“Now there were in the church that was at Antioch certain prophets and teachers; as Barnabas, and Simeon that was called Niger, and Lucius of Cyrene, and Manaen, which had been brought up with Herod the tetrarch, and Saul. As they ministered to the Lord, and fasted, the Holy Ghost said, Separate Me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them. And when they had fasted and prayed, and laid their hands on them, they sent them away.” Acts 13:1-3
GOD AT WORK! The Lord added
God has His own timetable for work to be done, and He also has His own workers. One of the big things I have learned by working in the Gospel with Mr. Herb Harris and other men older than me, is the necessity of adapting to, and being able to work with others. No one person is indispensable, and no one has all the gifts needed and the natural abilities, to effectively carry on the work of the Lord in any place. Plurality of workers in outreaching with the Gospel, and plurality of elders in local assemblies has many benefits. Spiritual, doctrinal and moral safety is preserved when there are the checks and balances of the variety of gifts given by divine Persons to frail mortal men and women.
Our Lord Jesus Christ “chose Him twelve” that they would be with Him. After they had been with Him long enough to learn basics and fundamentals, “He sent them forth to preach.” When they came back to the Lord from their preaching tours, they told Him how things went and what happened in the places they had been. Accountability is a needed principle in any work for God. We have not been called to be “free-lances” in the work. The apostle Paul recognized the benefit of having others with him; both for the benefit he would receive from them, and the benefit he would be to them. Mr. Harris understood that need, and whether “M.G.M.” was part of his plan for training us, or it just developed over time, it was a good training tool. To have four to six men in a small boat 8’x38’ with very close living quarters, for three to five months, is a “make or break” situation.
In June of 1961, after Mr. Harris had spent a month in Corner Brook preparing the “M.G.M.” for summer work, Mr. Harris, Bert Joyce, George Campbell, Wallace Buckle and Gaius Goff went to Port au Choix on the boat. There was a measure of interest there but not a lot in the open-air meetings that we could tell. Contact was made with the Spences, and one of the Spence ladies professed to be saved after listening to the Gospel only a few times. Apart from those families and a few others who were connected with them, there wasn’t a whole lot of interest nor a reason to stay there at that time.
We went with the boat to Parsons Pond again for a few days, and then went farther up the shore to Cow Head. A brother from Vancouver joined the boat there for a month or so. One of the Shearers families from Rocky Harbour had a construction company that was doing work dredging the entrance to the brook at Parsons Pond, and extending the wharf at Cow Head. While in Cow Head, I had a telegram calling me back to the USA to report for drafting into the army, so I had to leave early in July.
There was a bitterness in Cow Head against the Gospel by those who were leading members of the community, and that affected the community in general. That was basically because the minister who lived there was the man who tried to get the boat cut off the year before at Daniel’s Harbour. Also, quite a number of people from Bell Downs Point which was close to Cow Head, professed to be saved in meetings we had at Parsons Pond. Mr. Shears knew that there was opposition at Cow Head and told the men on the boat they should go up to Rocky Harbour and preach the Gospel. So, they did that and found a whole different response.
There was a good government wharf there to which they could tie up the boat. When they preached from the deck of the boat, a good number of people came to the wharf to listen. After a number of weeks there, they were able to rent the bays of a garage that wasn’t being used for about two months to hold meetings in. By God’s intervening hand, I was able to return to Newfoundland by the end of September, just around the time the owner of the garage wanted it back. An unfinished building nearby was made available to use if we would finish it off, which was done fairly quickly and meetings were held for that winter in Ken Parsons Parlor.
Mr. Harris rented a house in Rocky Harbour, and Wallace and Olive Buckle moved there with their new baby to help in the work of the Lord there. He and Mr. Harris were helped for some of the winter by Mr. Ernie Dellandrea who came from Ontario for a number of months. They had Gospel meetings there all fall and winter, and the Lord saved some precious souls. I was with the work at Parsons Pond and could usually get a load of people to come in the van with me to Rocky Harbour a couple of times a week. It was about a two hour drive each way depending on how the ferry crossing at St. Paul’s was. If it was blowing too hard, or if the tide was running too fast, the wait at the ferry could be an hour or so.
