Volume II

1961, 1962, 1963, 1964, 1965, 1967, 1968, 1987

Herbert W. Armstrong 1892-1986

Table of Contents

CHAPTER 51 ..... Planning a New-type College -- in U.S. and Europe
CHAPTER 52 ..... Our First Trip Abroad
CHAPTER 53 ..... Impressions of Switzerland and France
CHAPTER 54 ..... Mid-Atlantic Hurricane!
CHAPTER 55 ..... Strategy to Gain Possession -- Birth Pangs of the College
CHAPTER 56 ..... A Supreme Crisis -- Now Forced to Fold Up?
CHAPTER 57 ..... Surviving the First Year of Ambassador College
CHAPTER 58 ..... Ambassador Begins to Grow
CHAPTER 59 ..... First Fruits of Right Education
CHAPTER 60 ..... A Giant Leap to Europe
CHAPTER 61 ..... Our First Experience with Television
CHAPTER 62 ..... The Crossroads -- TV or Radio?

Chapter 51

Planning a New-Type College -- in U.S. and Europe

WHEN THE idea of founding a college to provide the future trained personnel for the expanding work was first conceived, I thought immediately of my brother-in-law, Walter E. Dillon. My wife's brother had been a life-long educator. Those who have read the Autobiography from the beginning will remember the episode of the oratorical contests at Simpson College, in Iowa, back in 1922-1924. I had worked with him in oratory, when he was a college freshman. He won the state contest. Walter and I had been closer together, from that time, than with our own brothers.

He held a Master's degree in education from the University of Oregon, and had done additional work toward a Ph.D., or an Ed.D. He had started teaching school upon graduating from college, later becoming a principal, and finally principal of the largest public school in Oregon outside the city of Portland. Thus he had had considerable executive and administrative school experience, in addition to being a natural-born and experienced teacher. He was thoroughly familiar with college and university life, methods and procedures. He had the technical experience for academic organization I lacked.

Choosing a President

Immediately when the conception of the college entered my mind, I had contacted my brother-in-law, asking if he would join me in the venture, as president of the college. I hardly think I could do that, was his first response. I don't know much about the Bible. Administering a religious college, I'm afraid, is altogether out of my line.

But this is not to be a Bible school, or religious college, I quickly explained. It is to be a straight liberal arts college, although it will offer a course -- as one of the majors -- in Bible and theology. You won't need to have theological experience. Do you think I would be able to teach that course?

I think you have more Bible knowledge and understanding than anybody on earth, he smiled. You know, I think we'd make a good team in getting this college started. With your business experience and ability, your religious knowledge and experience, and my academic experience -- well, I'll think about it.

He did think about it. Often we talked about it. Of course it was a weighty decision for him to make -- he had been established since his own college days in Oregon. Finally he decided he would come to Pasadena to help me get the new college started.

Before presenting the lease-option contract as an offer to Dr. B., Mr. Dillon had come to Pasadena to inspect the property and help me decide whether this was the right location. He had been immediately enthusiastic over it.

So now that we had the first segment of the future campus under contract, preparations began in earnest for organizing the thous and and one things required before it could swing open its doors as a going educational institution.

Special Magazine Edition

The very first thing to be done was to produce a special edition of The Plain Truth. The problem of recruiting students had been brought up by Mr. Dillon. That is a major problem of colleges and universities.

The Plain Truth and the broadcast will provide us with students, I had explained.

The first thing to do was to let people know about it. The Plain Truth was still an eight-page bimonthly. The next issue was to be the January-February, 1947, number. With it we went up to sixteen pages. I made this a very special, more attractive edition. For the first time, it had a front cover, instead of starting the lead article on the cover. It showed a picture of the entrance to the new college-to-be. The center spread -- pages 8 and 9 -- had a large four-column picture showing a portion of the new campus. The article announcing the new college began on that page, with a four-column headline; And now ... our own NEW COLLEGE!

The article explained that an amazing new setup has come into our hands that is unique, and, we believe, without parallel! Prospective students learning of the unusual program are thrilled!

Policies were announced. The article said: AMBASSADOR offers superior advantages in location, beauty of campus, nature of courses of study, high academic standards ... advantages in our special recreational and social program, cultural advantages, physical education, as well as in religious instruction.

AMBASSADOR is to be a general liberal arts institution -- not a Bible school, ministers' college, or theological seminary. It will fit students for all walks of life, offering a general and practical basic education ....There is no other college like AMBASSADOR. It is, in a sense, a revolutionary new-type college ... a forward-looking, progressive institution built on soundest principles, having highest goals and objectives, yet employing the best of proved methods of administration, and maintaining highest academic standards.

The reader will be interested in a little further explanation of the college, which appeared in that article.

But why should we establish and conduct a college in connection with this, God's work? the article continued. The reasons are concrete and vital.. .. The work has grown to a scope where called, consecrated, properly educated and specially trained assistants, ministers and evangelists to follow up this work in the field, have become an imperative need. The time has come when we must lay definite plans for carrying the gospel of the Kingdom of God into all nations, in many languages! Never, until now, could we foresee just how this was to be done. But the time has come; God has given the answer, and moved miraculously to open the way before us. The only answer was a COLLEGE of our own!

But why, then, was this not to be a Bible school or theological seminary?

The article, continuing, explained that: Yet, the active ministry is different from every other profession in one very important respect. No man ever should enter it of his own volition .... A true minister of Jesus Christ must be specially called of God. And how may we know whether one is really called? Experience has shown human nature to be such that most who think that they are called are mistaken, and those who really are called invariably try to run from the calling! Jesus gave us the only test.' By their fruits,' He said, 'ye shall KNOW.' But the fruits are worked out by experience, and that requires time. For that very reason, our college cannot be a ministerial college -- though it is being designed so that, should we be fortunate enough to find one out of twenty really and truly called to the ministry, that one will have been prepared and properly trained .... These considerations led naturally to the policy of making AMBASSADOR a general liberal arts institution for all young men and women, regardless of future vocation, occupation or profession.

The article continued to show what is wrong with this world's education today -- what has happened to it -- how it has drifted into materialism. It showed that the revelation of God -- in the Bible -- is the very FOUNDATION of all true knowledge -- the right approach to knowledge -- the concept through which to view and explain what is seen, measured and observed. But in this world's education, the false theory of evolution has been substituted as that basic concept and foundation. The article concluded with detailed, but brief, facts about the new college -- its location, courses offered, tuition.

Planning College in Europe

It may come as a surprise to many readers, but the conception of a second college abroad actually was generated in late December, 1946, or early January, 1947.

I had gone back to Pasadena at the end of December, 1946. On New Year's eve, I spent the night as Dr. B.'s guest, in the building still occupied by him and his sister, which was to become Ambassador College. In these days Dr. B. was very friendly. About 4:30 a.m., New Year's day, I was awakened by crowds trudging up the hill in front of the building, carrying blankets, camp-chairs, and stools.

The world-famous Tournament of Roses parade starts each year just one block south, on Orange Grove Boulevard. This first of our college buildings is only a half block east of Orange Grove boulevard.

This was my first opportunity to see the fabulous Rose Parade. I found the excitement of the throngs lining up along the parade course, beginning on South Orange Grove, and then making a right turn into Colorado Street -- the main business street of Pasadena -- was even more exciting than the parade -- if possible. In order to secure an advantageous position along the curb and parkway, vast throngs begin to assemble long before daylight.

It was during this visit that the idea of the second college in Europe came about. It was during a conversation with Dr. B. I was quite concerned about our future foreign language courses. I knew we had to have people trained in many languages, to get the gospel to all nations. I felt the average foreign language course, as taught in most colleges, inadequate. I wanted our young people to be taught to speak these languages as the natives of those countries do -- without a foreign accent. This was almost impossible, as taught in an American classroom. I felt students needed to actually live in these foreign countries, learning the languages there.

I knew, of course, that Switzerland is peculiar in that it has no one native language of its own. In northern Switzerland the official language is German. In central and western Switzerland, French is the official language; and in southeastern Switzerland it is Italian. Yet I knew most Swiss people speak all three, and a very large portion speak English beside.

In Switzerland, children are taught the official language of their district from birth. Then at age six most children start to learn a second language, and at age ten or twelve, a third -- and often one or two more later.

As we were discussing this situation, Dr. B. mentioned that he had a very close personal friend, a Madame Helene Bieber, of German birth, the widow of a very wealthy Frenchman, who owned the newest, finest, most modern villa in southeastern Switzerland at Lugano. Mme. Bieber, he said, had lost all her money during the war. It had been in Paris banks, and had been confiscated when the Germans occupied Paris. She had some money in New York banks, but wartime regulations, not yet released, apparently tied it up and prevented transmission of it to Switzerland. She was left with this ultramodern and super elegant five-story villa, facing on beautiful Lake Lugano, yet without funds even to employ a single servant.

She still has all her fine clothes, dozens of mink wraps and coats, and her villa, but no money, Dr. B. explained. Since you would not want to start your college over there for about three or four years, I believe you could effect a purchase -- if you can stretch to it -- on a basis similar to the one between you and me on this property here. You could begin making payments now, which would provide her with an income to live on. She could continue living in her villa for the next three or four years, with an income -- sort of eating her cake and having it, too, these first few years. Then, when you take possession and start your school, you will have a very sizable payment made on the purchase. By that time she will have her money from the New York banks, and will continue to receive regular sizable monthly payments from you for a few more years.

I think she might be willing to make such a deal -- and it would make it possible for you to acquire your second college without capital -- just monthly payments, beginning now.

I was intrigued. I did not realize that the good doctor actually had designs on marrying the rich widow -- surmising that she probably would also get her money from the Paris banks some day -- and that he probably had no more thought of allowing us to actually ever gain possession of the Lake Lugano villa than he did of allowing us to actually gain possession of this property in Pasadena!

I thought over the idea for some time. Finally, along about the tenth of February, 1947 -- or a day or two later -- I talked to Dr. B. on the telephone from Pasadena about the Switzerland idea further. He suggested we go over and see it. He offered to go along. We decided to go immediately. There was a sailing of the Cunard liner Queen Elizabeth from New York on February 19. Dr. B. said he would meet me aboard ship.

There was no time to obtain passport or steamer reservations before leaving the West Coast. Dr. B. already had his passport. Under regular routine it required thirty days to obtain one by mail from Oregon. But I knew the Press Officer of the State Department, and felt confident he would be able to get my passport issued immediately, at Washington.

Mrs. Armstrong and I had discussed the matter of her accompanying me. But there not only was the added expense, she had such fear of the water, she felt afraid to sail.

As a young girl her grandmother, born in England, had told her of a terrible shipwreck on her voyage to America. The grandmother was twelve years of age, when her widowed mother, with her eleven children, sailed to America. Some distance off the banks of Newfoundland, the sailing vessel was torn apart by a hurricane. Six of the children, lashed to a mast, were picked up by another vessel -- but the mother and five children were drowned. Hearing the vivid, stark details of this tragedy while a very young girl had put fear of the ocean into my wife's mind. So she had decided not to sail with me to Europe.

Accordingly, on February 12, after my telephone conversation with Dr. B., I procured round-trip tickets and Pullman reservations to New York for myself alone.

I had decided to make the trip to New York this time via Portland, Seattle, and on the crack train of the Great Northern Railway -- the Empire Builder -- to Chicago, thence on the B 0 line to Washington, D.C., then to New York. The cost and time was the same as going straight east from Portland on the Union Pacific.

Chapter 52

Our First Trip Abroad I

T WAS the morning of February 14, 1947. At that very moment, the Shasta Limited was approaching the station at Eugene, Oregon.

Mrs. Armstrong, Mrs. Annie Mann (a later hostess of girls' student residences at the college in Pasadena), and I were in my office. I had my hat and coat on, my suitcase packed and beside me and was throwing last-minute papers into my briefcase.

Suddenly Mrs. Armstrong exclaimed, I've decided I want to go with you!

Mrs. Armstrong's Shirttail Shoot

Well, this is a nice time to make up your mind, I said. You couldn't possibly get ready in time, now.

Oh yes I can! she replied. Grab your suitcase and typewriter, and let's hurry!

We dashed to the elevator. On the street below, one of our sons was waiting at the wheel of the car.

Drive over to our rooms! HURRY! I said. Mother's decided to go with me.

At the time, the reader will remember, we were living in two upstairs rooms in a rooming house about five or six blocks from the office. We had sold our home nearly two years before. The work had needed the money.

We were whisked, as only a seventeen-year-old boy can whisk an automobile around corners on two wheels, to our rooming house. We dashed upstairs. Mrs. Armstrong first threw her suitcase out of the closet, asking Mrs. Mann to throw her clothes into it while she pulled them down off hangers and literally threw them out of the closet. In less than two minutes she had dresses, suits, and other things out of dresser drawers, thrown and jammed into her suitcase.

We dashed back downstairs, and the car careened around corners, pulling up to the depot about one minute before the train pulled out. Eugene was a division point on the railroad, and the train stayed there ten minutes while they changed engines and crews. But the train had pulled into the station just about the moment we were coming down the elevator of the office building.

I told my sons to put our luggage on the train, while I dashed across the waiting room floor to the ticket office, and asked for a one-way ticket to Portland. There was not time, now, to procure tickets to New York and return for my wife.

Many, many times I had made what my wife termed shirttail shoots for trains. This is one time she herself was guilty.

But the shirttail shoot was not over, yet. I now had to pick up her round-trip ticket to New York, when we changed trains at Portland. We had twelve minutes between trains at Portland. But, as usual in those days, there was a long line standing queued before each ticket window. At the very last second, I finally obtained her tickets, caught the train as it was starting.

