Summitarians in Exile

by Bob Moore

Before I get started, I want to make a change in my View From the Summit history of the fellowship. It’s too late to change the print, but I’ll announce now that the author of our name, Summit is our own Barbara Jania-Smith, who suggested it at one of our early organizing meetings, where it was enthusiastically agreed upon.
        How did Summit live up to it name and get to be what it has become? Well, mainly through the efforts and leadership of its members, past and present. And because we are in a society which is constantly on the move, the folks that furnished that leadership have moved in and out. Come and gone. Of the original founders of Summit, only a handful have lasted up to the present. Of course we have gained more over the years, but they too have tended to disappear. Some of them found better things to do on Sunday mornings, some have died, but more have just moved away, to places like Minneapolis, Vancouver, Long Island, or most especially to Prescott, Arizona, which we have taken to calling “Summit East.” Let’s take a look at a few of them.

 Where to begin? Well, the beginning would be a good place, and we’ll look at the personalities as we go along.

 Summit’s organizer, Dona Foster, started out by doing almost all of the leadership roles herself, except that Connie Henry and Mary Ellen Shu, both of whom are still with us, had started  a Children’s RE program, and my wife, Dolores, had staked a claim to editing the newsletter and orders of service. Then Dona’s husband, Bob Foster, had a stroke which made him a full-time invalid requiring most of her time.  So Dona asked Dolores to chair the meeting which had been planned to organize the Fellowship and start work on bylaws and articles of incorporation. Dolores, who was allergic to chairing of meetings, mentioned that fact to another member, Geoff Levin, who offered to do it for her.
 

Short and red-haired, Geoff was a dynamo. He led the meeting, and within a few weeks he had informal committees busy writing the necessary documents to get us incorporated and recognized by the UUA, to look for a better location, to plan Sunday services, and to nominate candidates for officers of the Fellowship.

 That committee was unanimous in nominating Geoff for president, and he was twice re-elected to continue the job. Meanwhile his wife, Renée, took over as program chair, seeing that we had a speaker or other program for every Sunday service. Geoff had a particular talent for keeping track of dates—times when things had to be started so that they would be completed on time. Somebody said that he carried a calendar in his head..
 This is not to say that the Levins did all the work while the rest of us looked on. No, most of the process was done by the elected Governing Board and the various committees, who met monthly at various homes—often the Levins’— to get the business discussed and done. Why in homes? Well, we had no office and were renting the Lodge only for Sunday Services, so there weren’t many possibilities.
 

Geoff Levin was a botanist by trade, and he led a few springtime expeditions to the desert to take a look at the plant life, flowers and others, which sprang to life when it rained. However, he was offered a better job in Champaign-Urbana, the home of the University of Illinois, so he and Renée, plus their children, Toby and Madeline, moved there shortly after Geoff’s second term as our president. He was followed as president by another notable Summitarian, Gary Baldwin, but he is still with us, so not a subject for this sermon.
 * * * * *

Then came Barbara Wilson, who took over the presidency for two years. She and her husband, John, used to roar up to church services on their huge motorcycles from their home in Santee. Barbara was aware of the fact that UU’s love to discuss everything at great length, so that Board meetings tended to last until everyone was too sleepy to carry on but had not yet gotten around to the last items on the agenda. And she had a cure: she assigned each agenda item a time period for discussion, after which they went on to the next item, whether the first was settled or not. The new system worked like a charm—almost always an item was settled in the time allotted. If they required more study, they would be reintroduced at the next meeting, after everyone had had time to think it over and discuss it with others.
 

Certainly the most notable action during Barbara Wilson’s presidency was the hiring of Rev. Ned Wight as our first minister. Our pleas had been heard in Boston, and we had figured out how to pay him, with some help from the UUA and from First Church of San Diego. When Ned came for his trial weekend, the Wilson’s put him up in their spare bedroom and arranged his schedule to meet with anyone interested.. We’ll say more about Ned later.
 