Wallace and Olive Buckle are from Forteau, Labrador and were both enthusiastic about the Gospel. Olive (Belbin) Buckle had worked with nurse Taylor for a number of years at the cottage hospital in Forteau, so was acquainted with the Gospel to a degree when George Campbell went there in 1956. She was one of the first ones saved there. When Wallace, her boyfriend, heard about the “new religion” in Forteau, it wasn’t too long before he wanted to return home from Seven Islands, Quebec where he was a heavy equipment operator.
He had been working on the Q, S and L railroad that was being built to carry iron ore from the Wabush/Labrador City open mine, to the Gulf of St. Lawrence where the ore was shipped out to iron mills in the USA. While working there he had some very close calls with death himself, and when he saw the remains of a friend he worked with, after he had been run over by a train, he wanted to go home to Buckles Point for a while. God has His ways of awakening people, and He certainly did that with Wallace Buckle.
When he went with Olive to hear the Gospel one night early in 1957, he got quite upset with what Mr. Campbell was preaching. He and some other people had it in mind that George Campbell had a different Bible than they used in the local churches, so he sent to Eaton’s to get one that was what he believed was the right one. He would not go to any more of George Campbell’s meetings but started reading the Bible for himself. He saw what Olive was like since she had been saved, and as he read through the New Testament scriptures, he came to Acts 2:21, “Whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.” The same words are almost identical in Romans 10:13, “For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved.” He had read enough to know that what Mr. Campbell had been preaching was right, and when he came to that verse, he got down by his bed and called on the Lord to save him. He was changed from within because that is what happens when a person is born again. There was a real change in the outward part of his life as well. Wallace and Olive moved up to Toronto after they were married, and it was there he was baptized and came into the fellowship of the assembly that met at the Pape Avenue Gospel Hall.
After a couple of years living in Toronto, they decided to return to Labrador to be a help in the work there. Wallace started a garage to fix cars and trucks, and it was a year or so after he was at that work, that he was asked to go on the “M.G.M.” When the summer work was over, Wallace and Olive brought their baby and stayed on in Rocky Harbour working in Gospel work with Mr. Harris. From that time on, they have been involved in the work of the Lord in many places, preaching the Gospel and seeking to reach out in other areas of Newfoundland and Labrador. During the winter of 1961-1962, souls were saved at Rocky Harbour, Parsons Pond and Daniel’s Harbour as the Lord added to the work those He saved. Also, there were meetings in Labrador and St. John’s where precious souls were saved. God was at work!
Mr. Buckle had been operating heavy equipment in Quebec and had made good money for those times. When the Buckles married and went to Toronto, he had worked all the time and they had enough to meet their needs financially. Then in Forteau when he started the garage to repair vehicles he was doing fairly well. So, to go from having enough to feed your family and take care of everyday needs, to going without a job or normal income to living by faith alone, was quite a change. To not having food in the cupboard or money for gas, can be hard on a man who knows he can do well financially in life if he chooses to work hard. There were hard times in that way for the Buckles when they were in Rocky Harbour and other places, but when one is able to lead a lost soul to the Saviour, any losses we might have seems so small compared to the gains in the kingdom of God. The joy of serving the Lord in the place where He wants us, is far greater compensation then security in temporal things.
During the summer of 1962 after finishing building the Parsons Pond Gospel Hall, the crew went on the boat back to Port au Choix to try to reach some more people there and to be a support to those who had professed to be saved in that community. Mr. Harris was only at Port au Choix briefly, and then went back to Rocky Harbour, where Peter Mathews was fixing up an old house, he bought at Norris Point. They also got materials ready to build a Gospel Hall at Rocky Harbour. Bert Joyce and George Campbell went to Labrador to be with their families and Wallace Buckle and I stayed on the boat having open air meetings and nightly meetings in a school. Most of those who attended were two Spence families and some family connections.