We arrived in Seattle in the afternoon, and that evening started the long ride from Seattle. It was a rough, jerky ride across the states of Washington, Idaho, Montana, North Dakota, Minnesota and Wisconsin, into Illinois at Chicago. Our Pullman berth must have been at one end of the car, immediately over the wheels, where the riding is much more rough. It was even rougher on the B 0 all-night ride into Washington, D.C.

How NOT to Plan Your Trip Abroad

Now ensued a series of exciting events which give the reader an example of how NOT to plan your trip abroad.

Arriving in Washington in the morning, we first checked in at the Statler Hotel. Before applying for passports, it was necessary to obtain passport photos of ourselves. We found a leading photograph studio in the hotel. The photographer tried to sell us a dozen larger photographs along with the passport photos.

I had not had my photograph taken for many years. I had never allowed my picture to be reproduced in The Plain Truth or any of our literature. I had, for years, even dodged and avoided all camera shots, except a few to be kept within the family. But just prior to this I had received a letter from a radio listener that convinced me I had been wrong.

This listener asked me what I had to hide. He asked me what I would think of a minister if I dropped in at his church, and the pastor hid behind the pulpit while he preached. Would I not think he had something to hide? Would I not become suspicious? He said character is written on one's face, and he always liked to see the faces of those he listened to. Of course, this was not possible on radio but, at least, he said, I ought to let listeners see my picture.

The thought came of using one of these photographs to reprint, but I was still hesitant about printing it in The Plain Truth. The photographer made a proposition. Why not place a bulk order for 500? He would make us a very special low price for such an order. He did it all the time, he said, for Congressmen and government officials, who thus sent these photographs to constituents.

So, it occurred to me it might be preferable to send real photographs to just those few who personally requested and wanted them, rather than publishing my picture for all readers to see. We placed an order, I believe, for some 400 of me and 100 of Mrs. Armstrong since most requests we had received were, naturally, for mine. Actually, I think we found later that we should have ordered them just the other way around, for there was a far bigger demand for my wife's picture than the supply. After our return from abroad, these were mailed out to those who had personally requested them.

Next I went to the State Department, but the press officer could not be seen until afternoon. Then I went to the ticket office of the Cunard Line, owners of the great ship the Queen Elizabeth. They had one cabin left, space for two, cabin class, on this particular sailing but that was the only space on the ship. We wanted to return mid-March. But there was no space whatever available on the west-bound voyage until August. I was told there might be some chance of a cancellation in the next two days, before sailing. The agent agreed to telephone their New York office, and I could contact them there, after arriving in New York. I purchased the ticket for the cabin on the east-bound passage.

In the afternoon I waited a long while in the office of the State Department Press Officer until he returned, about 4:30 p.m. He was glad to see me again, and immediately called the passport office across the street, asking them to process my passport at once. It was a few moments before closing time when we arrived at the passport office.

They told me our passports would be ready in the morning. I happened to show them my State Department credential card which I carried.

If you had just shown us that, I was told, we would have put through your passports earlier in the day, and you could have had them before now.

It was necessary to obtain vis as to cross France, and to enter Switzerland, as well as to enter England.

The next morning, February 18, after obtaining the passports, we visited both the Swiss and French embassies, and had their vis as stamped in the passports. However, we learned that the British vis a had to be obtained in New York.

We had another very rough ride that afternoon on the train to New York -- rougher than the others before

Arriving in New York, we went to the Ambassador Hotel, where I customarily stopped when in New York. I had wired ahead for a reservation the day before leaving Eugene. But even then my telegram had not arrived in time. The hotel was booked up solid.

Mr. Armstrong, the desk clerk said, we certainly try to take care of our regular guests, but we're simply filled up, and booked ahead for about two weeks. But we have arranged a room for you and Mrs. Armstrong in another very good hotel just a couple of blocks away. We were also unable to accommodate your United States Senator from Oregon. You'll see Senator Wayne Morse sitting over there across the lobby.

I was acquainted with Senator Morse. He had been dean of the law school of the University of Oregon, in Eugene, before his election to the Senate. Mrs. Armstrong and I walked across the lobby, and chatted with the Senator a few moments, then went on to the other hotel.

Immediately upon reaching our room, I telephoned the Cunard Line to see if a cancellation had turned up on the return voyage, sailing from Southampton March 15.

Mr. Armstrong, said the man at the Cunard office, I would say that your chances are absolutely hopeless. We are booked solid for all our ships -- and so are all other steamship lines -- until the middle of August. More than that, we have several hundred others on the waiting list -- all ahead of you. There's absolutely no chance of so many cancellations that we can fill all of those ahead of you before tomorrow's sailing.

Hopeless or not, I do not give up easily. I determined to call the Cunard office again next morning.

But let me say right here, all this experience is an example of how not to plan your trip abroad -- on a moment's notice, without passport, steamer or plane reservation, vis as, or other preparations. Start planning at least a month ahead.

Out-Determining John Bull

Next morning I telephoned the Cunard office again. The same voice answered at their reservation office. It was the same story.

I told you, Mr. Armstrong, there's no chance whatever, he said.

But I kept on talking. Soon we got into quite a conversation. I was telling him about a branch college in Europe. The idea was something new in education. He became interested, and so I kept on talking. After a while he said, Would you excuse me a moment? I have to take a call on the other phone. I'll be right back.

In just about fifty seconds his voice came back. What lucky star were you born under, Mr. Armstrong? he asked. Talk about miracles! Do you know what that call was? It was a man cancelling a cabin on the March 15 sailing from Southampton, and just because you're on the phone at this moment, I'm going to forget all those other applications on the waiting list ahead of you, and let you have it!

It was no lucky star, but it probably was a miracle! Mrs. Armstrong and I walked hurriedly over to the closest subway station on Lexington Avenue, and caught the first express train to downtown Wall Street, and hurried over to the Cunard office, where we procured our return passage on the Queen Elizabeth. Without it, we knew we would not be able to obtain British vis as, or even to board ship that night.

The actual sailing was set for about 5 a.m. next morning, but all passengers had to be aboard ship by 11 p.m. that same night, Wednesday, February 19.

Immediately we took a subway back uptown, and went to the British vis a office in Rockefeller Center on 5th Avenue. A line was queued before the vis a window. I waited in line. Finally reaching the window, I was told that no vis as could be issued in less than thirty days' time. I could file my application now, but the vis a could not be issued for thirty days.

But I must have this vis a immediately, today! I said, Look, here is our ticket on the Queen Elizabeth. We have to be aboard ship before 11 o'clock tonight.'

That makes no difference, sir, replied the clerk. We require thirty days to issue a vis a. You Americans are always trying to do things in a hurry. But you are in a British office now, and we don't rush things through in such a mad manner.

This may be a British office, but you're in AMERICA, now, Mister, I returned. And here, we do things the AMERICAN way. I have tickets to board the Queen Elizabeth tonight, and we are going to board it!

My dear sir, the clerk said politely, we British are quite determined, you know. Would you please step aside, now. You are holding up this queue.

Well now, I smiled, you may be Johnny Bull, and you may have bulldog determination, and stubbornness, but right now, I'm more determined. I will not move from here until you stamp the vis a in my passport. If you want to make room for those behind me, just stamp it, here.

But I simply have to clear the way for the others behind you. Would you continue talking, then, to one of the officers at one of the desks behind me, so I can get to the others?

That depends, I said. Is the man at the desk behind you your superior? Does he have more authority to issue a vis a than you?

Assured that he did have superior authority, I agreed that if this officer would come to the window and agree to let me inside the gate to see him, I would leave the window and continue with the man higher up.

He asked me why I had not sent in my application thirty days earlier. I explained that this was an emergency trip, planned suddenly only six days before, out on the West Coast. I explained how we had picked up passports on the run, as it were, and how miraculously space on the ship had opened up, and we had all the other required vis as. Now all we needed was the British vis a, so we could land at Southampton and pass through England on the way to Switzerland and return.

But he, too, was stubborn. He refused to issue the vis a short of thirty days. It seemed very unjust. If he was determined, I was more determined. I kept talking.

Mr. Armstrong, he said, finally, I simply must ask you to please excuse me. I have much work to do.

I will not leave until you stamp the vis a on our passports, I said with finality. Well then. he compromised, will you leave now and come back at 3:30 this afternoon?

The office closed at 4 p.m. Will you promise to see me then, if I do? I asked. He promised, and Mrs. Armstrong and I left. Promptly at 3:30 p.m. we returned. But this man avoided even looking our way. I stood at the gate, waiting. He did not keep his promise. He refused even to glance my way, and I was unable to open the gate and go to him.

Finally, at five minutes to four, he walked into another room. A moment later, another man, who sat at another desk, after cleaning up his desk to leave for the day, saw me waiting at the gate. He came to the gate, asking if there was something I wanted before the closing time.

Yes indeed, I replied. Mr. Blank asked me to return at this time for my vis a. We are boarding the Queen Elizabeth tonight. But Mr. Blank just went into another room, and didn't seem to know I was here.

Oh, I'll take care of it for him, then, he smiled. Will you step in? We walked over to his desk, and he stamped vis as in our passports. I got out quickly, before Mr. Blank returned.

The Floating City

With nerves almost shattered, we walked up the gangplank of the Queen Elizabeth about 9 o'clock that night, looking forward to five quiet days aboard ship.

But there was no quiet until after 11 p.m., when all visitors had to leave the ship. The letters Mrs. Armstrong and I wrote our children tell the story:

Wednesday Night, 11:39 p.m. February 19, 1947

Hello, kids!

We are on board -- mail leaves in ten minutes -- must be brief. Visitors all have just left, This is the largest passenger liner ever built -- tremendous! It's been like an exaggerated movie premier -- mobs throng all over -- fourteen decks -- blocks and blocks long -- everyone dressed up -- many in evening clothes -- everyone happy -- crowd surrounding Mischa Auer getting autographs (he's going to Europe on the Queen) -- now it's quieting down. This ship carries 3,500 passengers -- a city floating! One gets lost on it.

At last we're really going to England-Europe! We have a nice small private stateroom to ourselves.

Dick and Ted, prove you are grown up and worthy of being trusted and taking responsibility. That's the way to get more privileges. Ted dress warm. That's all the time I have.

Keep the home fires burning. They say there's no coal for fires in England or Europe. We'll probably freeze and starve -- but here we go!

Love, Dad Dearest Children all of you,

It's a quarter of midnight. We are aboard and lack a whole lot of having seen the ship. It's immense. We are going to bed.

Ted if only I knew you were taking care of yourself I would be much happier. You must not go out in a T shirt when you are accustomed to a sweater. Now take care of yourself.

I can't realize that I'm at last going to see England. I've always wanted to. This is a beautiful ship. We'll get pictures of it.

We wish we could see all of you. We send a world of love to our dear family.

Mother The Queen Elizabeth was 1,031 feet long -- almost a quarter mile. It had fourteen decks; its gross tonnage was 83,673 tons -- about double that of a large battle-ship; it carried 3,500 passengers.

I was much amused at a cockney elevator operator aboard ship. Of course, actually the ship did not have elevators -- the British call them lifts. In calling out the various decks, he would say: 'C' Deck next -- 'C' for Charlie. Then, 'R' Deck next -- 'R' for Restaurant. Then, 'B' next -- 'B' for Bertie. Then, 'I' Deck next -- 'I' for Albert.

We had the smoothest crossing ever experienced by members of the crew -- so some of them told us. We had prayed for it. Nevertheless, Mrs. Armstrong spent two days in bed with seasickness.

Aboard ship, at the reservations office, reservations were made for us at the Dorchester in London. At Southampton, the boat train to London was waiting in the Customs shed at the docks. I had obtained Pullman car reservations. This does not mean sleeping cars in England -- just first -- class coaches. The tickets had been obtained at the reservations window aboard ship. In the Customs shed, an officer examined our tickets, and told me we were in Car 'I'. So we walked almost the length of the train, past cars 'C', 'D', 'E', and on down to 'I'. Then we learned that we had encountered another cockney -- and we had to trudge back to car 'A'.

Arriving London

We docked at Southampton on Tuesday, February 25. Thursday morning, the twenty-seventh, a reporter from the Daily Graphic called on the telephone and asked for an interview. He arrived at 12:30, so I invited him to lunch in the Dorchester Grill Room. The idea of a college with one unit in America, and one in Europe, with a number of qualifying students transferring from the one on scholarship to the other was a new idea in education.

A wonderful idea, he exclaimed. I did not get to see his story in the paper about it, since we left early the next morning for the Continent.

Our first real look at London was on Wednesday morning, February 26. In some respects it was like a dream. To us, it was a different world. Some of our first impressions were recorded in letters to our children. Here are brief excerpts:

From Mrs. Armstrong: written Wednesday: It's so different here in London. Cabs, buses, everything -- never saw such a conglomeration of buildings, so many twists and turns in the streets. We went to Somerset House today. I thought I would look up Grandma's birth record, but couldn't find it. However, I don't know just the year or place of her birth. We have a nice room, but cold. Lights all go off and elevators (pardon me -- lifts) stop running from 9 until noon, and from 2 to 4 p.m. Scarcely any heat in the coldest winter England has had since 1840, around two years before Grandma was born. The sun shone brightly today -- first time since five weeks ago. We've seen Buckingham Palace, Parliament buildings, etc. -- of course, so far only a very small part of London, for we slept till almost noon. We had not arrived in London until after midnight.

