not reluctant to wield a switch now and again to rein in the unruly child.
Helen worked hard in school and ultimately excelled. She graduated Granite Quarry High School in 1930, earned a diploma in secretarial skills at the Salisbury Business School in 1931, and found a job at Leonard’s Jewelry in Salisbury. The owner and his wife treated her like family. With her strong work ethic, a finely calibrated moral compass, and charismatic personality, Helen flourished. An attractive young woman, Helen was determined to make something of herself, not an easy task in that time and place.
Teen and Helen’s courtship developed slowly, beginning with an anonymous Valentine’s Day telegram he sent her on February 14, 1940.
Less than one thousand years ago, the heretofore mentioned day was founded. It certainly is strange how a peculiar oddity like this was handed down through the ages but it just goes to show you what humanity is made of. How-ever I want to take the same opportunity to wish you Happy Valentine’s Day.
In July, the finance company sent Palm to Charlotte to work for several weeks. Writing on company stationery, he told Helen, “You really are swell to me and I want you to know how much it means if you don’t already have an idea.”
In September, Teen wrote again, saying that the song “Begin the Beguine” was playing on the radio as he wrote. As he would scores of times in the future, he referred to his letters to her as a chat. He promised to “drop in again via the postman from time to time. I hope the reading was as pleasant as the writing …” He signed off, “Love and Kisses, Teen.”
Later that month, Helen was hospitalized with diphtheria and Teen sent flowers. He had come to realize just how deeply Helen had invaded his heart. Helen always would believe that was a turning point in their relationship, for soon after, her suitor’s letters became more direct.
A few days before Christmas, Teen wrote from Kannapolis, North Carolina, where he was attending a business meeting.
I’ve got you on my mind, sweetheart, and wanted to drop in via the postman for a little chat with you as it seems years since I saw you last.
Did I ever tell you that you had the most beautiful eyes and smile that I ever saw in my life? Did I ever tell you that I love you more than anything else in the world? That I miss you more and more as the clock ticks off the records of life? That you are the most wonderful episode that has ever happened in my life? That nothing could ever be anything worthwhile to me without you? That the paramount thing is just the two of us? That I will work my fingers to the bone to make you happy?
I love you
On December 30, Teen wrote to wish Helen a happy New Year and made his intention even clearer. He also broke the news that he had lost his job:
You are so wonderful and sweet and I love you with all my heart and soul. I am going to marry you right away, too. Think of that — You can’t do anything about it — I’ve just lost my job, but I can still be real sweet. I am true blue to you. I love you.
About the same time Teen met Helen, a business associate of his invited him to the First Presbyterian Church to hear Charles Woodbridge teach the Bible. Teen was never much of a churchgoer, but he reluctantly accepted, attending an evening service where Woodbridge was teaching from the book of Revelation. Almost in spite of himself, he was captivated and began going to the morning Sunday school Bible class, where Woodbridge was teaching from the gospel of John. When the pastor reached the third chapter and the story of Nicodemus the Pharisee, it roused something deep in Teen’s spirit.
Nicodemus was a member of the Jewish ruling party — the Pharisees — the group of men most adamantly opposed to Jesus’s teachings. Nicodemus knew all about Jesus and what he taught. He was quite possibly a closet disciple.
In fact, when he finally sought Jesus out, it was secretly, in the middle of the night. Jesus told Nicodemus that in order to enter the Kingdom of God, he must be born again.
This was a new idea and a new term and it literally made no sense. Nicodemus’s response to Jesus bordered on the sarcastic: “How can a man be born when he is old? Can he enter a second time into his mother’s womb and be born?”
Jesus told Nicodemus that he wasn’t talking about a physical rebirth. The born-again experience Jesus described was spiritual: “The wind blows where it wills, and you hear the sound of it, but you do not know whence it comes or whither it goes; so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”
Peering deep into his soul and heart, Teen realized that, like Nicodemus, he was not a living, breathing believer reborn of the spirit. As he later recalled in a personal account of those days, “I suddenly realized that I was not ready for Christ’s coming, and if he were to come at that moment, I would be lost, a counterfeit, to be eternally cast out.”
He invited Helen to join him at the church, and they both began studying the Bible. Although they both came from religious families — Teen’s was Presbyterian, Helen’s was Lutheran — both were essentially seekers looking for God. As a child, Teen attended Sunday school, and his mother regularly took the children to Sunday services, though his father never joined them. Helen’s grandmother voraciously read the Bible. She planted seeds of faith, in fact, in Helen, though Helen would later refer to herself in those days as “religious, but lost.”
If Teen had been asked if he were a Christian before he went to Salisbury, he would have nodded yes in intellectual assent. After all, he had gone to Sunday school, knew Bible stories, and was a decent, good person. But as Teen later explained, upon listening to Woodbridge teach the Gospel of John, he became persuaded that he needed a personal savior. He would speak of the power of the Holy Spirit that led him to confess his sins and invite Jesus to be Lord of his life.
For Teen, this experience of being born again gave him a genuine sense of joy, an assurance of his eternal destination, and the kind of peace the Bible says surpasses all understanding.