One brother who had been saved earlier in Port au Choix, not only bought fish but fished himself. He had his nets spread out on one of his gardens drying so that he could clean it, and as he was on his way to the school to the Gospel meeting, he saw a young man with a knife cutting up his nets. As he was telling us this when he came to the meeting, he seemed quite dismayed with himself. He had run and caught the young fellow who was taking his spite out by cutting up the nets. As he told us this, I was imagining in my mind what I would have done and what he had actually done. He guessed right away what I had been thinking, and said, “Mr. Goff, I never hit him. I shook him a bit and I guess it scared him, and he pled with me to let him go, which I did. I never hurt him although he bled a bit out of his mouth.” I guess he really did shake him.
That same young man, later stole the tires off of Mr. Buckle’s car. When we got looking around the community and saw the tires on the few vehicles that were there, it wasn’t long until Mr. Buckle said, “Look there, those are my tires and wheels on that car. The wheels are just newly painted.” I watched as he walked up to the young man who was trying to jump in his car and drive off, and Wallace called out, “Hey, give me are ride back to the boat will you?”
He very quickly replied, “Sure thing, Mr. Buckle,” and off they drove. When I got back to the boat, the young fellow had all his old rims and useless tires out of the trunk of his car and they were all on the wharf. Wallace had him cleaning the paint off the rims of the Buckle’s car and was preaching the Gospel to him all the time. Then he told the young guy his testimony, what he was like before he got saved, how the Lord saved him, and why he was preaching the Gospel now. He had a captive audience as that young fellow kept scrubbing the paint off the rims until Wallace was satisfied.
When he went to put his old rims and useless tires back on his car, Mr. Buckle said, “Hold it.” We had tires on the side of the boat as bumpers against the wharf, that were twice as good as the young guy’s tires, so we traded him our partially good tires for his useless ones. He went off amazed and from then on was as favorable as an unsaved person could be, especially toward Mr. Buckle.
“Heaping coals of fire” on a person’s head wasn’t a punishment but was a way to show kindness to one who didn’t deserve it. That is how grace works. “Do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which despitefully use you and persecute you.” However, it happened, the gist of that incident went around the whole community, and Mr. Wallace Buckle has been a well-thought-of man in Port au Choix ever since.
God did save another one of the Spence ladies at that time. Late in July, Bert Joyce and George Campbell came to take the boat to Labrador for a few weeks. Mr. Harris wanted Wallace and me to help Peter Mathews get going on the new hall at Rocky Harbour. It wasn’t easy to find a suitable piece of ground in Rocky Harbour, but a man who had been saved at the Salvation Army, had a useless piece of ground across the road from his home. Part of it was a bog and part of it was a high nob of ground that stuck up like a twenty-foot bump and then it dropped right into the creek. After looking it over we all agreed there was room to build a hall if we pushed the dirt off the nob into the bog. So, slabs were laid down and a bulldozer pushed the nob flat and the whole piece was usable. One part would be good for the building and the other for the parking area.
Mr. Peter Mathews stayed on to head up the building of the Rocky Harbour Hall, and Wallace and I went to help him in that work. We had some local help and occasionally when a big job like pouring cement, putting up walls, and putting on the roof, we got help from Parsons Pond men. To get gravel for cement we had to shovel truckloads of sand and gravel into a rented dump truck and then it was hauled about three miles to where the hall was to be built. It was a difficult job to get the basement down far enough because the ground was sticky clay. However, in spite of difficulties, the Gospel Hall in Rocky Harbour was finished in October.
Peter Mathews then went home to Langley, BC with the intention of coming back to live in Newfoundland the next summer. Douglas Howard and George Campbell had a Gospel series at Rocky Harbour at the opening of the new hall. After the meetings were finished, there was a baptism and the assembly of people there began to break bread in the new hall in remembrance of the Lord on the Lord’s Day morning. The Gospel has been preached in that hall in the sixty years since, and the assembly meetings are still held in that same building, although there have been some renovations and repairs since that time.
Mr. and Mrs. Buckle, Mr. Harris and Mr. Dellandrea were constantly at Gospel work in that area, but they would occasionally came to Parsons Pond and I would go there for some of their meetings. Mr. Albert Barbour came over that winter, and he and I had a Gospel series at Parsons Pond. A number of people from Daniel’s Harbour professed to be saved at that time.