A portion of my letter, written same day: Dear Kids all, at home: We have spent our first day in old London town. As mother told you, because of a strike. and due to coal shortage, we were kept on board the Queen Elizabeth until 7:30 last night. Our train didn't get started until 9 p.m. We almost froze. We're almost freezing now. The temperature in the hotel room and lobby is about fifty-five degrees. It's a different world. Old buildings -- many in ruins, all originally nearly white, and of stone, now almost black-coal smoke.

Attending Royal Reception

Just before noon on Thursday, I received a telephone call from the private secretary to His Excellency, the Ambassador and Plenipotentiary Extraordinary of Saudi Arabia, Sheik Hafiz Wabba. She said that His Excellency had heard that I was in London -- I had an hour's interview with him at the San Francisco Conference, in 1945 -- and wished to extend a very special personal invitation for Mrs. Armstrong and me to attend a royal reception to be held that evening in the ballroom of our hotel, the Dorchester.

I wondered how the sheik had come to know we were in London. Then I remembered that the day before I had seen some Arab officials in their flowing robes in the lobby of the hotel. I had gone to the reception desk to inquire whether Sheik Hafiz Wabba was in the hotel. He was not, but I was informed that he did frequently come to the hotel. I had mentioned that I knew him. I supposed the reception office had made our presence known to the sheik.

This royal reception was in honor of H.R.H., the Crown Prince, Emir Saud. He later became King Saud of Saudi Arabia. The Sheik's secretary said that His Excellency would like to have another chat with me, and this reception would be the only opportunity, since he was leaving with the Crown Prince the next morning.

We had planned to leave London for Zurich that afternoon. We had an appointment to meet Dr. B., and Madame Helene Bieber in Zurich that evening. When I expressed regret at being unable to attend, due to this appointment in Zurich, the secretary urged me to postpone the Zurich appointment and stay over for the reception. It would be, she said, the most glamorous and important social event held in England since the war, and again reminded me it was the only opportunity for another interview with the sheik.

I said that I would telephone Dr. B. in Zurich, and if I could postpone our appointment, I would call her back. The appointment was postponed, and I notified the ambassador's secretary. A little later a specially engraved invitation arrived at our apartment by private messenger.

Perhaps excerpts from a letter written to the family at home immediately after returning from the reception will best describe the experience. This is what I wrote:

Just this second we returned from the royal reception held by Sheil Hafiz Wabba and H.R.H. Emir Saud, the Crown Prince of Arabia. It was very colorful. About 200 invited guests -- earls, dukes with their monocles and flashing decorations, admirals, commodores, dozens of ambassadors -- we saw those from Turkey, Chile, Albania, etc. We entered in couples. A brightly uniformed page announced each couple in a very loud voice, as 'Lord and Lady so and so, ''Admiral and Mrs. so and so, ''The Turkish Ambassador,' and so on. We were announced as 'Mr. and Mrs. Herbert W. Armstrong.'

The Arabs, in their flowing robes, stood in the receiving line. Mother advanced first, then I -- since this was the customary way. First we were greeted by His Excellency Sheik Hafiz Wabba. In turn he introduced us to the tall and very handsome crown prince, whom they addressed as 'Your Royal Highness.' Then the remaining five or six top Arab officials. Then the crowd mingled around, munching on tiny sandwiches, French pastries, while being served tea. The dress was not formal. The people over here have been through a war, in a way we Americans have no conception, and they simply don't have many fine clothes over here right now. There were very few in evening clothes. The clothes of several were becoming a bit threadbare. Yet the titled ones wore their glittering decorations. Mother was the nicest-looking woman there.

We had a very nice, brief, private talk with the sheik, and got a statement for my article on the Palestine situation for the next Plain Truth.

We were seated at a table, when the royal party approached. Immediately we arose, and took seats at another table. The Crown Prince sat at the table we had vacated, but before doing so smiled and motioned for us to be seated beside him at the table. He does not speak a word of English. I felt we should not accept his invitation, since it was apparent that table was intended for the royal party. He was merely trying to be cordial. Twice he smilingly motioned a welcome to us, but I smilingly and apologetically shook my head and refrained.

That Crown Prince later became the king, when his father, old King Ibn Saud, died. That experience was the first time we had ever come into personal contact with royalty.

While I was writing the above, Mrs. Armstrong was writing the following about the reception:

We just returned to our room from the royal reception. I felt just like Little Lord Fauntleroy. It was all so interesting. We were announced in a thundering voice to all. Presented to Sheik Hafiz Wabba (His Excellency), who in turn presented us to the Crown Prince (His Royal Highness), and on down the receiving line. We were among the lords and ladies, dukes and earls, and admirals and ambassadors of many countries. They are all just folks. We were so interested in it all -- tables everywhere -- you could sit or not. In the center of the ballroom were large banquet tables with different kinds of food and drinks. One just walked up anywhere and helped himself. There was beautiful music -- violins and piano. The Palestinian announcer for the BBC branch there introduced himself to me and then to two ladies, and I later introduced him to Dad.

It's March 1 now; (this part evidently written later) I'm all packed. We leave soon for France. It's bitter cold, no heat at all in the rooms. I fill the bathtub with hot water and get in until heated through, and then jump into bed. Last night the maid brought me a stone hot water bottle that kept me warm. Poor Britain is suffering even worse, it seems, than during the war. Everything but water is rationed.

And Now -- the Continent

The evening of the first of March 1 was writing a letter with my portable typewriter on my lap, in my upper berth in a compartment on the sleeping car of a French train from Calais, bound for Zurich. Mrs. Armstrong occupied the lower berth. This is part of what I wrote:

Here we are in France. Just boarded this train a half hour ago. It's now dark. At 4:30 this afternoon we were on a boat crossing the English Channel, and the sun not far from the horizon sinking in the west. I looked at my larger watch, which is still set Eugene time, and it was 8:30 a.m. I did a little quick calculating and discovered that at that hour, you were looking at the same sun, same distance from the horizon, rising in the east, while we were looking at it setting in the west. We are one-third way around the earth from you. In other words, you people are walking almost upside down. I know you are, because one of us is, and it isn't us over here.

Calais is quite a little town. We've seen many bombed and shattered buildings. OUR bombs probably did that. The Nazis had this town. Seems strange, like a dream, to think we are actually over here where the war was fought, in territory that was occupied by the Germans. I don't see any Germans here now. The people here are French. And I mean FRENCH! At the dock and depot, which are joined together, the officers or attendants, or whatever they were, had typical French caps, like French army officers, and flowing capes. The porters, seeking opportunity to carry luggage for the tips, yelled out, 'Porteur! Porteur! Porteur! with accent on the last syllable -- or equally on both. The train porters can't speak a word of English. They say 'Oui!' (pronounced we').

It's now 8:45 p.m. Just at that last paragraph we were called to dinner. A Frenchman walks through the cars ringing a cute little bell. We weren't sure it was a call to dinner, or whether there was even a dining car on the train. We were in the rear car, so we started forward. After going through all the sleepers, and about four day coaches (European type, six to a compartment), we came to what looked like the baggage car, decided there was no diner and turned back. Two cars back a porter stopped us. He couldn't understand us; we couldn't understand him. We tried by motions to make him understand we were looking for the dining car -- if any. Mother suddenly remembered that the word 'cafe' is a French word, but probably we didn't pronounce it the French way -- at least he didn't understand. I pointed to my mouth, then my stomach, and finally a light dawned on his face, and a smile. He pointed back up front. We opened the baggage car door and found it was a diner. We sat by two Englishmen, one of whom travels over this railroad every two weeks or so, and speaks French. He steered us through the meal. First a waiter came by and served something supposed to be soup. (Right here Mother says we are entering Amiens -- this town figured prominently in the war -- remember?) After the soup, another waiter came along with a great big dish of spaghetti, with meat balls stuffed in deviled half-eggs. There is no water -- unfit to drink. Everyone drinks red wine. The Englishman told us we could have fried chicken, not too bad, at extra cost, but by that time we had eaten enough spaghetti. Then a course of potatoes, then 'ice cream,' made with, apparently, water and skim milk. I paid in English money, about 14 shillings and some odd pence.

Wish you could see this funny French sleeping car. These French cars are larger than the British -- about the size of an American car. We had to climb up a steep ladder to get on the train. It's rather crude compared to our Pullmans still, not too bad. Altogether different, though. Seems funny to us. We have a private compartment. There are no sections -- all private rooms. It has private wash basin, but no toilet. All use the same public toilet -- both men and women.

Mother has seen some of those French farms we've heard of -- house and barn for livestock all in one building. The ground is covered with snow -- has been, all over, since we landed at Southampton. We are to arrive at Basel about 8:10 a.m. There are no railroad folders, timetables, or maps. Those are luxuries only Americans enjoy.

I have quoted the letter at some length. Most books or articles about foreign travel do not mention many of these little things that an American notices on his first trip abroad. I felt those reading this Autobiography might find it interesting.

The Vision of the Future

A portion of a letter written on the train next morning may be interesting -- and prophetic:

The English tell us that we Americans are just now starting to go through the stage of development they did 200 years ago -- that we are that far behind the times. They really think they are ahead of us! They are smugly ahead of what they suppose us to be -- yet they know nothing of America, actually. I was particularly impressed by their pride. They feel they are superior, morally, to all people of the earth. Yet it is quite apparent that their morals have hit a toboggan slide since the war! They are surely a long way from realizing their sins, nationally and individually, and of repenting of them -- and they don't even dream, and would never believe, that they are to be punished and conquered, and then rescued from slavery by Christ at His Second Coming -- so as to bring them to salvation. In some manner, I know now that I must warn them, and will, but it will be difficult -- no use of radio there, as it's government owned and operated. YET, THEY MUST BE WARNED.

I think it can be done by purchase of advertising space in newspapers and magazines, getting people to write for The Plain Truth. I've been making plans, while in London, for our coming campaign to reach England. The newspaper reporter said the advertising idea could be used. We will have to either send Plain Truths across, or have them printed in England, which is what we undoubtedly will do -- a European edition. The college over here will probably become a European headquarters for carrying on our work all over Europe. WE MUST REACH EUROPE AND ENGLAND, as well as America! Our work is just STARTING! I see, more and more, why we have been simply led into taking this trip, and why the way opened so miraculously and suddenly before us at every turn. Before the coming atomic war, we have much work to do.

As I wrote then, the prophecy has been fulfilled. The college was established some years later than I then expected -- it was established in Bricket Wood, near London, instead of in Switzerland.

General Eisenhower and Channel Invasion

On Thursday, February 27, I had written this to our children at home: ' ... Today I tried to purchase a pair of gloves. It is cold, around freezing, and will be colder in mountainous Switzerland. I walked almost the length of Bond Street, stopping in all men's clothing shops on the right side of the street proceeding north, and on the west side of the street returning south back to Piccadilly. Finally, at the last store, I found a pair of dark tan kid gloves. I engaged the shopkeeper in conversation. Why were gloves so scarce, in so cold a winter?

He explained that a large percent of everything manufactured in Britain is exported. I asked why. 'Because,' the merchant replied, 'England would starve otherwise. We must import nearly all our food, and we can't get a credit exchange to enable us to buy food in foreign countries unless we export to those countries an equal value in manufactured products.' You can buy 'made in England' gloves, luggage, leather goods, china, woolens, etc., easier in the United States than here.

After finally finding a shop that had a pair, I didn't get my gloves after all. After he had removed the price tag, he couldn't let me have them because I had no ration book.

This morning we finally spotted some lemons in a fruit and vegetable shop. My liver really needed some citrus juice, after the kind of food we had been getting. Quite a crowd was queued up before the stand. After standing in line ten or fifteen minutes, I asked for a dozen lemons. The woman asked for my ration book. No ration coupons, no lemons! -- and only l/2 pound to a customer, then! I'm starving for fruits, juices, and leafy vegetables. You don't realize what we have to be thankful for, on America's Pacific Coast. We have the best of everything in the world -- and yet we grumble? What we are seeing here is next best. Every other country (except Switzerland) is worse right now.

As we were leaving the lobby of the hotel this evening, the hall porter, who looks more like an impressive, important business executive, told us this hotel (The Dorchester) was Gen. Eisenhower's headquarters prior to the Channel Invasion. Marshall, Patton, Bradley, and all our top generals stayed here. They were all well liked. This porter saw a lot of them, talked to them, and arranged many things for them. He said they were quiet, but simply oozed with personality, and he rated Eisenhower as the ablest, strongest personality of all, even over Marshall, and thinks he is one of the strongest men in the world ....

Do you know, the Channel Invasion that defeated Germany might have been planned in this very hotel! It could have been in this very room where I'm writing. When the invasion zero hour came, the porter said Eisenhower and all other top military men came down one morning smiling and happy, and said they were off for a two or three day rest in the country. They were good actors -- appeared happy. They said they could throw off all restraint and heavy responsibility a few days, and get in some needed rest and a vacation in the country. They were not a bit tensed up. No one suspected a thing. They didn't check out of the hotel. They left their things in their rooms. If any Nazi spies were in the hotel, they would have been thrown completely off. Then next morning -- BANG! The great invasion smash was on -- and doom for Hitler! No one in this hotel suspected anything was up.

Chapter 53

Impressions of Switzerland and France

WHAT a difference between France and Switzerland! On the French train, no breakfast was served that Sunday morning, March 2, 1947. The reason: the train was running two or three hours late. Our sleeping car had been scheduled to be transferred to a Swiss train at Basel in time for breakfast.