John did not follow Barbara as president immediately; however both of them stayed heavily  involved, even after they adopted a Chinese orphan, Liliana. Lily was delightful but  hyperactive and kept the parents busy for awhile . Eventually too, John was elected president and served  for a year and a half. And finally the family moved to Prescott, Arizona, but they still frequently  mount their motorcycles and roar back to visit us.
 * * * * *

Keith and Anne Dixon never held offices in Summit; in fact I believe that Keith is a Catholic or some other form of non-UU that kept him from officially joining. However he led some services and discussions of his chosen field of health insurance. Anne was a member, active in working up public relations ideas to promote UUism in general, Summit in particular. Their daughter Louise was a bright and remarkably self-possessed pre-schooler. Ned Wight described her as “three, going on thirty.” They were valuable members until Keith’s job took them to Minneapolis. They are still active there: my step-sister Betty—a Minneapolis Methodist and U.U.— sent me a copy of the Minneapolis Unitarian Service Auction booklet, and Keith and Anne are listed as sponsors!
 * * * * *
 

John Cunningham, who retired as a navy chief while still in the prime of life, remained big, powerful, and impressive. He did important service in setting up for church services in the Lodge, including placing the chairs for the congregation and putting out the heavy directional signs leading strangers to us. He also served as Summit’s representative on the San Diego County UU Cluster. John and his bride, Jo, were the first couple to marry in the Fellowship. Jo served as program chair for a year, seeing that there was a service every Sunday when Ned was not in the pulpit. (His contract specified only that he do three services a month, so we would have variety.) Jo became a semi-invalid, walking with a walker, allergic to perfume and other scents, but she stayed interested and active in Summit activities, notably the bridge club, where she and John were a redoubtable couple. The Cunninghams left a hole when they moved to Iowa City.
 * * * * *

 Another notable Jo and John team were the Careys, active right from before the start of Summit.  They hosted the first planning meetings, in their home. John, who directed our public relations and advertising, has died, and so not a suitable subject for today’s sermon, but Jo stayed active after his death and served a tour as President of the Fellowship. While President, she re-married, and her new husband, Jim Lindstrom, took on the presidency for a notable two years, and was extremely active in the search for a building for the Fellowship. Meanwhile they had moved to Poway, and after a few years of making the long commute, they stopped coming to our services and eventually dropped membership.
 * * * * *
 

Before she joined Summit, Shirley Perry already had been a busily active member and leader in First Church and in the County Cluster of Congregations. Then she joined Summit and worked hard for us. I recall her working hard on the Auctions, calling on people to submit items and joining with Dolores in thinking up clever and original descriptions of the items for sale. If she had a failing—and like the rest of us, she certainly did—it was that her enthusiasm made her take on too many responsibilities at the same time, so that she would find herself so overwhelmed that other Summitarians had to leap into the gap to salvage a project.
 

While a Summitarian, Shirley remarried and changed her last name to Doyle. Her new husband, called Doc, after his initials, M.D., was a big muscular man and an exceptional ballroom dancer. They made an impressively graceful couple on the dance floor. One Sunday a stranger appeared for our service and stayed for the sermon discussion afterward. There he got the floor and started to tell us that we were all going to hell if we believed the nonsense we were discussing instead of the inerrant Holy Bible. While the rest of us sat aghast, Doc Doyle rose, took the stranger by the arm, and escorted him out the door, never to be seen again. The Doyles moved to Ohio, the home ground of Shirley’s family, and Doc has since died.
 * * * * *
 

Then there were the Bourdeaus, Lee and Phyllis. They were an imaginative pair who did odd-ball things like make Halloween scarecrows for sale as a fundraiser for Summit and fixing up old houses as combination museum and home. They lived in one such place belonging to Phyllis’s father, who had been a pioneer in Spring Valley. After the father’s death, Phyllis and Lee did considerable traveling in the western states and eventually moved to the Las Vegas area to be near their daughter and son. We miss them.
 * * * * *

 John and Maria Duffy were another outstanding couple with an adopted daughter, Tiffany, who was a pre-schooler when they started. While they were with us, John led the men’s group in discussing the works of esoteric German philosopher Nietzsche. Maria, who had studied for a career in opera, has a beautiful and powerful voice that stood out in our Summit choir.  They moved to Escondido, where John set up his machine shop. Then he developed lethal cancer, which he fought off with all his considerable strength and a lot of support from Maria for years before his recent death.
 * * * * *

 Esther Cardall was active in committee work and played organ solos as part of occasional church services. She was elected vice president and served as president after John Wilson resigned from that job in mid-term. She did an outstanding job and was reelected for the next full year. We miss her since she moved to Pasadena and has taken a prominent role in a UU church there.
 * * * * *
 

A.J. Averett, generally known as Tony, operated our sound equipment during church services for several years. A devout left-wing Democrat, he tended to use the candle-lighting time in the service to expound on whatever political football was in the air at the time, and he also brought up similar points during the sermon discussion period afterward.
 He owned a cat named Mr. Gray, whom he nursed back into health through several near-fatal illnesses. Mr. Gray died within the past year, having lived well into his twenties and survived more than one cross-country automobile  trip.
 