Late in the winter I went to Oregon for a couple of months, and while there bought a four-wheel drive International van. When I left for Newfoundland in the early spring, I loaded the van with things to bring for the Mathews who were moving to Norris Point after their children were finished school at Langley. After I came back to Parsons Pond, and Mr. Harris came back to Rocky Harbour for a while, he agreed to take the boat to the Quebec coast where Bert and George had an interest, and specific exercise toward Harrington Harbour. A young man from Ontario came with Mr. Harris and was on the boat that year and for several years after. There were some believers in Ontario or somewhere in the Maritime provinces who had relatives who lived in Harrington Harbour.
We headed straight across the Gulf of St. Lawrence from Bay of Islands and got there in seven or eight hours. There was some interest in that family, but they were quite intimidated by the religious leaders who lived there. So, even though we had two weeks on that coast, that seemed to be about all the time they wanted to spend there. Mona Campbell and their little boy David, were in Scotland, and George wanted to go there as soon as possible.
After we left Corner Brook for the second time that summer, the crew was Mr. Harris, Bert Joyce, Wallace Buckle, Roger Richardson and Gaius Goff. We headed for the south coast, spending about a week at Port au Basques visiting the houses and having open air meetings. That was the first time on the south coast, so we went from one town to the next. There were a few miles of road there that went as far as Harbour la Coup. When we were in Port au Basques, Mr. Anderson who had a freight boat, invited us to go to Isle au Morts where he lived. There was an interest there and we were able to rent a community hall for a while until a religious leader had the town council put us out of the building.
By this time, it was well up in August so we went from place to place, with brief stops for a night or two. There wasn’t too much interest at Magree and Fox Roost, but at Burnt Islands there was a real interest. We were able to rent a building on the island there. One or two people professed to be saved at that time. We had open air meetings at Rose Blanche and there seemed to be an interest there also. There wasn’t much at Harbour la Coup but when we got to La Poile, everyone seemed interested. That place was beyond the road and from there all the way to Terrenceville, there was no road. Perhaps that was why interest seemed greater, because there were not very many distractions in those settlements.
We stopped at each place along that coast as far as Burgeo and then went out to Ramea which is on an offshore island, before we called it a trip and turned back. When we left Corner Brook, we had hundreds of Kember Texts and cases of Bibles. We sold the Bibles for twenty-five cents because people seemed to appreciate what they paid for, more than what they got free. When we got back to Corner Brook, they were all gone. It was October then and the weather was getting cold and stormy, so it was time to put the boat up for the winter.
Talking things over with Mr. Harris at Rocky Harbour, he seemed to think it would be a good idea if Wallace and I took the little portable hall and went to Rose Blanche to try to get a start in the Gospel on that coast. The interest in Rose Blanche wasn’t as good as some other places, but that was as far as the road went. We put the portable hall on a trailer and pulled it behind my van and made a place by the road in Rose Blanche just big enough to put the hall on. The visiting was okay, but we could not get anyone to come to the meetings. They had a new minister there who had come from Labrador and he told the people that “those Gospel preachers divide homes, break up families, and they haven’t even been to a seminary.” He came from a village not far from where Wallace Buckle grew up on the Labrador coast. His influence was strong enough that any interest people had in the summer, was gone by the late fall.
Construction on the TransCanada highway had just begun in Newfoundland and the roads were terrible on tires. Sharp rocks blasted out for ballast were probably two to six inches big and had a lot of sharp points on them, so by the time we got back to Corner Brook, we had ruined four tires. For quite a few years when roads were first being built in Newfoundland, tires were one of the biggest costs of travel. Gas was about fifty cents a gallon and we thought that was a lot. But tires – whew! So, recaps were what I used most of the time.