We Arrive in Switzerland

Our French train finally dragged itself up to the depot at Basel, Switzerland. The minute we crossed from France into Switzerland, everything suddenly seemed refreshingly different? France was then in a state of lethargy and discouragement. People in Switzerland appeared more alert, better dressed, cleaner. The French, so soon after the war, seemed whipped, beaten, run down.

Our car was hooked onto the Swiss train at Basel. There was a light, airy, clean Swiss dining car on the train. After Immigration and Customs officials went through the train, we finally made up for the lost breakfast with the best meal since we had left the U.S.

Dr. B. was stopping at the Hotel Storchen in Zurich and had made reservations at this hotel for us. Arriving in Switzerland's largest city, we took a taxi to this hotel. I did not have any Swiss money, so I asked the taxi driver to come into the lobby with me, where I transferred $20 into Swiss francs, out of which I paid the taxi fare. Dr. B. happened to be out somewhere with Madame Helene Bieber, who was staying at another hotel. Mme. Bieber, the reader will remember, was the owner of the newest and finest villa in southeastern Switzerland, Heleneum, on Lake Lugano, in Lugano-Castagnola.

Switzerland, by the way, was at that time so much more prosperous than France because Switzerland was not involved in the war. Switzerland had profited from both sides. The Marshall Plan and United States' billions of gift dollars had not yet put France in her present state of Common Market prosperity.

An hour or so after our arrival at the hotel in Zurich, we located Dr. B. and Mme. Bieber. We joined them at tea in one of our hotel lounge rooms and were presented to the owner of Heleneum. She was accompanied by her big full-blooded chow dog Mipom.

Next afternoon we were riding through the Gotthard tunnel through the Gotthard Pass. It and the Brenner Pass are the only two passes for travel between Germany and Italy. During the war, the Swiss managed to remain neutral and hold the Germans off from invading them. They did this by threatening to blow up the Gotthard tunnel, and destroy these two passes if the Germans attacked. That is how this little nation of Switzerland held powerful Nazi Germany at bay.

We found the lofty Alps all that had been claimed for them -- breathtaking -- MAGNIFICENT!

At Zurich, we noticed that the style of architecture was almost wholly German. But the minute we emerged from the tunnel, on the Italian side, the architectural design was all Italian.

The same would, of course, be true of the French-speaking area.

Yet there is really no language barrier between these three sections of Switzerland. Customarily, babies and children are taught the official language of their section until age six. Then Swiss children are taught a second language beginning at six years of age, and a third language at about age ten or twelve. Most better educated Swiss speak four or more languages.

I Am Not the Boss

At Lugano we inspected what was the object of our whole trip -- the site of a possible future Ambassador College in Europe.

Often I have to stop and realize how many proofs we have been given that we have been called to the work of GOD -- that neither I nor any man plans and guides it.

It is not our work, but GOD's and the living Jesus Christ is HEAD of His Church and the real Director of this work. He has not allowed it to be of my planning.

Christ, through the Holy Spirit, said to the prophets and teachers of the Church at Antioch, during fasting and prayer, Separate me Barnabas and Saul for the work whereunto I have called them. Saul's name was then changed to Paul. He and Barnabas were ordained apostles. They were called to GOD'S WORK. They did not choose it as a profession -- Christ first struck down Saul with blindness, converted and called him. Christ ordered his ordination for THIS WORK.

But even though the Apostle Paul was put in charge of God's work to the Gentiles, Paul was not allowed to plan it or make the real decisions.

In A.D. 50, Paul and Silas, After they were come to Mysia [western part of Asia Minor -- Turkey today], they assayed to go into Bithynia, but the Spirit [of Jesus] suffered them not (Acts 16:7).

Paul planned to go EAST, along the north shores of what is Turkey today. But Jesus Christ, HEAD of His Church and God's work, planned otherwise! By a vision at night, the resurrected living CHRIST showed Paul that they were to go the very OPPOSITE direction, carrying the gospel for the first time to the continent of EUROPE!

This was a MOST IMPORTANT decision. In obedience to orders from Christ, by this vision, Paul and Silas went immediately into Macedonia IN EUROPE, holding their first meeting at Philippi (Acts 16:7-13).

In like manner, on this trip to Lugano, I tried to plan to start operation of GOD'S WORK for these last years either immediately, or within three years IN EUROPE and to establish a branch Ambassador College in Lugano. That was MY planning and intention -- just as Paul's was to travel east into Bithynia.

Here is what I wrote to those at home, from Lugano, on March 3, 1947: I have decided DEFINITELY and FINALLY on the Swiss branch of Ambassador. The idea is right. But the PLACE is still open for investigation.

But I was to learn, later, that CHRIST had decided DEFINITELY and FINALLY otherwise! He had decided that the great DOOR of radio would open for me to preach His Gospel to EUROPE on the first Monday in 1953. And His COLLEGE for Europe was to open later -- SEVEN years later; in 1960 -- and in ENGLAND just outside London, not in Switzerland!

In ways that often seem astounding, CHRIST shows repeatedly that it is HE who is guiding and directing this great worldwide work of God!

Inspecting Potential College Site

I was much impressed with Lugano. On Tuesday evening I wrote:

Dear Family at Home: Today we have seen Lugano! Partly. And what a place it is! It's all so different -- so strange. It's ITALY with Swiss prosperity. A BEAUTIFUL, prosperous Italy. It's the most intriguing place we ever saw. It's certainly OLD-WORLD. It's the perfect place for the European unit of Ambassador College.

So I thought. But CHRIST thought otherwise! Mme. Bieber remained in Zurich until Tuesday. We did not have an opportunity to inspect Heleneum until Thursday. That evening I wrote to my brother-in-law, Walter E. Dillon, who was to be the first president of Ambassador College at Pasadena. This, in part, is what I reported to him:

We have been here since Monday night. Tuesday we took a boat trip down the lake, east, to the very end of Lake Lugano. About two miles east of here is the Italian border. Most of our boat trip was in Italy. We were within five miles of the place where they shot Mussolini. He was caught trying to get across the frontier into Switzerland, and they say he was heading for Lugano. I talked to a man who was then a Swiss Army captain, in charge of the frontier at that point. He knew Mussolini, talked to him. Mussolini was caught at Dongo.

The trip on the lake was a life-time experience. The majestic Swiss Alps rise on either side. The Alps really surpass our Cascades, or the Rockies -- even the Canadian Rockies. Just now they are snow-covered -- look as if they are miles high, in fantastic shapes. Lugano is the Swiss Riviera. It's different from our mountain or lake scenery. The very atmosphere is different.

What I started to write tonight is this: This afternoon, for the first time, we saw what we have come 9,000 miles to see -- 'Helelleum' -- the possible future seat in Europe of AMBASSADOR COLLEGE ....We were invited to 4 o'clock tea. On arrival, we stepped into the most beautiful and elegant interior we had ever seen. It far surpasses what we expected! It is the ideal home for Ambassador College in Europe. It is adequately designed to house forty or fifty students, besides supplying six classrooms, library, lounge, and dining hall. Its atmosphere would automatically breed culture, poise and refinement into students. Mme. Bieber appears to want us to have it. She thought the kind of deal we have discussed very splendid. She knows little about business, and probably will be guided by her lawyer. But it's the only way she can eat her cake and have it too -- that is, sell it, live off the income from the sale, and still live IN it for the next three or four years. And it's the only way we can purchase such a property without the capital for a large down payment. We make it during these three years while she would retain possession. I have made every check. I am now convinced we must have our European branch. Switzerland appears the only place for it.

Better Things Opened Later

So, you see, I was planning for it -- but Jesus Christ was planning otherwise -- and HE, not I, guides and directs GOD'S WORK. In HIS due time, He opened the DOOR (see II Cor. 2:12-13) for His END-TIME work of our day to start in Europe.

And, the living CHRIST did open miraculously and unexpectedly what we ourselves had never planned -- His Ambassador College overseas. He opened in England a place we never dreamed of finding -- not merely one building with mere residential-size grounds, but several buildings, with magnificent gardens and landscaping, spacious grounds, and a total of approximately 200 acres! And instead of a maximum of forty or fifty students, we had the capacity for many more.

Surely GOD's WAYS ARE BEST! How happy and GRATEFUL I am that Christ Jesus does not leave the real master planning of His great work to me. My ideas would not have been best -- but what HE plans is always just right. It is a wonderful thing to KNOW we have the SECURITY -- Of GOD'S GUIDANCE. It's a wonderful feeling of absolute trust, faith and confidence, with no worries!

Leaving Switzerland

We left Lugano with Heleneum still uncertain, but hoping to close the deal by mail later.

We traveled by train from Lugano to Geneva on the following Sunday, then back to Bern where we caught the night sleeper for Paris. In purchasing our tickets, I noticed we had only twenty minutes to make a connection at Bern. Based on American experience, I was a little uneasy.

Suppose our train is late arriving in Bern tonight, I suggested. Is twenty minutes sufficient time for that connection?

SIR! came the indignant response from the ticket agent. A Swiss train is never late! You can set your watch by it!

There is another saying Swiss people like to quote It's impossible to get a bad meal in Switzerland. We have since eaten in many restaurants and hotels in Switzerland, and have never been served an unsatisfactory meal. There is a third saying in Switzerland: We raise our children from the bottom up. And they are well-behaved!

En route from Lugano, our electric-driven train retraced our route through the Gotthard tunnel, but turned westward to Bern some distance north of the tunnel. On the train I opened my portable typewriter and here is part of what I wrote to our children at home:

Here we are again in the world-famous Gotthard tunnel -- the pass high in the Alps between Italy and the north of Europe. It's a Sunday morning, 8:07 a.m. For two hours we have been thrilling to the most marvelous scenery! Yet it's only 11:07 Saturday night in Oregon. Seems funny. It's been daylight two hours, here. Yet you may not have gone to bed yet last night!

Now we are headed back toward home, speeding northward through these awesome, spectacular Alps. An hour and a half ago I got some good color movies (I hope) of the pinkish rising sun shining on the snowcapped peaks of the Alps, still darkish gray of dawn below -- only the sun-drenched peaks illuminated with a yellowish pink.

Now we have emerged from the tunnel, on the German side. There is much more snow. All limbs of trees covered with snow. It's fantastically beautiful. Mother exclaims that this is the most beautiful scenery in the world. She will hardly let me write. 'O LOOK, Herbert!' she keeps exclaiming. 'You can write some other time. But LOOK, now, LOOK! Those trees on that mountainside are green, underneath, but they're WHITE, now! Isn't it EXCITING? O, come over here, quick! Oh, you're so provoking -- it's too late, now we've passed it! etc. How CAN A MAN WRITE? Ha! Ha! In the middle of that sentence I got some marvelous camera shots. (I hope). However, no matter how good they come out the pictures won't show it to you. You have to be here and EXPERIENCE it!

At Bern we changed trains, and continued south from there to Geneva, arriving about noon or somewhat before. I remember we were especially impressed with the baby carriages, or prams. Thous ands of people out walking on a beautiful Sunday afternoon, many pushing these elegant baby carriages.

Also we were impressed with young people on dates. It seems the American young people have LOST the art of dating. The automobile has changed everything. But in Switzerland, instead of the degenerating custom of driving out on a lonely and secluded road to neck and arouse passions while minds were dulled, or letting their minds drift in a ready-made daydream in a darkened motion picture theater, hundreds of couples were seen sauntering afoot along the two sides of the lake, which in downtown Geneva narrows like a river -- with many bridges across at each block.

We saw the League of Nations buildings. We found Geneva a clean, beautiful city. It, too, offered many advantages as a potential seat for a European branch of Ambassador College.

It was late afternoon or evening when we took a train and returned to Bern. I had telephoned long distance to a man in the educational division at the U.S. Embassy in Bern. He met us at the railway station. I spent the twenty minutes layover discussing educational advantages of a branch college in Switzerland. (Yes, our Swiss train was precisely ON TIME!)

First Visit to Paris

Our sleeping car delivered us to Paris in the early morning. Everybody has heard of the beauty of Paris. We were introduced to it, so it seemed to us, by way of the back door -- entering through a dilapidated blighted area. It was a drizzly, dreary morning. The railroad station though which we entered was in an unattractive wholesale district.

I checked our luggage, expecting to leave it there until boarding the noon train to London. I walked up to the ticket window to purchase 12 o'clock tickets to London, which would leave us time to see Paris until noon.

The mademoiselle ticket agent could not understand a word I said. After some five minutes of trying to speak by gestures, she sent for a man from the other side of the railway station. He could speak English.

These foreigners can't even speak plain English, I exclaimed to my wife. She reminded me that we were the foreigners! That realization gave a funny feeling.

The English-speaking man explained that the train to London departed from a different station. Paris has several railroad stations. So we were obliged to return straightway to the checkroom and reclaim our bags. Our obliging French friend said he would help us into a taxicab. He asked Mrs. Armstrong to wait inside and watch our luggage. I found that getting a cab on a rainy morning in Paris in 1947 was not like a big-city American depot, where one finds dozens of cabs lined up and waiting, as rapidly as incoming passengers can be piled into them. In fact, I learned that finding a taxi in Paris on a rainy morning is a superb accomplishment -- if one can do it!

Taxi Hunting in Paris

Fifteen long minutes dragged by at the taxi entrance, and not a cab in sight, except those with passengers, and one or two whose drivers shrugged their shoulders, saying Nothing doing! in French motions. My French friend asked me to wait there and ran bare-headed out into the street. In five minutes he returned, shaking his head. Another fifteen minutes. Then again he left, saying he'd go over on the boulevard, a block away, in search of a taxi. He explained that the Nazis didn't leave them many cabs in good repair, and besides, depleted the petrol supply. So taxicabs were a scarce commodity at that time. As time slipped by, Mrs. Armstrong and I were becoming more and more hungry. There had been no diner on our train. Finally, at 9 a.m., our friend came back triumphantly in a taxi. We wanted the cab until noon, but this driver was soon due in at his garage. He would have time only to drive us to the George V hotel for breakfast.