Tony grew tired of life in San Diego County and considered moving to Canada or to his home state of New York. He finally chose up-state New York, partially because of problems in getting Mr. Gray across the international border. However, he has never lost contact with Summit, for he uses the e-mail addresses of a number of Summitarians to flood us with copies of newspaper editorials and news articles on subjects of interest to him, and hopefully, to us. His chief source is the liberal New York Times.  Maybe after a few more Allegheny winters he’ll be back.
 * * * * *
 

Virginia Spiller, long-time Summitarian, now deceased, was having d inner in her favorite restaurant when the manager asked her about the pin she was wearing, with the UU logo. Virginia answered at some length, and the manager, Karen Hagberg, said that it sounded like the religion she had been looking for. Where did we hold our services?
 

The Hagberg family: Karen, Merle, and their four children, came and stayed. with Summit. Merle volunteered to help set up the room at the Lodge for Sunday services once a month and did yeoman duty until the family moved to Prescott, AZ. Karen worked in children’s RE, ending up as an able director of the program, again until they moved to Prescott. Meanwhile the two older daughters, Sara and Kelly, had grown to maturity and remained in the San Diego area, although no longer as active Summitarians. The two youngsters, son Kevin (now bigger than his dad), and daughter Shelby are living in Prescott but come back to visit as often as they can.
 * * * * *
 

Delores Nims worked long and hard at building up an adult Religious Education program for Summitarians to study and learn on a wide variety of subjects. It’s said that if you scratch a Unitarian, you find a schoolteacher, and Delores had a gift for finding among us potential teachers for a wide variety of interesting topics. One subject that she herself taught was Tai Chi, a Chinese form of non-strenuous physical exercise. I have always been clumsy and slow to learn anything requiring physical coordination, but she kept me at it until I learned it—and still go through it at least once daily. I truly believe that may be why I am the first member of my family to live into my nineties.
 

But Delores left us to travel all over the world, to such esoteric spots as Tierra del Fuego and Indonesia. She managed to survive being in the Indian Ocean area on the edges of a lethal tsunami and a huge earthquake. Finally she has ended up in Washington State, whence she still visits us from time to time.
  * * * * *
 

Kit and Trixie Stowell are another couple whom we miss. Kit is a professional musician who plays guitars and a variety of harps of different sizes and shapes, mostly from Latin America. Perfectly bi-lingual, he also teaches both Spanish and English. As a hobby, he studies pup-fish, small fishes who live in tiny ponds and water holes in the deserts of northern Mexico. Living in such isolated pools, they have developed into a wide variety of slightly different species.
 

The Stowells were active with Summit for several years before moving to Vancouver, WA, to be nearer Kit’s grown daughters by a prior marriage.
 * * * * *
 

Beverly and Leonard Thomas, a nurse and a high school teacher respectively, were old-time members of First Church when they realized that they had to drive right by Summit’s meeting place to get to services at First Church. They stopped off, looked us over, and eventually joined Summit. Beverly’s beautiful voice augmented our choir, and Leonard became a leader in the Summit men’s group, where he assailed the Superintendent of the San Diego City Schools, a man with no background in the field of education. Both Thomases reached retirement age and moved to the Sacramento area, whence they return for occasional visits.
 * * * * *
 

By far the most influential of our former members was the Reverend Ned Wight. A small men with a big smile, he appeared younger than his mid-forties, and when he came for a weekend tryout period, he instantly charmed the fellowship. There were a few misgivings when he himself mentioned that he was gay, but Summit’s vote to hire him was nearly unanimous. 
 

When he arrived permanently, there were a few adjustments to be made. For example, Ned was basically a Christian who simply did not believe in the trinity, whereas many Summitarians were atheists, agnostics, and generally non-believers. After this became evident, Ned gave two outstanding sermons in which he pointed out that the God a believer believed in was not necessarily an individual enthroned on a cloud, but rather a concept of some unknowable force which made things go, whether you believed in it or not. Being UUs, we found that we could listen and talk about such ideas without feeling that there was a penalty for disagreeing.
 