Our foray to the south coast was a bust, so Mr. Buckle went back to Rocky Harbour where his family was, and continued his work in the Gospel with the new assembly there. However, a new development had arisen, and Mr. Harris wanted me to haul the little portable hall to Buchans, a mining town toward the center of the island. Archie Sharp, a son of Mrs. Tom Lynch of Bishop’s Cove, had been saved a number of years before at the People’s Church in Toronto when he was working there. He had returned to Newfoundland and married. His home and family were at Whitbourne, Trinity Bay, but he went to Buchans to work for ASARCO who owned the mine at that time. “Brother Archie” was a small man with a big heart for the Lord, and he didn’t mind talking to people about the Gospel.
There was a bunkhouse for men who came and went to work for the company, but Archie wanted some privacy. So, he went outside the town in which all the houses were owned by the company, and built a small cabin at Pigeon Inlet. There were quite a number of small homes built there, and then some nice homes started to be built at Pigeon Inlet.
Archie Sharp was well known around Buchans because one of his jobs was to deliver coal to the homes for stoves and furnaces. His testimony and zeal for the Lord interested Melvin and Ralph Penny, and soon the Lord saved them. They knew Sidney Locke and they would all go to Archie’s shack and read the Bible and talk about the scriptures. Moses Adams came from Upper Island Cove and knew Uncle Tom Lynch and Archie. Moses had a serious drinking problem, but Archie kept at him with the Gospel, and Moses and Sid also professed to be saved.
When Archie told his half-brothers, Harvey and Cron Lynch, what was happening in Buchans, they got some of the brethren from St; John’s and drove to Buchans to have some open-air meetings. While there they had a baptism and Moses Adams was baptized in Red Indian Lake. When they got back to St. John’s they contacted Mr. Harris, so when we got back with the portable on the trailer, Mr. Harris said to me, “Don’t unhook that trailer. We’re going to Buchans.” Two days later, Mr. Albert Barbour who had come across the island on the train or plane, had got enough framing and plywood so we could make a roof on the portable hall for the winter. A canvas roof would make the hall impossible to heat.
Albert Barbour and I went ahead with my rig, and Peter Mathews pulled a small 12-foot travel trailer behind his van. We left Corner Brook around 5:00 in the morning because we knew the “TransCanada” would be in bad shape. The “highroad” was very muddy and we passed a number of transport trucks that were sunk down in the mud to the bottom of the box. In other low places there was standing water but we were able to keep going slow but steady all the way to Pigeon Inlet where we arrived at 10:00 that night.
By noon the next day the hall was up and the roof was on. By late afternoon most of it was painted with waterproof paint, and I took Mr. Barbour to Gander so he could get back to work at St. John’s. Douglas Howard had come along with Mr. Harris and Peter Mathews. He and I started Gospel meetings there at Pigeon Inlet and Mr. Harris and Peter went back to Rocky Harbour. We were having meetings in Buchans when I heard that President John F. Kennedy was shot.
Mr. Howard and I continued meetings in Pigeon Inlet until a week or so before Christmas. An interesting development happened while we were there. The government of Newfoundland started a centralization program which was to move people from small isolated settlements, to centralized larger communities. That way they could have larger and better schools, better access to health clinics, and in a general way, to have better conveniences at less government cost. In Buchans they made a townsite to move the houses from Pigeon Inlet right next to the actual town that was owned by the mining company. We could see that soon no one would live at the Inlet, so we were able to arrange for a piece of land in the new townsite.
When the Mathews family came to live in Norris Point and be with the Rocky Harbour assembly in 1963, Wallace and Olive Buckle and their two daughters, moved to Flowers Cove to live and be with the new assembly there. It became obvious that there soon have to be a Gospel Hall as a meeting place for the assembly at Nameless Cove. Mr. and Mrs. Harris went back to Nova Scotia where their home was as they were both not too well and the assembly at River Hebbert was small. The Buckles knew the people in the straits at least in a general sense and it was a good place for them to live and work in the Gospel.
A day or so after Christmas day, Mr. Harris told me to go to St. John’s to speak at the annual Sunday School treat. I had never been farther east than Gander, so it was new to me to get on the “Newfie Bullet” train in Corner Brook and head for St. John’s. There was a lot of snow that winter, so it took two days of going forward and backward to get across the island. There was a big V-plow on the front of the engine, but there was too much snow in the Gaff-Topsail mountains to just push through. So, for most of a day they spent punching through hard snow drifts.