Breakfast took a whole hour. Service came with great flourish, much style, and very leisurely. We ordered orange juice, toast and coffee. The waiter brought four oranges to his service table, and started laboriously squeezing them on a little hand lemon-squeezer. Then he served the two small glasses to a couple of ladies at an adjoining table. Then he walked to the kitchen and returned in no time at all with our orange juice which was NOT orange juice but some sort of artificial orange crush, with artificial flavor and sugar and water. The toast was cold, dry, packaged melba toast. The coffee was black, strong and bitter -- no milk or cream. The cost was 400 francs -- $4.00.

Foreigners Seeing Paris

After another ten minutes delay the English-speaking doorman got us a taxi. The driver could not speak a word of our foreign language. I asked the hotel doorman to instruct him that we wanted to see the Eiffel Tower, the Champs Elysées, stop at a shop to purchase an umbrella for Mrs. Armstrong, who had left hers at Lugano, and then to our railway station.

At the Eiffel Tower, even in cloudy rain, I got one good picture with my Plaubel-Makina German camera -- only picture I was able to take in Paris. We saw many ornate and beautiful buildings, though they were dark and dirty, and gloomy in the rain -- much gorgeous statuary. The driver drove around and around in the shopping district but all stores were closed. It was a Catholic holiday. He did find one small shop open. But their ladies' umbrellas were a new style with long handles, and Mrs. Armstrong was afraid one would look freakish in America, so she didn't buy one. (When we returned to New York, we found all stores selling the same style there!).By now we had to go straight to our railroad station. I tried to instruct the driver, but he couldn't understand. I tried to tell him our train left at noon, by pointing to 12 o'clock on my watch. He immediately smiled knowingly, nodding his head that he understood -- and drove us in fifteen or twenty minutes to a jewelry store -- which, of course, was closed! I tried to make him understand I'd like to buy some film for my camera -- and he drove us to a photographer's studio. Somehow, in desperation, I finally got through to him that we wanted to go immediately to the railway station, where he deposited us at 11:30 a.m.

We boarded the famous crack Golden Arrow for London.

Chapter 54

Mid-Atlantic Hurricane!

STREAKING northward on the crack Paris-London Golden Arrow, we saw much of the desolate ruins left by the war that had ended only a year and a half before.

In America, we had heard and read about the war daily. We had seen pictures and newsreels. But now my wife and I were there, where it happened. Here was the actual devastation of war all around us. Now it suddenly became real!

The Marshall Plan and American dollars had not yet made progress toward restoration. Europe was laid waste, many of its cities in ruins. Almost no one believed, then, that Europe could ever rise again. Yet I had been persistently proclaiming for two years, over the air and in The Plain Truth, that Germany would once again come to economic and military power, heading a ten-nation resurrection of the Roman Empire.

Desolate, Hopeless Europe

Have we forgotten what bleeding, war-torn, disheartened Europe was like, immediately after World War II? That is, all but prosperous Switzerland. Switzerland kept out of the war, by means described previously. Switzerland did business with both sides and prospered during the war years.

We need to be reminded of the condition of prostrate Europe before United States dollars went to the rescue. These dollars did a sensational pump-priming job. German and Dutch industry did a phenomenal job of rebuilding. Then the Common Market produced the almost unbelievable prosperity that is Western Europe's today.

I was seriously impressed with this wretched post-war condition in France and Italy. From Lugano I had written our family at home:

This afternoon we were in Italy. Took a boat trip down the lake, east, to the end of Lake Lugano. Half way we crossed the Swiss-Italian frontier. Immediately we noticed a difference. The style of architecture was much the same all Italian but as soon as we were on the Italian side, everything was run-down, dilapidated, gone to rot and ruin.

There are seven or eight little towns along the lake shore, and the boat is like an interurban railway by which people from all those towns come to Lugano to shop. We docked at every town. The Italians were so very shabbily dressed. Some of the women had no shoes -- they wore a sort of flat wooden sandal, strapped to their feet with string or ribbon. Most of the Italians looked defeated, hopeless.

Once they were a proud, prosperous, world-ruling people. But ancient Rome became prosperous, as the United States is today. Then they went in for soft, luxurious living, idleness and ease, entertainment, lax morals.

Rome fell. The United States is starting that same toboggan slide to DOOM, today.

This afternoon, along the five or six Italian towns where we docked, we saw the result of going the way of ancient Rome. We saw their 20th Century descendants, poor people one looks on with pity. Yet the Italians are emotional, and Mussolini took advantage of them, played on their emotions, whipped them up to a fanatical frenzy for Fascism. Then Hitler took them over. Then the Allies invaded the peninsula. And now they are a dejected, discouraged, helpless, hopeless people! Even worse than the French we saw.

And Mrs. Armstrong wrote this about our boat trip: Italy is in terrible shape. We were up and down the shores of Lake Lugano, in Italy. It was a cold day in winter, but women, old and young, were on the lake shore on their knees leaning over into the water, washing clothes in the cold lake water on flat boards not washboards -- no soap, just pounding and rubbing, some using a brush on their sheets, men's pants, sweaters and everything -- big baskets of clothes, grey and dingy looking. They hung them along the lake front or on buildings, balconies -- anywhere.''

Back in London

Arriving back in London, I found letters and reports from the office in Eugene, Oregon, awaiting me. The news from the office was not good. Receipt of money was way down. The office was in a tight financial squeeze.

I wrote the office staff: Since receiving your letters and reports today, I have had to decide we will not, at this time, obligate the work to payments on 'Heleneum,' the villa we went to Lugano to see. Madame Bieber is anxious to sell it to us on the terms we had in mind when we came over. I received a letter from her here this morning, enclosing a complete list (in German language) of the rooms on every floor, and assuring me she would send a blueprint of floor plans if I still wanted them, which I do .... It is offered to us at a fraction of its cost (it is a replica of the 'Petite Trianon' at Versailles) and on terms we could handle, once out of this financial slump, with about 8 percent increase over present income. There is no down payment whatever required. Just monthly payments three or four years, before we take possession -- while she still lives there ....God will direct us and show us His will, and His selection, in due time.

I have been shown a fine large building (large for us, that is) -- right on this fabulous Park Lane boulevard, just a half block from our hotel -- The Dorchester here in London. I am advised that the price is very low, right now. It was used as the officers' club by United States Army officers during the war. I was advised that we very likely could purchase, with use permit for a college, and very likely get local support for such a college here that would pay half the costs, because Britain is now very anxious to encourage everything she can in good relationships with the United States. They feel here that an American college in London, sending American students here to study, would bring here some of our very best young men who will become leaders, and would better international relations between the two countries.

If it were not for the foreign language angle, I believe I would prefer to have it here .... It might ultimately work out that we would have TWO European units -- one in London, one in Switzerland. We are the first to have the vision of such a college. It is something entirely new in the world of education. It's something BIG! It will be accomplished. But it will take time. I know we are being led by the hand of God into things never before done. They will be done, and in time -- and there is not too much time.

How PROPHETIC were those words, written March 13, 1947! ` God did guide and lead -- not the way I then planned. But He did, in His due time, which was the year 1960, establish His college overseas. He did not establish it in Switzerland, but on the outskirts of London. NOT in that fine but very old stone building in congested downtown London, but just outside, in the scenic Green Belt, with a 180-acre campus, beautiful and colorful gardens and lawns, adequate buildings. The building on Park Lane was finally torn down in 1962 -- probably to be replaced with a modern skyscraper.

A Prophetic Occurrence

In view of an event that occurred March 10, 1963, it becomes pertinent to quote another paragraph from the above letter to our office staff, written March 13, 1947 from London:

But after visiting Geneva, we are somewhat in favor, now, of Geneva as the seat of the European unit of AMBASSADOR. The city and buildings are more beautiful at Geneva, but the natural surrounding scenery and mountains are more beautiful at Lugano. Both are on lakes. Geneva is the number one education center, with great libraries, the large university, and it is a world political capital in international affairs. We will never find another place as modern and elegant as 'Heleneum' but for extracurricular advantages, great libraries, and international atmosphere, and a center for world affairs, Geneva would be preferable.

Was that, by coincidence, prophetic? On March 10, 1963, I gave our French Department approval for signing a five-year lease for a suite of offices in Geneva!

Mr. Dibar Apartian, at the time of this writing, is professor of French language at Ambassador College in Pasadena. Also he is director of the French work, and the voice on the air of the French-language version of The World Tomorrow. Our French Department is now well organized, with offices and a staff at our headquarters Pasadena campus, and also an office and French-speaking staff at the college in England.

Many of our booklets have been translated into French. And, of course, we have a full-color French language edition of The Plain Truth.

Sir Henry's Gripe

Our 1947 trip to London, Lugano, Geneva and Paris did pave the way for important developments that have followed.

In the lobby of our hotel in London, The Dorchester, I met a baronet -- a Sir Henry, though I do not remember his family name. He was indignant at us Americans, and candidly told me so. That morning, the London papers carried a story of Herbert Hoover's recommendation that the United States appropriate a few hundred million dollars to feed starving Germans.

Why, hang it, Sir, he sputtered in exasperation, they ought to use those millions to feed us starving Britons before they feed those Germans who caused all this starvation. Do you know, sir, what I get to eat for breakfast? I haven't been able to get an egg for six months, and just two little slices of bacon a week. The nearest we can come to eggs is some kind of dried powdered synthetic stuff, sir! And it isn't fit to eat! We get almost no fruit, or fresh vegetables, or milk, butter, or sugar.

Sir Henry may have been griping, but we found this allegation true. Actually we ourselves fared better than English titled people in their homes. Leading hotels and restaurants were allowed to serve more and better food than was obtainable by private citizens. But even so we subsisted primarily on potatoes and cauliflower at every meal, along with soups thickened with flour but no milk, and a limited amount of fish.

Spencer-Jones -- Guide Extraordinary

On Tuesday, after returning to London, we spent an eventful day on a tour, afoot, of the royal and government sections of London.

We had been standing that morning before the entrance gate to Whitehall Palace, watching the mounted King's Guards. A guide came up to us and began to give us an interesting explanation. He showed us his credentials as an accredited guide. Spencer-Jones was a real character! We decided to engage his services, for a foot tour beginning at two that afternoon.

He met us at the entrance of The Dorchester. After three hours of seeing some of the most interesting things of our lives, he asked so little for his services I paid him double, and then wondered if I had not underpaid him. He knew his London and British history.

He took us through places closed to the public. He seemed to know all the guards and officials, and they would smile and let us through. He told us that the then Queen Mother, Queen Mary, knew him, and always gave him a smiling, friendly nod when he passed her. He had acted as guide over this same tour to General Eisenhower, and at the end of their tour he said the General said to him, I wish I had your memory, Spencer-Jones. We could understand why. He gave us a whole college education on British history.

On our tour we walked through the court of what had been the palace of Britain's kings 400 years before. It was so dirty and shabby I asked why they didn't clean the place up.

Oh that would never do, Sir! the guide assured me. We are proud of its age, Sir, and it must be left just as it was 400 years ago. But it's very beautiful inside, Sir.

Spencer-Jones' wife and two daughters were killed one morning at 11 a.m. in a daylight raid by German bombers during the war. But he wanted no pity. He was proud.

Imagine, he said, a dark night, a complete black-out, a thous and planes screaming overhead, bombs exploding like deafening thunder here and there around you, the incessant fire of our antiaircraft, guns, and people screaming. I've walked right past here, he said at one point, and watched hundreds of planes overhead -- Germans desperately trying to bomb this royal and government section -- our boys up there shooting them down. A Nazi parachuted right into that tree you see there, Sir, and would have been torn to bits by the women who rushed at him, but the guards reached him first and took him prisoner. Dozens of planes crashed right in this park, Sir!

This guide lived in a humble pensioner's home. He drew a pittance of a pension from World War I. His clothes were worn and frayed.

But Spencer-Jones was English, and the English are PROUD. He asked if I would convey one message from him to America. This was his message: Tell America, please, DON'T EVER EXPRESS ANY PITY FOR US BECAUSE WE'VE GONE THROUGH A WAR AND ARE NOW HAVING A HARD TIME. THAT, WE JUST COULDN'T STAND, SIR! He had lost home, family and prosperity. But he still had his pride!

Mid-Atlantic Hurricane!

We sailed from Southampton on the return voyage, again on the mighty Queen Elizabeth, at 4:30 in the afternoon of March 15.

On our eastbound crossing, we had prayed for a calm sea. Stewards and stewardesses had told us it was the smoothest crossing in their memory -- and in mid-February at that. But somehow we must have taken calm crossings for granted by the time of our return voyage. At least we neglected any petitions to the God who controls the weather. And we learned a lesson!

In the early afternoon of Tuesday, March 18, I wrote the following from the middle of the Atlantic:

Dear Everybody at Home: What a sea! Today we're seeing something you never see at home -- a real rough sea in the middle of the Atlantic. Mother isn't seeing any of it. This is her third day confined to bed. A rough sea greatly encourages her penchant for sea-sickness. We've had three days of choppy sea, but today the waves are far bigger and higher than before.

