It was a tradition in the athletic culture of my high school to prepare for basketball games played in Butte by visiting Henry’s Plumbing on Second Street West. Butte was a mining town boasting the largest open-pit copper mine on earth. It was notorious for its ruthless and corrupt robber barons in their mansions and the thugs and gangs on the streets.
I was initiated into the mythic mayhem of Butte violence by being taken with a few of my teammates to Henry’s in anticipation of my first game in Butte. Henry got us ready to deal with the brutality that we were sure to encounter by outfitting us with what he called “fist pipes.” He cut a piece of pipe to a length of four inches, threaded both ends, filled the pipe with sand, and then capped the ends. When walking the streets of Butte, we were to keep this fist pipe enclosed in our grip. When assaulted by one of the Butte toughs, we would slug him with our weighted fist, and he wouldn’t know what hit him. Henry had grown up in Butte. He knew what he was talking about. As he cut and threaded the pipe, he regaled us with Butte stories of street violence. He charged us two dollars for the weapon.
In the athletic subculture of our school, Henry was a legend. We called his fist pipes “Henrys.” In the days approaching a road trip to Butte, “Do you have your Henry?” was part of the checklist. There were two high schools in Butte, one Catholic and the other public, so our team made the trip twice a year. Over the course of the two years I was on the team, we walked those menacing sidewalks four times, our concealed weapons at the ready, and never once had occasion to use them. A huge disappointment.
I had a more personal connection with Butte violence in Abraham Vereide. Abraham was my mother’s favorite cousin. He was twenty years older than my mother. He had some of the charisma of her brother Sven, but he put his to far better use. A friend who keeps track of these kinds of things tells me that I am Abraham’s first cousin, once removed.
Abraham arrived in Butte forty-two years before I showed up with my Henry. I was prepared for the violence. He wasn’t. He arrived in America from Norway in 1905 at the age of nineteen. He heard that there was work in Butte and took the train across the country to get his start. Because of a few missed connections, compounded with difficulties with the English language, it took him fifteen days to get across the country. He got a job as a section hand. But he received a rough welcome—he was beaten up and robbed of his first three paychecks.
Eventually he received a friendlier welcome three hundred miles north of Butte in Kalispell. There he met Mattie, a Norwegian girl from Wisconsin. He proposed to her on a hill overlooking Flathead Lake, just a few miles north of where I now live. Abraham and Mattie were married in Kalispell in 1910, the year my mother was born in that same town.
Abraham’s new father-in-law was a Methodist pastor. Under his influence Abraham himself became a pastor. In a few years he was a pastor with a congregation in Seattle.
After the death of his wife, my maternal grandfather moved to Seattle where there were family ties from Norway. Mother by this time was a teenager. The Norwegian network of cousins brought my mother and her cousin together. As she grew up, he took an interest in her. My mother admired her cousin extravagantly. As I grew up, her stories of her cousin Abraham significantly shaped my pastoral and moral imagination.
I grew up in a fiercely guarded sectarian church. Nobody outside the walls of the congregation of Spirit-filled souls we worshipped with on Sundays was considered “Christian.” Abraham was the pioneer in my circle of immigrant ancestors who broke out of that tightly knit, self-defined sect that was hostile to any form of the faith that dressed or used language that betrayed “worldliness.”
Through my mother’s stories I learned a lot about cousin Abraham. The doors of Abraham’s church opened out on neighborhoods of Scandinavian immigrants, “strangers in a strange land,” marginalized and exploited. The windows and doors of this church didn’t enclose; they opened out. Abraham’s sense of congregation expanded greatly. He set about preparing these newcomers for a dual citizenship, American citizens and citizens of heaven. He was bold and energetic. He recruited the mayor of Seattle and leading business leaders as allies in developing a social conscience for bringing these immigrants into a full participation in the “welfare of the city.” He started what he called Breakfast Groups. They were soon meeting all over Seattle.
Sometimes Abraham would bring his young cousin, my mother, and her boyfriend (later to be my father) to a Breakfast Group. She wasn’t used to this—Democrats and Republicans, Lutherans and Methodists, Roman Catholics and Greek Orthodox, Jews and even an occasional Chinese Buddhist, Presbyterians and Pentecostals, churched and unchurched, sitting down together for a weekly breakfast of bacon and eggs, waffles and yogurt. And then this Norwegian pastor unobtrusively slipping the word “God” into that pot of mulligan stew, with the quiet invitation, “Let us pray.”
“And do you know what, Eugene?”—this is now my mother speaking—“After a few times of seeing Abraham in action in those Breakfast Groups, that sectarian stranglehold on my throat loosened, and I found myself breathing freely.”
My mother’s stories of Abraham did the same for me, set me free from the claustrophobic confinement of sectarianism, opening wide windows and doors to wherever the wind of the Spirit is blowing.
Eventually in 1953 the Breakfast Groups found expression in his formation of an annual President’s Prayer Breakfast in Washington D.C. It was during the Eisenhower administration. Billy Graham was the speaker. Three years later every state had a Governor’s Prayer Breakfast. In 2007, I was invited to address the Governor’s Prayer Breakfast in Montana and claimed my heritage as Abraham Vereide’s first cousin, once removed.
I first met Abraham personally in 1960, when he was nearly eighty. I had driven to Washington D.C. to attend the President’s Prayer Breakfast. I introduced myself to him. “Evelyn’s son? How good of you to come and meet me.”
A year later he came to our home in White Plains, New York, where my wife and I were then living, had lunch with us, and reminisced about my mother as a teenager in Seattle, his rude initiation to life in Butte, his marriage in Kalispell, and his first assignment as a newly ordained Methodist minister: “I was an itinerant circuit rider in and around Great Falls where the Great Plains begin to stretch out east from the Rocky Mountains. I had a horse under me, a rifle in its scabbard, a Bible tucked under my belt, in a sanctuary of Norwegian-like mountains.”
I loved hearing his stories, loved swapping memories of our Butte connection, loved hearing about my mother and father as young people newly in love in Seattle. But the enduring pastoral legacy I received from Abraham was my rescue from the stifling sectarianism in which I had been raised.