The train got to St. John’s at twelve noon on January 1st, 1964. Mr. Albert Barbour picked me up at the train, and a half-hour later I met Linda, the young lady who would a year later become my wife. The assembly at Carbonear also had a Sunday School treat at that time, so I went there for the first time. While there I was asked if I would come back and have a Gospel series in the Smith Ave. Gospel Hall. That was the first of many series I have had the privilege of speaking at in St. John’s. Bert Joyce and I had meetings there beginning in February and lasting nearly to the spring.
In the spring Wallace Buckle and I put the loud speaker system on my van and began having open-air meetings in different places where the St. John’s brethren had been preaching in the open air. They had a good interest at Templeman, Bonavista Bay the year before, where they had contacts from the St. John’s assembly. They also had been having Sunday afternoon open air meetings around Conception Bay, and then went to Trinity Bay South. They found a family at Whiteway who were related to believers in the assembly at Parsons Pond. Wallace and I found an interest in Bonavista North, but the interest in Trinity Bay South seemed quite urgent. It seemed to us to be the right thing to go back there as soon as we could.
Again, that summer we went to the Quebec coast to Harrington Harbour where there was a family with connections to the assembly at Sherbrooke, Quebec. Mr. Harris, Bert Joyce, Wallace Buckle, Roger Richardson and Gaius Goff were on the boat in Quebec until early in July. After being in Quebec, we went back to Burnt Islands on the south coast first, and had a series of Gospel meetings. From there we spent about two weeks having meetings in La Poile. Some people wanted to buy Bibles and we gave some away to those who didn’t have the twenty-five cents.
The interest in Grand Bruit was quite small. While there, one woman was quite upset that we preached the Gospel in the open air off the boat, and made that very plain when we got to her house. Her words were, “What are you doing here? Go with that stuff to the heathen.” Her husband who was listening, said, “Where do you think they are? Everyone here is a heathen.” We were in Burgeo for a few weeks preaching in open air in different coves that are around that community.
A famous Canadian writer named Farley Mowat was living there at the time and wrote a couple of books while there. One of them was titled, “A Whale for the Killing,” and it was about the people there who shot a whale that got into one of those coves and couldn’t seem to find its way out. He had an old Newfoundland schooner that he sailed around in with his friends and they partied and drank a lot when they were aboard of her. One Sunday afternoon he sailed up along beside us when were we having an open-air meeting, and turned up the volume of his record player so that the songs they were listening to would drown out our meeting – and it did. Monday morning when he had sobered up, he sent a message to the boat asking of a couple of us would come to his house. When we got there, he was apologetic to a certain degree, and asked us to have a drink with him. Mr. Joyce explained to him who we are, where we are from, what we do on the boat and why we preach the Gospel. He was respectful at least and we never had any more difficulty from him.
From there we went to the island of Ramea where the lady who owned some fish plants and a fleet of draggers lived. She employed most of the people who lived in those isolated communities. There were no roads connecting them so all traffic was by boat within the community and between communities. The only other means of transportation was to walk. She had electric plants for her fish plants but didn’t supply power to the communities. We came back to Corner Brook in September as the weather starts to get bad on that shore when fall sets in by the end of September. Mr. Harris wasn’t well so went to the mainland and California for the winter.
Mr. Buckle and others were wanting to build a Gospel Hall at Flowers Cove, so Kenneth Taylor who had moved from Abbotsford, BC to Corner Brook to be a help in the work there, and I, went to help at the hall in Flowers Cove. The hall was soon finished and the assembly started to meet there. The Buckles moved into an apartment that was on one end of the hall. Ken Taylor and I went to the east coast again and had meetings in the Bishop’s Cove Hall, but there wasn’t much interest except on the part of those who were saved before. Moses and Madge Adams who were living in Buchans and had both professed to be saved there. They came from Upper Island Cove and Bryant’s Cove which are near Bishop’s Cove, so we thought there might be some interest in those families. Actually, there was opposition from them instead of interest.