This great Lady (the Queen Elizabeth), who is no lady, lurches, and heaves, and tosses back and forth, and groans and literally SHUDDERS! The doors and walls creak. Out on deck the high gale whistles and screams! And the great giant waves sink way down the depth of the ground from a fifteen-story building on port side, as the giant ship swings and dips over to starboard, and then we roll back to port side just as a massive wave swells up alongside, it seems only two stories below.

It's a SENSATION -- but, unfortunately, one of those things one must experience, and cannot be really understood by a word's eye view. So you won't really know what I mean. Right this second this ship is shuddering like a dying man. She groans, and then amid her rolling, swaying motion just shivers, and shakes, and shudders -- and then sways on! A while ago 'Her Majesty' got to heaving more than usual, and I rushed to the aft main deck, just as she sank way down. Then the rear deck tossed high, and a wave that seemed as high as a ten-story building rolled over and broke into a beautiful white spray, dropping like a cloudburst on the deck. In the excitement I shot the last ten feet of movie film. I think I caught the most spectacular film of all -- waves rolling like mountain peaks -- then the break -- and the stiff gale blows spray like boiling steam.

Most of the ocean is dark muddy green in color -- almost black, but covered with white caps as these gigantic waves break about every 780 or 800 feet. Then, in the wake of the ship is a trail of light, bright, turquoise-blue in the sunlight -- when the sun flashes its brilliant rays down between clouds.

It's real stormy weather -- yet there's no rain today, though there was yesterday and Sunday. But, in spite of the intermittent sunshine playing hide-and-seek behind spotty billowy clouds, we are today heading into the stiffest gale so far. And, although I hope I have shot some more or less thrilling pictures of it, you'll never know what I mean. No picture can give you the third dimension -- the feel -- the motion -- the lurch and sway, the sounds, and the EXPERIENCE of it. Poor Mother! She's experiencing it in seasickness, but not seeing any of it! They say we won't dock in New York until Friday or Saturday, now. We've had to slow down to five or six knots.

But the worst was yet to come -- and I had not realized, when the above was written, that we were in a hurricane! Actually I did not realize how serious the storm was until we docked in New York, as I shall explain below. But the storm became more wild toward evening. Early next morning I added a postscript to the above letter. Here are excerpts from it:

Storm Worsens

Mid-Atlantic, Wednesday a.m., March 19, 1947. Dear Folks at Home: Just a little early morning P.S. to yesterday's letter about the storm. Yesterday, toward evening, the sea became wildest and most thrillingly exciting. Finally there were tremendous swells, about 1,500 feet apart, farther than the length of this ship that is 1,031 feet. They became like mountain ridges. Sinking down in between the towering ridges the sea was like smooth valleys. The gale was so stiff that, while the 'valleys' in between liquid peaks or ridges were quite smooth, yet spray was being whipped along like a sandstorm on the desert. It actually looked more like a desert sandstorm than a sea -- in between peaks, that is.

The sea seemed wildest about dusk. I had shot all my movie film, but I still had seven shots left on the Plaubel-Makina. It was becoming too dark for most cameras, and I was thankful for the f.2.9 Makina. There was quite a little haze, too -- and the fierce gale raised a continuous spray above the water surface (like a sandstorm). So I used a haze filter, opened the shutter all the way, set it down to 1/25 of a second. My light-meter showed the necessity of this, although I should have liked to have taken these shots at 1/200th of a second. I hope the fast-whipping spray doesn't turn out to be a blur. (These pictures were developed by Associated Press, New York, immediately on landing.)

At times it seemed the stern of the ship lifted fifty or seventy-five feet out of the water. As I stood on one of the aft decks, as low as we were allowed to go, it seemed we sank way down into the water, then lifted up clear out of the water as the prow plunged down. After some time, I decided I had all the good pictures possible to get. I had closed up the camera, and started back inside, when, suddenly, the deck below seemed to leave my feet, as if I were left in mid-air. It was a sensation!

The Climax

Instantly I realized we were taking another of those superdips. As soon as I could get traction under my feet, I rushed back outside on the deck at the stern to catch the thrill of the next dip. We usually got about three in succession before those extreme tilts dissipated themselves. This had been the most sudden and extreme dip I had experienced, so I tried frantically to pull out the tin shutter in front of the film pack and get the camera set for action as I ran. In the excitement I failed to get the camera set and adjusted in time, but I did reach the open deck in time to SEE the one most thrilling dip of all!

It was the sight of a lifetime! The stern of the gigantic ship rose high above the water, as the prow plunged down into it. Then we on aft deck seemed to lunge down deep into the water, just as a huge liquid mountain peak rolled up behind us. It seemed almost as if the ship were about to stand straight up in the water -- we on the bottom, the bow pointing straight up to the sky. Of course, we didn't sink quite that far down -- but we experienced the sensation of being about to do so. A big portion of that stupendous wave rolled up behind us, broke, sprayed up into the air like an explosion, and came like an avalanche full force down upon the lower deck just below us at the complete stern of the ship! Then the flood of water rolled off the far-stern deck like the torrent of a river, as once again we mounted up toward the sky.

Mrs. Armstrong Collapses

For an hour I kept running intermittently down to our cabin on C deck to urge Mother to come up and see the thrilling sight. I knew that in an hour it would be too dark to see it, and it might be the last chance in our lifetime to witness anything like it. I was more excited now than she was on the train ride through the Swiss Alps. I learned later it was the angriest, most furious sea in twenty years -- with the highest waves and greatest swells, and mountain-peak waves forming a jagged and uneven horizon as far as the eye could see! Every now and then -- perhaps a half mile -- perhaps three or four miles away -- a great aqua-peak would suddenly rise up, towering above all else on the horizon, only to sink rhythmically back down again.

The sea was almost half WHITE with the white caps in sandstorm effect in the screaming gale -- half, ugly dark green-brown, almost black, forming the most weird and fantastic shapes as giant waves surged up toward high heaven, broke, then sprayed down to sink below other heaving waves surging up in front of them. I was as excited as a twelve-year-old boy!

I guess a stewardess outside our cabin door overheard my almost frantic urging of Mother to try to come above with me to see the exciting spectacle, and she must have thought there was going to be domestic trouble if she didn't get Mother up there. Anyway, she went into our cabin, and took the covers off Mother and insistently marched her out to the lift, and on up to the main deck lounge.

But there Mother almost completely collapsed. The stewardess (all stewardesses are trained nurses) finally found me and brought me to Mother, slumped over in a chair, pale-white. Together we got her back to our cabin and to bed. It was just after this that the above-described most exciting scene occurred.

In Mortal Danger

The motors of the ship were stopped down to around six knots. I did not realize until after the above-described incidents that the big ship actually was in danger. We were in desperate danger! I was told then, at late dusk last evening, that the ship might break in two, in the middle, if the full speed were put on, or if, at any time, Captain Ford failed to keep the ship headed straight into the wind in that furious storm. Regardless of direction, we had to keep headed straight into it. It was the worst storm the Queen ever fought through.

When I learned from a steward that we were actually in mortal danger, I went to our cabin and prayed. Suddenly I remembered how we had failed to ask for God's protection on this voyage. Now I realized we were in the plight described in the 107th Psalm, verses 23 through 30:

'They that go down to the sea in ships, that do business in great waters; these see the works of the Lord, and his wonders in the deep. For he commandeth, and raiseth the stormy wind, which lifteth up the waves thereof. They mount up to the heaven, they go down again to the depths; their soul is melted because of trouble. They reel to and fro, and stagger like a drunken man, and are at their wit's end. Then they cry unto the Lord in their trouble, and he bringeth them out of their distresses. He maketh the storm a calm, so that the waves thereof are still. Then are they glad because they be quiet; so he bringeth them unto their desired haven. Oh that men would praise the Lord for his goodness, and for his wonderful works to the children Of men!'

So now I prayed, in real earnest -- and also in real FAITH. I knew that those words of God were not idle words -- they were the very PROMISE of Almighty GOD. He is no respecter of persons. Here was the largest ship, so far as we know, ever built by man -- in mortal DANGER!

Until now, I had looked on the whole thing as an exciting experience to be enjoyed. Now I was sobered. I knew the eyes of God were on that great ship and its thousands of passengers. I knew that if I asked Him to do what He promised in that 107th Psalm, He would do it. He is no respecter of persons. Those lives on that ship were as precious to Him as any.

So Mrs. Armstrong and I very soberly and earnestly prayed to the Eternal to calm the storm. We claimed this Psalm as His PROMISE that He would. We thanked Him for doing it. After that we had a good night's sleep.

So I awoke early this morning, and before breakfast I went up on the main deck to see a calm sea! Not yet completely, but relatively calm and quiet. It was cloudy and began to rain while I was up on deck. The rolling movement of the ship is now caused by the forward motion -- the motors are now opened full blast, and we are plunging full speed ahead. What a changed ocean from last night! No whitecaps this morning, except those created by this floating city.

Safe in New York

We had smooth sailing the rest of the way. The big Queen arrived in New York two days late. When we docked, excited newsmen were allowed to come on board before anyone could disembark.

I attended the news conference in Captain Ford's quarters. The captain said it was a storm of hurricane force, and the worst of his entire life's experience. It was BIG NEWS. The world's largest ship had been in mortal danger.

I had the only good camera shots of the storm. The Associated Press men asked if they could have the films, promising to develop them immediately and turn them over to me, with prints, the next morning.

Mrs. Armstrong and I were allowed to disembark from the ship immediately, ahead of other passengers, with the AP men and Customs waved us through with very scant inspection, on learning that the AP wanted to get our pictures by wirephoto to all papers coast to coast immediately. I left the film-pack at Associated Press headquarters.

Next morning I returned to Associated Press offices. An angry official said that some dumb cluck around there had mislaid or misfiled my films, until too late to get them into print while it was still fresh news. He apologized profusely, and handed me the films and prints.

So they were never published in the newspapers across the United States, after all.

Chapter 55

Strategy to Gain Possession -- Birth Pangs of the College

THE Queen Elizabeth docked in New York on March 21, 1947. It was good to be back on solid ground.

We returned to Eugene, Oregon, March 25. Immediately I plunged into preparations for establishing the new Ambassador College in Pasadena. All thought of the European branch of the college was of necessity shelved for the time being. The financial situation dictated that.

Appointing a President

I have recounted, earlier, how I had first approached my wife's brother, Walter E. Dillon, as prospective president of the college, when the conviction to found the college was first conceived.

At first mention, he had only laughed. Me become president of a Bible college? he had exclaimed. Why, I know almost nothing about the Bible. That would be out of my field.

But I had hastened to explain that Ambassador was not to be a Bible college, but a straight coeducational LIBERAL ARTS institution.

Do you think I could teach the theological classes? I had asked.

Why, I think you know more about the Bible than anyone living, he replied.

When I explained that there would be a course in theology, along with other usual liberal arts courses, and that I would personally teach the Bible classes, the whole idea began to make sense to Walter.

You see, I explained, you are an educator -- I am not. You've devoted your life to education. You are head of the largest school in Oregon, outside Portland. You have a master's degree from the University of Oregon, with work toward a Ph.D. You are familiar with academic requirements, organization, and procedures. You are an experienced academic administrator. You have proved your ability to direct teachers. In these things I am not experienced. I will organize and teach the Bible courses, but I need you to help me plan and organize the college as a whole, and supervise the academic administration. you've had the academic experience. I've had the business experience. Don't you think we'd make a good team?

I certainly do, he replied, after hearing my explanation. We talked over all the details, and policy plans generally. I explained that I was bent on founding a NEW KlND of college, consistent with tried and sound organizational and administrative practice. Ambassador, I said with emphasis, was not to be a rubber stamp. I was well aware that colleges had fallen into a dangerous drift of materialism. He agreed. I also realized that mass-production, assembly-line education in universities of five to forty thous and students resulted in loss of personality development and much that is vital in student training. To this he also agreed.

The Foundational Philosophy I explained how the Bible is, actually, the divine Maker's instruction book He has sent along with His product -- the human individual. It reveals the PURPOSE of life -- the purpose for which the human mind and body was designed and brought into being -- the directions for operating this human mechanism so that it will perform as it was designed to do, and fulfill its intended purpose, reaching its intended goal.

In other words, that the Bible is the very FOUNDATION of all knowledge -- the basic concept as an APPROACH to the acquisition of ALL KNOWLEDGE -- whether academic, scientific, historic, philosophical or otherwise. The Bible provides the missing dimension in education. Therefore, it must be the BASIS for all academic courses.

The Bible does not contain all knowledge -- it is the foundation of all knowledge. It is the starting point in man's quest for knowledge, and equips man to BUILD on that foundation.

The Bible, alone of all books or sources of knowing, REVEALS basic PURPOSES. It alone reveals the inexorable, yet invisible LAWS that regulate cause and effect, action and reaction -- that govern all relationships -- that produce happiness, peace, well-being, prosperity. The Bible is a guide-book of vital principles, to be applied to circumstances, conditions, and problems.

God has equipped man with eyes with which to see; ears with which to hear; hands with which to work; minds with which to reason, think, plan, design, make decisions, and will to act on those decisions. Man has capacity to explore, investigate, observe, measure. God enabled man to invent telescopes, microscopes, test-tubes and laboratories. Man, of himself, is enabled to acquire much knowledge. But without the BASIC knowledge -- that FOUNDATION of all knowledge, revealed only in the Bible -- man goes off on erroneous tangents in his effort to explain what he discovers.

Only in the BIBLE can he learn the real PURPOSE being worked out here below. Only through this revelation from GOD can he know the real meaning of life -- what, exactly, man is -- or THE WAY to such desired blessings as peace, happiness, abundant living -- the spiritual values.