He was very eager to move forward in this new, born-again life with Helen at his side. They spoke of it in their letters that summer, when Helen went on vacation with girlfriends to Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Teen wrote to her almost daily:
Dearest Sweetheart:
I miss you already and wish you were here. Take care of yourself and I’ll pray for us each night … Sweet Sweetheart, have a good time and remember that I miss you and love you with all my heart and soul. I’ll be waiting only for Sunday as that will be a wonderful day with you by my side.
I just love you to pieces and will just keep on loving you more and more and more cause you are the sweetest Sweetheart of all.
Love and kisses
In reply, Helen wrote that she hoped to be back from Myrtle Beach by 7:00 a.m. Sunday so they could go to church together. She added, “I have been saying a nice prayer for us each day — but I haven’t read the Bible. Bet you have though.”
Woodbridge was thrilled with the couple’s new commitment to Christ and invited Teen to join a small group of men who prayed each Sunday afternoon for the ministry of the church and their personal concerns. It was the beginning of a long and deep personal friendship between the two men.
As Teen and Helen turned to Christ, the eyes of the nation were increasingly turning toward Europe where the military and political situation was deteriorating rapidly. After negotiating an alliance with Italy’s Benito Mussolini, Hitler invaded Poland on September 1, 1939. German forces, already in control in Austria and Czechoslovakia, swept into Denmark and Norway. Hitler signed a nonaggression treaty with the Soviet Union, and then, ominously, in September 1940, Japan joined the Axis with Germany and Italy.
Woodbridge occasionally interrupted his Bible teachings to speak about the war in Europe. His parishioners were deeply worried, and he realized they needed to hear words of comfort and hope — to be reassured God was in control of history and human events.
“We are living in unusual days,” he declared one Sunday in May 1940. “The German eagle, which already clutches in its fierce talons Austria, Czechoslovakia, portions of Poland, Denmark, and Norway, has today entered Holland, Belgium, and Luxembourg. Armies are about to clash on a wide frontier … Two ideologies, democracy and totalitarian might, are now facing each other in battle array on the field.
“No man knoweth the day or the hour,” he preached. “But as we watch with mounting indignation the affairs abroad, let us be very sure that our own hearts are brimming with warm and tender love for the Lord Jesus. Let us never despair, for our Father doeth according to His will in the armies of heaven and among the inhabitants of earth.”
The next month, France fell to Hitler’s military onslaught.
Many of the townspeople of Salisbury turned to prayer, asking God to stay the hand of Hitler’s armies, Navy, and Air Force, and to restore peace to Europe. The church elders designated a special day of “prayer and supplication to our Heavenly Father that he may intervene in the horrible struggles of war and peace may once more reign supreme in the hearts of men.”
In August, the German Luftwaffe attacked England from the air, and the Battle for Britain was joined. Although President Franklin D. Roosevelt, campaigning for reelection against Wendell Wilkie, assured the nation’s mothers and fathers that their boys were not going to be sent to fight in a foreign war unless the United States was attacked, that September he supported the passage of the Selective Service Act by Congress, establishing the military draft.
The military situation in Europe continued to spiral downward. On November 14, 1940, Coventry, England, experienced an especially terrifying round of firebombing from the Nazis. Roosevelt warned the nation in a speech on December 29, 1940, that “our civilization” was in great danger. He declared: “The Nazi masters of Germany have made it clear that they intend not only to dominate all life and thought in their own country, but also to enslave the whole of Europe, and then to use the resources of Europe to dominate the rest of the world.” That same day, the Nazis unleashed a savage aerial onslaught of firebombs in an apparent attempt to burn London to the ground.
The winter and spring saw matters further worsen, but for Teen and Helen, the war remained distant and removed as they planned for their wedding.
It was a simple ceremony, performed June 7, 1941, in Helen’s hometown of Faith in the living room of the Lutheran minister. Amidst baskets of lilies and white roses, the minister and his wife and a friend sang “O Perfect Love” and the couple exchanged vows. After a brief honeymoon trip to Virginia, they returned to Salisbury and their jobs — he at the auto finance company, she at Leonard’s Jewelry. But a life that seemed perhaps idyllic and tranquil to the newlyweds did not last.
On the morning of December 7, 1941, after Teen and Helen attended adult Sunday school and the 11:00 a.m. church service, he went to his weekly men’s prayer session. As a new believer, he enjoyed meeting with these men and Woodbridge for prayer and to get to know each other better. As they dropped to their knees, a church member burst through the door.
“Pastor!” he exclaimed. “We’ve been attacked! Japanese planes have bombed Pearl Harbor! The battle is still going on!”
The next day, well before the American public would learn the full extent of the attack — more than two thousand men killed and the near destruction of the U.S. Navy — a somber President Roosevelt declared the bombing a “date that will live in infamy” and authorized a declaration of war on Japan.
Three days later, Germany and Italy declared war on the United States, and less than two months after that, Teen Palm was drafted by the U.S. Army. He was going to war.