After we finished those meetings, Ken went back to Corner Brook. Wallace Buckle came and we went to Whiteway to visit and try to get a place to have meetings. There were connections we had there with people from Parsons Pond and Bonne Bay which led us to that place. The brethren from St. John’s had good attendance at open-air meetings there Sunday afternoons. We thought those contacts might be interested in the Gospel, but that wasn’t really so, although they were always polite to us. We did make a good contact with the Jacksons, but we couldn’t find a place to rent to have meetings. We found an old bus in Carbonear that we could buy, so we got it and fixed the inside so we could have meetings in the bus. While we were there Mrs. Jackson professed to be saved and there was a fair interest. Mrs. Minnie Snow from Carbonear had a daughter who lived there. Mrs. Goosney from Parsons Pond assembly had a sister who lived there, and aunt Barbara Snow from Carbonear came originally from Green’s Harbour which was the next town. She had a lot of family members there. By the first part of December, it was too hard to heat the bus, so we closed the meetings.
The new hall in Flowers Cove was opened and so Wallace and I started Gospel meetings there in early January. I had a limited time because Linda and I were getting married January 27th. The interest was good and we were sure we needed to continue to have meetings there, but decided to wait until Linda and I got back from our honeymoon to the west so my people could meet my new wife. There were on-going meetings for the Gospel on the Labrador coast and as far down as Charlottetown where Mr. Joyce visited quite often getting there by his airplane. George and Mona Campbell had three children by then and so he stayed in the area of English Point and L’Anse au Loup having meetings in the assemblies there. He and Mr. Fred Holder had some very good Gospel meetings that winter.
Mr. Fred Holder was having believer’s meetings in St. John’s when we got married. Wallace stood up for me and Doris, Linda’s sister, stood for her. Bert Joyce officiated. Mr. Harris sent us a telegram that was read at the reception in the basement of the St. John’s Hall. “Dear Gaius, ‘The thing which I greatly feared has come upon thee.’ Love, Herb.” That verse of scripture was applied with humor, but I don’t think Mr. and Mrs. Barbour thought it was funny at all. He was a confirmed bachelor, and some thought he believed all of those who worked in the Gospel shouldn’t get “bogged down” by a family. Actually, he came to love Linda dearly and greatly appreciate her when we lived with him for a while in Corner Brook.
Mr. Harris was at Desert Hot Springs, California at the time, so on our way to my parent’s home in Oregon, we were able to visit him for part of a day. He seemed anxious for us to get the honeymoon over and get back to Newfoundland. When we did get back in March, we went to Flowers Cove and stayed with the Dempsters, while Wallace Buckle and I had a Gospel series in the new hall. Quite a number of people professed to be saved then, including Gussy Norman, his wife and two daughters. He was the mayor of Flowers Cove at the time, and he and his family faced a lot of opposition. The weather was really bad with snow piled high everywhere. However, that was a good thing because people couldn’t go anywhere. The hall was full every night and we didn’t miss a night even though snow just didn’t stop coming. God’s weather doesn’t stop God’s work.
Gussy and Dora along with their girls came to the meetings at nameless Cove each night in the Bombardier that could hold at least thirteen people. It was made out of plywood, had two tracks on the back and a Dodge engine on the back facing backward. There were skis on the front that could be changed for tires when there wasn’t snow.
One stormy day Wallace and I went across the harbour to Gussy’s store and found him alone there. We had a good opportunity to bring the Gospel to him personally, during which time we told him the story of “Captain Coutt’s Conversion.” He was saved by putting his own name in Isaiah 53:5-6. After we left, Gus got down before the Lord with Isaiah 53:5-6 before him and inserted his name in the place of “our.” In faith, he saw that was a real fact, and God saved him. When he told us that night, there was a lot of rejoicing when the mayor was saved. There were quite a number of people saved at that time, most of who became part of the Flower’s Cove assembly.