The biblical revelation provides man with the true concept through which to view and explain what he can observe.

HOW Ambassador Was to Be Different

But the educational institutions of this world have rejected this FOUNDATION of knowledge. They have built an educational structure on a false foundation. They left God, and His revelation, out of their knowledge. They have built a complicated and false system composed of a perverted mixture of truth and error.

Ambassador College was to correct these ills and perversions in modern education. That was to be its basic policy.

The board of trustees of the Radio Church of God, of which I was chairman, would set all policies until the college could be incorporated in its own name with its own board of trustees. Until that time, it would be operated as an activity of the Radio Church of God. Mr. Dillon would administer these policies.

To this he agreed. But I was to learn later that, not possessing a real grasp or understanding of the Bible, he apparently never did really comprehend what I meant by this basic concept of education.

Mr. Dillon was the product of this world's education. He was imbued with its concepts. He never did quite grasp the real meaning of my continuous emphasizing that Ambassador College was definitely not to be a rubber-stamp college. I assumed he was in complete harmony with our basic purpose. I feel sure he thought he was.

Had I, too, been indoctrinated with the prevailing educational concepts, there would be no Ambassador Colleges today -- but God saw to it that I came up through different channels.

Starting Active Preparations

The special January, 1947, number of The Plain Truth, announcing the future college in Pasadena, brought applications from both prospective faculty members and students.

One application came from Dr. Hawley Otis Taylor. He was chairman emeritus of the department of physics at Wheaton College. Dr. Taylor had a Ph.D. from Cornell University; had taught at Cornell, Harvard, and MIT; had been a consultant of the Navy in the war; had been a member of the U.S. Bureau of Standards. His scientific publications were voluminous. And he was a professed Christian.

This all seemed too good to be true! Dr. Taylor had reached Wheaton's retirement age -- seventy. He had once lived in Pasadena and wanted to spend his retirement years here. He felt he had several active years of service left, and Ambassador College offered the opportunity to add his salary here to his retirement pay from Wheaton. After due correspondence, and, I believe, a personal interview in Pasadena, we appointed Dr. Taylor dean of instruction and registrar of the new college.

Other applications arrived. Mr. Dillon and I were anxious to get on the job in Pasadena immediately. The very next morning, early, after our return from Europe, he and I started the long drive from Eugene to Pasadena.

We stopped off at a small town in southern Oregon to interview a woman, a Dr. Enid Smith, teaching English in a high school. She had Ph.D. degrees from two universities. One was from Columbia University -- the other from the University of Oregon. had received an application from her. We hired her as our first instructor in English.

We Buy New Home

We arrived Pasadena Thursday night, March 27. Things now were moving into high gear. Friday morning I contacted Mrs. C.J. McCormick, the real estate broker through whom the purchase of the college property had been made. I had been looking at a number of places, before the trip abroad, for a home. She had said she would try to have a few places lined up for me to inspect on my return from Europe.

She said she had three places for me to see, which she felt might fit the requirements. Chief requirement was the fact that I lacked even enough money for a down payment. We were going to have to manage to purchase a place, as we had the college, with no down payment.

Mr. Dillon went with me. The first place she showed us was an ill-arranged, two-story Spanish home.

I didn't like the second place. The third place was three miles from the college, in the California Institute of Technology district. At first glance from the street, I said: That place exactly reflects the character of Mrs. Armstrong. She'd like it.

But on the entrance sidewalk, I stopped. Look, Mrs. McCormick, I said. It's no use looking at this place. It's the most homelike-looking place I've seen -- but we could never afford a place like this. What we're looking for is a small, modest-type house -- something inexpensive. This place is sufficiently modest in appearance, but it's too big.

Mr. Armstrong, she promptly replied, this is the only kind of place you can afford. That's why all three of these places I had chosen to show you are larger places. You can't afford to buy a small place. If it is a new tract place, the company selling it will demand a down payment which you don't have. If it's an older place lived in by the owner, such people are selling because they need the money, and they would have to have a sizable down payment. These people are financially well-to-do. They don't need the money. If they like you and Mrs. Armstrong, and you like the property, they can afford to let you have it without a down payment.

These people love their home. The only reason they want to sell it is that Mrs. Williams is unable physically to walk up and down stairs any longer, and doctors have told her she must move to a place of one floor only. They have found a lovely one-story place in South Pasadena. They paid cash for it. I've already briefed them on your financial position, and how you are starting a cultural college, and that you are people of the character that would take the best of care of this property. That's important to them. They do love this place, and want to be sure the family moving in will take the best care of it.

We went on inside. The home reflected character and charm. It seemed even more homelike inside than out. It was a fourteen-room house, fourteen years old, but of quality construction and had been well maintained. It was a frame colonial house, two stories, and a half-basement of three rooms in clean, excellent condition.

We examined the construction from underneath, in the basement. It was substantial. Mr. Dillon had spent a summer selling real estate. He had learned how to appraise the quality and value of a house.

This place, he whispered to me, is so desirable that if you don't buy it, I will. Don't ever let this place get away from you.

Of course I wanted Mrs. Armstrong to see it. And the Williams wanted to see her, before deciding whether to sell to us. After we left, I called my wife long distance. She had just an hour to catch the evening train for Los Angeles. The next evening she arrived -- or, more probably, it was Sunday evening.

On Monday morning I took her out to see it. It was love-at-first-sight with her. It had seemed to me that this home and my wife simply belonged together. It was just her type -- her character. It had quality, charm, character. Yet it had simplicity. It was not a showplace, not ostentatious. Just quiet, modest, with charm, beauty and character. The Williams, we learned later in the day, fell in love at first sight with Mrs. Armstrong. Immediately they felt she was the woman who would take good care of the place.

Mrs. McCormick contacted us in the early afternoon. It's like a miracle, she said. They want you to have it. They will sell to you at just half the price the property has been listed for, for over a year. They will sell it to you on quarterly payments, no down payment, no interest, and will give you possession and the deed, taking a trust deed (mortgage), in ninety days when the second payment is made.

We couldn't believe our ears! I did some quick figuring. We had been living in motels, forced to eat at restaurants. The money we were spending at restaurants for ourselves and two sons was almost exactly the amount of the payments. Mrs. Armstrong is a very economical cook, when we could have a home where she could do the cooking. With her management over grocery buying, I figured the food would cost no more than we were spending for motel rent.

In other words, IT WAS GOING TO COST US ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to step into this beautiful home and start owning it! It would involve no increase in our cost of living!

I went immediately to the office of Judge Russell Morton, our attorney, asking him to draw up the agreement. When I told him the terms, he looked at me with a strange look.

I never heard of such a deal, he said. Why, I ought to refuse to write up the agreement! That's the second important property that has come to you without even a down payment.

He did write up the agreement, and the next day, Tuesday, April 1, 1947, the Williams, Mrs. Armstrong and I, signed, and I gave them a check for the first quarterly payment. We were to have possession and the deed July 1, the same day we were to take possession of the college property.

First College Office

Mr. Dillon was anxious to get into an office, and get started with the preliminary work of organizing the new college.

There were the two buildings on this original property we had purchased for the college. One was the present library, which we then called the college, for the simple reason that it housed all classrooms, library, music department, assembly-everything, except business office. And, besides this was the former garage. It was a four-car garage, with apartments occupying the second floor and each end of the ground floor, and filled with tenants. We managed a deal, at a premium cost, by which the people in the apartment at the rear upstairs and the rear downstairs vacated. The center of the downstairs, garage space for four cars, already was vacant. The building originally had been stables -- way back in B.C. years -- before cars!

In the rear ground-floor room, later to become our printing shop until 1958, we opened the first Ambassador College office. We purchased desks and office equipment and supplies. Mr. Dillon employed a secretary -- a Miss Ruth Klicker. He began work of planning a curriculum.

One day he said a man had walked in, while I was out, and applied for the job of professor of French. He was Professor Emile Mauler-Hiennecey, French-born and educated, with degrees from a university in Paris. He had moved to New Orleans and done private French tutoring, and in recent years had lived in Pasadena, He had taught in high schools, and continued private tutoring. Mr. Dillon wanted me to interview the professor -- even then a year or two past seventy.

After my interview, we appointed him our first instructor in French.

We employed two other women teachers -- Mrs. Genevieve F. Payne, with an M.A. from Colorado University, and graduate work in history at other universities, as instructor in history and Spanish; and Miss Lucille Hoover, with a B.M. from Chicago Musical College and considerable additional study in America and abroad, as head of our music department.

And then, about June 20, after Mr. Dillon had gone to New York to study at Columbia for the summer, Mrs. Lucy H. Martin came in for an interview. She was an experienced librarian -- had served on the staff of the Library of Congress at the nation's capital. I did not know until later that she had degrees in music equal to or higher than Miss Hoover. I employed her as librarian. It was then a part-time job. She was teaching in another private school in Pasadena.

We also appointed a Mr. Krauss, with an M.S. from the University of Southern California, who had been officer in charge of the Navy physical fitness program, as director of physical education.

All in all, we felt our new college faculty rated very well in degrees and previous experience. I had wanted Mr. Dillon to earn a Ph.D. from Columbia University. He already had graduate credits from the University of Oregon. So he and his wife departed, about mid-June, for New York City for summer work toward his degree.

Dr. B. Balks

After signing the papers for purchase of our new home on April 1, 1947, I began to think about how we would furnish such a large house. Of course we had some furniture in storage in Eugene, Oregon. But most of it was old and worn, and there was not enough to furnish even a small part of our new home.

The main building we had purchased, as the college building from Dr. B., had always been used as a large residence. It was, however, more institutional than residential in appearance. Dr. B. and his elderly sister were living in it. The building was completely furnished. Most of the furniture and furnishings were somewhat old, but of the character usually found in larger mansions. He probably had bought it all second-hand at one of the auction markets. We were not going to be able to use this furniture in the college, when we turned the rooms into classrooms.

I approached Dr. B. about moving the furniture and furnishings to our new home on July 1. Immediately he refused. For tax reasons, he had itemized the purchase price, segregating the furnishings from the real property. By placing a higher value on the furnishings, he avoided a portion of the capital-gains tax on the real estate.

But the wily, scheming Dr. B. suggested that, for a separate cash payment, he would agree to removal of the furniture. I think his price was $2,000, to apply on the last two months' rental on the twenty-five-month lease. The reader will remember that we purchased this first college property on a lease-and-option basis. We were to pay $1,000 per month rent on a twenty-five-month lease. At the end of twenty-five months, the $25,000 thus paid was to become the down payment on the purchase. The contract included an option to purchase at that time, with the $25,000 down payment thus accumulated, and $1,000 payments per month, plus interest.

So Judge Morton drew up a legal contract, by which, as a result of advancing this last two-months' rental under the lease part of the contract, Dr. B. agreed we might move the furniture and furnishings to our new home address but to no other location.

We became convinced before July 1, however, that Dr. B. had no intention of ever giving us possession of the property. Our contract called for nine months' rental payments at $1,000 per month, before possession. After this $9,000 had been paid, we were to take possession.

It had been a real headache of a problem to raise that extra $2,000. It probably took some thirty days, but I think it was managed by mid-May. But as July 1 approached, Judge Morton, his associate attorney, Mr. Wannamaker, and I had become convinced that Dr. B. did not intend to give possession -- that his intention was to keep the money we had paid -- which now would be $11,000 by July 1, and to keep the property too! We went into a huddle at the law offices about strategy for peacefully taking possession.

Dr. B. had always made me a welcome guest, personally. Mrs. Armstrong and I had spent the night there on New Year's eve, so we could view the 1947 Tournament of Roses parade. This world-famous parade starts just one block south of this property, on South Orange Grove Boulevard -- and this original property is less than a half block off Orange Grove.

We worked out a strategy. So on the morning of July 1, Mrs. Armstrong, our two sons and I parked our car, filled with our luggage, a block away -- out of sight from the Dr. B. building. Then I walked over to the front door and rang the bell. Dr. B. came to the door, and, as I suspected, looked carefully to see that no luggage or other members of the family had come with me. Seeing no one, he allowed me to step inside, as I had so frequently done.

We went inside and chatted. Nothing was said about our taking possession. Then, after about ten minutes, the front doorbell rang. I beat Dr. B. to the door, opened it, and before Dr. B. grasped what had happened, in walked Mrs. Armstrong, and our sons, carrying our luggage. We were inside. But so was Dr. B. and his sister!

We took over two bedrooms. We planned that not more than one or two of us would ever leave the building at one time -- always keeping at least two of us inside, to admit any who left.

Some two weeks went by. Dr. B. and his sister made no move to leave. We were in. But so were they -- and they seemed to have no intention of moving out or turning over possession.

Of course, he was violating his signed agreement. We could possibly have taken it to court and forced them out. But that was the last thing we wanted to do. We wanted to keep the peace.

So we had another strategy conference at the attorneys' offices. We remembered the legal paper he had signed agreeing to removal of the furniture and furnishings to our new home on or after July 1.

It was decided to inform Dr. B. we had set a date for removing the furniture, and that on that date, set about three days ahead, house movers would come and remove the beds on which they were sleeping -- and in fact all, except the one Mrs. Armstrong and I were using. Dr. B. protested, when I informed him.

I have a piece of paper here, I said, which you signed, which says these beds are going to be moved on that date. You have three days to get your own things packed, and to vacate and turn complete possession over to us. I don't want to have to resort to legal means or force.

Oh, well, he answered gruffly and angrily, All right! All right! We'll get out!

