WHY I DIDN'T BECOME A "BABLISS" PREACHER

by Randy Reynolds

I remember the sweltering little southern churches in which my daddy preached his fire and brimstone sermons in the 1950’s—wood frame churches with no air-conditioning and no ceiling fans, where open windows let the heat in instead of out and insects of various denominations flew straight through the screens and congregated to worship the bare light bulb dangling above Daddy’s head. On summer nights in those churches, the humidity was so thick that people had to fan the air toward their faces to help themselves breathe. The cardboard fans they used were promotional items from the local funeral home--reminders, if any more were needed, that death was nigh.

The more excited Daddy became the faster those fans waved.

“Jesus, Jesus,” mumbled the shy people.

“Amen! Bless him, Lord! Preach it, brother!” yelled the bold ones.

(One old brother, at a service in south Louisiana, jumped to his feet, shook his fist and in a dyslexic moment shouted, “The devil’s the truth and the liar’s not in him!” And everybody said Amen.)

When Daddy made some really scary heart-stopping point in his sermon, the fans stopped, as sinners and saints alike pressed them against their lips or chests to savor the fear. Daddy’s next point offered hope and this got the fans waving again so that people could resume breathing.

I learned to smoke on those fans. I thought smoking was cool and the fan-handles were a flexible, porous wood that could be ripped from the cardboard, straightened out and lit. Smoking seemed cool because my teen-aged Uncle Bobby and Aunt Katrina did it (both were heavy smokers; both deceased now.) And I wanted to be like them and like my daddy, whom I hero-worshipped and who often preached about how much he had smoked as a child.

When I was a second-grader, Macon, Georgia, 1956, I ripped the handles off fans, lit up and swallowed smoke like a house afire in the same church room where on Sunday mornings I sang “This Little Light Of Mine.”

Long before I started smoking fan handles, I was my daddy’s assistant at his revivals in those hot little churches. When I was two and three years old, I accompanied him on revivals that lasted a week, with Daddy preaching every night. He and I would stay with the preacher’s family for that week, while Mother and my siblings stayed home in north Georgia. Each time Daddy got up to preach, I’d be right behind him on the chair or bench nearest the pulpit, with my blond hair slicked back and my cheeks scrubbed and rosy, wearing my dress-up short pants and suspenders and a crisply starched shirt.

A few sentences into most sermons, Daddy would have to take off his suit coat because of the heat, and he’d always drape the coat over my outstretched arms and make a funny little comment about me being his helper. I'd stand there with that coat and never flinch until the sermon was over, proud of myself for being up on stage in front of everybody, but also feeling great empathy for Daddy whose thin white shirt would become drenched with sweat as he jumped around and preached one of his lively high-volume sermons. People were amazed at my daddy’s preaching, and also at what a well-trained little son he had.

He liked to show me off, so after the service, when people were still milling around exchanging pleasantries, some would gather around us in the aisle and he’d ask me Bible questions that he knew I could answer. Once, when I was three, he said in front of such a group, “Randy, tell them what kind of preacher you’re going to be just like your daddy when you grow up.” He expected me to say “Church of God,” of course, but I blurted, “Babliss.” That got a roar from the little huddle of church people and Dad was still retelling the incident 60 years later. (That skill at ad-libbing was an asset in my radio career!)

For my first few years on this earth, I was so proud of my daddy that I could bust. MY DAD was the one who stood there in the pulpit and told people what to do to get to Heaven, how to live their lives. HE was the one who relayed messages from God. My heart went out to all the children whose dads were not preachers. I wondered if they were embarrassed about it.

I didn’t turn out to be a “Babliss” preacher, after all. My daddy was already the best preacher there could be, I thought, so I wanted to be something that he had not already done better than I could have ever dreamed of doing. I imagined myself as, alternately, a cowboy jet pilot, a cowboy lawyer, a cowboy reporter and a cowboy songwriter. In sixth grade, when Kennedy got elected, I had an intense desire to become President because Presidents got their picture in LOOK magazine every week.

Being taught, however, that the world was about to end—a recurring theme both in and out of churches in those days—my focus became narrower. Why worry about the adulthood that I would surely never have? Why not just enjoy the here and now?

I'll tell you why: because I –poor, unfortunate, beleaguered, ridiculed, ostracized, abused boy that I fancied myself to be—I was the preacher’s son.

But that’s another story.