God was at work in Corner Brook and there was real encouragement there. Mrs. Bertha Payne and her family started coming to the hall at 8 Valley Road. They had lived near the new hall in Rocky Harbour, and when her husband got work as a plumber in Corner Brook, they moved a few blocks up the hill from the Corner Brook hall. Mr. Campbell and Mr. Buckle had a series of Gospel meetings in Corner Brook then and during those meetings she was saved. Also, Shirley Pelley, who parents were from Carbonear, started coming to meetings at Corner Brook and was saved. Melvin Hancock who had finished school in Corner Brook had a good job there and was a great help in the assembly. Marina Dennis professed to be saved at the meetings held in the hall and so the numbers were increasing there. She and Melvin were married later on.
George Campbell had been exercised about another boat for the Labrador and Quebec coast for quite some time. The way opened in 1965 for him to get the “Northern Light,” and so during the summer, George Campbell, Wallace Buckle, Vern Markle and some other brothers went along the Quebec shore to Old Fort for quite a while. Then they went farther up that coast and found interest in some places and opposition in others. The “Northern Light” was a great asset to the work on that coast.
The full summer crew on the “M.G.M.” in 1965 was Mr. Herb Harris, Roger Richardson and Gaius Goff. Bert Joyce was on the boat for about two weeks when we returned to the south coast and visited the same communities, we had for the two years before. Then
Doug Howard joined us at Burgeo where we had some fair interest that we wanted to follow up. We tied up at Muddy Hole and pitched the small 16x30 tent we had on the boat, on a bog that we covered with some rented lumber. A man was building a house gradually, and was glad to make a few dollars renting out some lumber for a couple of months. We were there for around six weeks having meetings in the tent. Mr. Howard stayed for a month and then Mr. Albert Barbour came for a week. Even though there was quite a lot of opposition, some people professed to be saved. That made quite a stir among the people, most of whom who worked at the fish plant, which is a great place for gossip. Some were for the Gospel and some were against us being there. To take some precautions against the tent being cut down when we had to be away from the tent for a while, we braced it inside so that it could stand, if necessary, without ropes and pegs tying it down outside.
While there, we put fixed up the basement under the house of one of the people who professed to be saved, so we could come back later and have meetings there. One day we heard rumors that some young men who worked at the fish plant were going to cut the tent down at night, so I stayed in the tent for a few nights. Sure enough, one night between 11:00 and 12:00 when it was good and dark, a group of probably around eight or ten came quietly with fish knives to cut the ropes. They were very startled when I asked them if I could help them with something. I couldn’t see them very well but they couldn’t see me at all because of the darkness in the tent. They cursed and swore at me a bit, but I could tell they were likely only teenagers or a little older who thought they were being brave. So, they cut the ropes with me watching them. They seemed to think they had done a wonderful thing – except the tent didn’t fall down.
“It won’t come down until God wants it to,” I told them, “And He doesn’t want it down yet. You guys are up against God.” I don’t know if they were superstitious, or if common sense set in, but for some reason they all took off running as quick as they could. That little incident went all over the town, and we had no trouble from then on.
Roger Richardson had to go back to school, and so Mr. Harris and I were there staying on the boat and having nightly meetings until well up in September. Linda was in St. John’s with her family, and we were soon expecting our first child, so because the interest gradually dropped off as the nights got cold it was time to take the boat back to Corner Brook. A skipper on a dragger that was in Curling near Corner Brook wanted to ride back with us, so we left early in the morning, but had a real rough ride for close to thirty hours. For some reason, when we went back to Burgeo several times to follow up the people who professed to be saved, the community was “straightly shut up.” Those who professed to be saved would connect with us when they came to St. John’s for some reason, but in Burgeo they were so afraid of what might happen that we couldn’t even get a place to stay overnight.
During the fall of 1965 we were able to get started building a Gospel Hall in Buchans. Some local people put in the foundation and put the floor on. Then, we were able to get brethren from St. John’s and Corner Brook to come and help us for a few days. Mr.
Barbour took the lead, and the building was up and finished outside including the roof in a week and a half. Later we got a good deal on some insulation and paneling in St. John’s, and had the building well finished by the end of the year.