We already had a tradition of a circle discussion after each service, and Ned really shone as a leader of those discussions, making sure that everyone who had something to say had a chance to say it, usually followed by some encouraging and often funny comment from Ned. His wit always sparkled, whether written into a sermon or crackling spontaneously during discussion.
 

Ned was a musician: during his undergraduate college years he had played in the band at Stanford. And he was a talented singer with a clear tenor voice. When he arrived at Summit, he was shocked to find that our music program was ragged at best and although we might occasionally  have some organized singing, there was hardly the vestige of a regular choir. He set about to get one started, initially both leading and singing in it.  He was able to stand in front, facing the singers to get them started on a piece, then spring nimbly into place to become the tenor section.
 

Before studying for the ministry, Ned had a brief career in public relations, which stood him in good stead in his new job. He gave an interview to one of the free-distribution weekly papers. He offered invocations at city council meetings. Best of all, unless out of town, he proofread every Summit newsletter before it went to press, and because he understood about deadlines, got it done on time.
 

Perhaps the effort he was proudest of was a project to get a living wage for all laborers who did work for the city of San Diego. Before, the city had simply done business with contractors for labor-intensive jobs like cleaning streets, parks, and office buildings. The contractors, understandably anxious for all the profits they could make, had kept the wages down to starvation level. Now they have to meet minimum pay standards, due to the effort of The Interfaith Committee for Social Justice, with Ned as a prominent member.
 

His ministry to ailing Summitarians was outstanding. He visited any of us who were hospitalized, sometimes getting there before the attending doctors. Even more importantly, he also regularly visited those chronically ill and housebound, such as Virginia Spiller and Sylvia Altman.
 

There isn’t room in this sermon to mention all Ned’s activities—I sometimes wonder if the man ever slept—but they included such items as representative of the Pacific Southwest District  to the UUA board of trustees, and leadership in the Navajo Interfaith Clergy.
 

Most importantly of all, Summit’s membership grew during the first decade of his ministry, from perhaps a couple of dozen to over a hundred. Even then people were moving out and away, but new ones came in faster than old ones left. However, about the turn of the century, our membership leveled out and the losses began to equal the gains. I believe that this fact led Ned to decide that he had done all he could for us and that it was time to move on. However, his legacy is still with us. Many of us feel that he is a close friend.
 * * * * *
 

The Reverend Bonnie Tarwater was our first intern minister. Young, attractive, and articulate, she had a particular talent for children’s Religious Exploration. She did an outstanding job of directing the children in a performance of C. S. Lewis’s The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe.  Her sermons tended to be too mystical and too Christian for some Summitarian non-believers, so it was appropriate that after having been ordained, she now is the minister of a United Church of Christ Congregation in North County.
 * * * * *
 

The Reverend Don Stouder was a seeker. A gay man, he first arrived on our scene as chaplain of Grossmont Hospital, where he gave religious comfort to patients of all backgrounds. He had been ordained as a Bishop in a tiny denomination called the Thomas Christian Church. He had already preached a few guest sermons at Summit, and they had been well received as they probed into the teachings of Jesus without the requirements for belief in his deity.
 

Don leaned heavily on the Gospel of Saint Thomas, a recently discovered manuscript which contained most of the teachings of Jesus as supported by the four gospels in the Bible, but eliminated the biography, the miracles, and the geographic detail.
 

When Ned took a sabbatical leave, Don filled his place in the pulpit for six months as an interim minister,. Since then he has left his job at Grossmont Hospital and operated a coffee-house book store called Somewhere Else, which featured entertainment by guest musicians, including young Summitarians Marissa Henry and Julia Shu. Now he has closed the bookstore and is working as a Family Services Chaplain for Lifesharing Community Organ and Tissue Donation, which is affiliated with the UCSD Medical Center. He helps families make the heart-breaking decision to donate a loved one’s organs following a tragic or unexpected death. He also trains other chaplains how to work with these kinds of difficult cases.
 * * * * *
 

It is hard to know when to stop on a project like this.  I am sure I have omitted some names which deserve to have been included. Fortunately for me, however, those people are too far away to complain. And even more fortunately for Summit, our remaining members are quite capable of leadership when it is needed.