The strategy worked. We had possession. But Dr. B. still thought he was not beaten. He still thought he could outsmart us and keep the property. We were to learn that, when the time came to exercise our option to turn it into a purchase, in December, 1948.

Chapter 56

A Supreme Crisis! -- Now Forced to Fold Up?

NOW CAME the real troubles! We reached the crossroads. This was to be the real test. Ahead, now, was the possible transition from a small, struggling, virtually one-man work to a major scale organization exerting a powerful influence on humanity the world around! Ambassador College was to provide the only possible means. It was to be the recruiting and training center, integrating into effective organization those whom God would call to surround me -- to become this Christ-led and Spirit-powered organism.

But lying in wait, poised to spring at us in satanic fury, was a succession of such seemingly insurmountable obstacles, diabolical plots, persecutions and oppositions as I never dreamed of facing. As I think back now, I realize, as I did not then, how these efforts to thwart the founding of the college seemed to come from all directions -- and from within as well as without. Yet in actual fact all were instigated from one source -- the same that had always sought to destroy the work of God.

It seemed, however, as if the irresistible FORCE met head-on with the immovable obstruction.

The $30,000 Headache

The wily Dr. B., possessing the highest law degrees in the land, and living by his wits had tried to prevent giving us possession of the college on July 1, 1947. We called the building that is now the library the college in those days.

Then, in August, the city building inspectors came around to inspect our proposed college building. Dr. B. had assured me it was of solid concrete, fireproof construction. I had had it examined by two architects. They, too, said it was a solid concrete building. But the building inspectors bored inside the outer layer of hard concrete. It was a frame building, after all. It did not come up to codes to qualify as a classroom building!

They slapped on us what proved to be -- as we then called it -- a $30,000 headache. That's a real costly headache!

Before we could be given official occupancy for a college building, they informed us, all walls and ceilings must be torn out and replaced with one-hour-fire resistant construction!

Once we began tearing out walls, the inspector condemned all the electric wiring system and the plumbing pipes. New electric conduits were required throughout, and all new plumbing pipes!

I engaged a contractor, highly recommended by our next-door neighbor who then owned Mayfair, later to become our first girls' student residence. The contractor agreed to do the job -- on $4,000 weekly progress payments.

But where was I to get the $4,000 per week, on top of regular operating expenses? Our income at the time was perhaps $2,500 per week -- all obligated in advance for the operational expenditures of the work. Now I had, somehow, to raise an additional $4,000 per week!

I sent out a desperate emergency letter to church brethren and co-workers. I made personal long-distance calls to those I felt might be able to help with larger sums.

A peanut and watermelon farmer in Texas sent in most of his life savings -- a few thous and dollars. His education had been neglected. It was now too late for him, but he wanted to help others still young enough to obtain the higher education he lacked.

A doctor in Missouri sent a few thous and dollars, and then more later. He later became a trustee of Ambassador College, and the first director of its Bible Correspondence Course. Although he had had nine years of college education and a doctor's degree, he came to Ambassador and earned an additional master of arts degree, in theology.

A radio listener I had never known before, in northern California, mortgaged his own new home for $5,000 and loaned it to me -- without security. I was six months past the allotted year in paying it all back, but I made a business deal with his mortgagee, paying him a cash bonus, to extend the time six months on the unpaid balance.

The final week, early October, the contractor came up with a $12,000 bill and demanded immediate payment. I had planned for only $4,000, and had gone through a dozen nightmares to raise that. The pressure was almost unbearable.

Everyone -- except my wife and I -- knew the college had folded up -- before it even opened its doors to students. And, of course, the living HEAD of His Church, Jesus Christ, knew it hadn't!

How I finally raised that additional $8,000 within a few days' time, I don't remember, now. I think that was the week when this $5,000 loan came in. But, somehow, God saw us through.

The Lesson in Faith

It became almost impossible to sleep nights. I never lost faith -- really. I never doubted the outcome. Yet I had not yet learned the total, implicit, trusting faith that can RELAX and leave it quietly in God's hands. I was under terrific strain. It was literally multiple nightmares condensed into a super ONE!

On one occasion, I almost snapped. I weakened to the extent that I actually prayed, one night, that God would let me die through the night, and relieve me from the almost unbearable agony. But next morning, I was deeply repentant for that, and prayed earnestly for God's forgiveness. Twice I did give up, on going to bed at night. But next morning was another day, and I bounced back, repentant for having given up -- if only momentarily.

Yet this $30,000 headache was only the beginning of troubles. Others were yet to come -- from within and from without. It was not until early 1949 that things eased up. By then I had come to the place that I had to pray in final desperation for six months' grace from this constant harassment. I humbly asked God to consider that I was human, with human weaknesses, and PLEASE to give me six months' rest from the terrible ordeal.

He did. And during that respite I finally learned how to RELAX in faith, and shift the weighty BURDEN of it over onto CHRIST! And, at least up to the time of this writing, God has enabled me not only to trust Him for the final outcome, but to let faith remove the strain of anxiety.

When troubles or emergencies arise, we should be tremendously concerned! We should not take these things lightly or nonchalantly. We should be on our toes to Do whatever is our part, but trusting God in relaxed FAITH to guide us and to do His part which we cannot do for ourselves. We should be freed from destructive strain and worry.

This lesson of faith does not come easily. Sometimes it is achieved only through punishing experience. We need to learn that God does not do all things for us. He does many things in, and through us. We have our part to do. But there are some things we cannot do, and which we must rely on Him to do, wholly, for us. It takes wisdom to know which is which.

We had received some forty applications for prospective college students. But this reconstruction program had delayed the college opening. I had been compelled to notify all applicants that I would advise them when we finally were ready to open.

College Finally Opens

Ambassador College did finally swing open its big front door to students October 8, 1947. But by that time nearly all applicants had gone elsewhere. Besides our son Dick (Richard David), there was only Raymond C. Cole, who came down from Oregon where his family had been in the Church for years; Herman L. Hoeh, who came from Santa Rosa, California; and Miss Betty Bates from Tulsa, Oklahoma -- four pioneer students -- with a faculty of eight.

Did ever a college start so small? Or with a ratio of two professors to each student? But the things of God, through human instruments, always start the smallest, and grow to become the BIGGEST!

Ambassador College had started! It was not born without agonizing birth pangs! But, as a mother is soon over the pangs of childbirth, so we are not suffering them today.

Yet the trials and troubles, oppositions and satanic plots to stop the college and the work, did not end on October 8, 1947! Even the worst was yet to come!

But in the end, even Satan will be forced to bow to the TRUTH that GOD's purpose STANDS that Satan can do no more than God allows -- and that, though Satan's power is far greater than that of us humans, God's power is infinitely greater than Satan's.

God has said HIS GOSPEL SHALL BE PREACHED AND PUBLISHED IN ALL THE WORLD! Satan has tried to prevent it. Had this not been the very WORK OF GOD, it would have been stopped long ago. But the living CHRIST has said He would open the DOOR for the proclaiming of this message, and that NO MAN can shut it!

In His power and strength HIS WORK continues to GO FORWARD!!

Chapter 57

Surviving the First Year of Ambassador College

WOULD you really say it was a college that finally swung open its door to students the eighth of October, 1947? There were only four students!

There were no dormitories -- no place for students to be in residence on the original little campus of one and three-quarter acres. We had some books and encyclopedias on shelves in the one room that served as music room, assembly room, library, study room and lounge -- but no real college library. There was no gymnasium, no track or athletic field.

WHY Smallest Beginning

I suppose many people would laugh at the idea of dignifying that by the name college. But there is a reason why it had to begin that small.

When the Great God, Creator and Ruler of the vast universe, does something by Himself, He demonstrates His supreme power by doing it in a stupendous awe inspiring manner. But when it is actually God who is doing something through humans, it must start the smallest. Like the grain of mustard seed, the smallest of herbs, which grows to become the largest, God's works through humans must start the smallest -- but they grow, and grow, and grow, until they become the biggest!

Had Ambassador College started big, with several hundred or a few thous and students, a great campus filled with large college buildings -- an administration building, classroom buildings, laboratories, music conservatory, large ornate auditorium, gymnasium, a fine quarter-mile track and football field, a large library building with 500,000 volumes, dormitories, dining halls -- everything complete, then I could certainly have no faith in accepting it as God's college.

Ambassador started in a building that had been a private residence. True, it had been built in an architectural design more institutional than residential in appearance. But it had been a residence. Then there was the garage. As I mentioned before, it had been originally stables -- way back in the years B.C. -- before cars. It had later been converted into a four-car garage, with apartments upstairs and apartment rooms at both ends.

We had turned some of the living rooms into business offices, and the central garage space into our general mailing room for the radio work. Our small printing shop, with a Davidson duplicating machine, occupied the rear ground-floor room. We called this building the administration building. Since then it has undergone successive remodelings, and served as the administration building until our modern new four story administration building was completed in 1969.

And, again, I have explained before that God's number for organized beginnings is TWELVE. His original beginnings always start with ONE MAN. God started the human family with one man, Adam. His nation Israel started from the one man, Abraham. That nation's government and leadership started with the one man, Moses. The Church of God and God's WORK started with the one man, Jesus Christ.

But God's own nation on earth had its organized beginning through the TWELVE tribes. The Church had its organized beginning with TWELVE apostles.

God started the original planning and founding of His college through myself. I had no help from our church in Eugene. The members were too poor to give financial aid. One or two offered dis approval and criticism. But, on that morning of October 8, 1947, the actual organized beginning of the college numbered TWELVE persons in total -- four students, eight faculty members, myself included. The property had been purchased, as previously explained, TWELVE years after the start of the work.

No Dorms

We had no facilities for housing students. Our own son, Richard David (Dick), lived with us in our new home (new to us, that is). Betty Bates had rented a room out in the east end of Pasadena, some five miles from the college. She used the city bus service for transportation. The other two students, Raymond Cole and Herman Hoeh, rented a room together some two and a half miles from the college. They used less expensive transportation -- shoe leather. They managed to prepare their own food, somehow, in their room.

Those pioneer students had to rough it in a way I am sure our students of today do not realize. They certainly did not live in luxury. We did manage to employ these pioneer students for part-time work, at $40 per month. But they had to pay $31.50 room-rent-per each! In order to have enough to eat, they often picked lamb's-quarter -- in place of spinach -- where it grew along certain sparsely settled streets and in vacant lots, then prepared it after returning home from school. Many times, they simply went hungry. They were more hungry for an education than for physical food.

Yet they never mentioned any of this, and I didn't learn of it myself until much later.

They heard talk from others about when this thing folds up. But there was no thought of the college folding up in their minds -- nor in mine. They had faith. They were there for a purpose! It was a mighty serious purpose! It was the one goal of their lives, and they concentrated on it and worked at it with all their energies!

The part-time work these pioneer students did was janitor work.

Opposition from Within

Previously I have mentioned the opposition faced in getting the college started. There had been plans, plots, and schemes to stop the broadcast work before it started, and to kill it after it started. Not from lay members, either at Eugene or up in the Willamette Valley -- but from jealous and coveting ministers. There were temptations to drop it -- offers of something better -- financially. Only these didn't really tempt me. There had been seemingly insurmountable obstacles to hurdle over.

But there now was opposition, whether intentional from those who brought it or not, from within the faculty.

Remember, I had set out to found a NEW KIND of college -- God's college. Not a Bible school. Not a religious school. A straight liberal arts co-educational institution -- but Based on God's revealed knowledge actuated by God's Spirit.

But where was I to find teachers and college professors, at the university level, who taught courses on the very FOUNDATION of God's revealed knowledge? Such instructors simply did not exist. I had to start with those reared and schooled in this world's type of education.

And I have explained before how educators, long ago -- from the days of Nimrod -- from the days of Plato who founded the curricular system -- from the days of the University of Paris which started the present universities in the 12th century -- had not retained God in their knowledge. The world had inherited education, not from God's teachings, but from PAGANISM.

Since I could do no other, I was forced to choose instructors trained in the prevailing system of education. But I sought those of outstanding qualifications and adequate degrees. I wanted the best!

There was the woman professor of English. She had at least two Ph.D. - some eight degrees altogether. This surely sounded like the best. She had taught many years in India. I did not know, when Mr. Dillon and I employed her, that she was saturated with eastern philosophies and occultism. As time went on, it became evident that our English professor was not at all in harmony with the real objectives of Ambassador College.

Later on in the year we learned that Professor Mauler-Hiennecey did not really believe in God, but had strong agnostic views. However, he was a lovable old fellow, and a very fine French teacher, as well as a good instructor in Spanish. Under him my son Dick learned to speak French without even an accent. When he went to France, in 1952, he was accepted often as a native Frenchman.

We found M. Mauler-Hiennecey to be pleasant, friendly, kind-hearted. He was with us several years, but finally resigned. But, he was then getting pretty old. We did love him, and he rendered service for some six years.

But in Dr. Taylor I felt we had a sympathetic Christian believer. Dr. Taylor, in spite of his illustrious academic record, which included faculty membership at such institutions as Harvard, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cornell, and Wheaton, strongly professed Christianity.

It had seemed too good to be true. The application I had received for a professorship on the Ambassador College faculty from a man of Dr. Hawley Otis Taylor's record in education and science appeared positively providential.

In today's world of materialistic higher education and science, God has been virtually thrown out the window. The Bible has been relegated disdainfully to the scrapheap of medieval superstition.

Of course much if not most of the doctrines of traditional Christianity might well be put in the category of superstition.

I should have known Dr. Taylor's Christianity was this traditional variety. But somehow I didn't realize this until after he arrived in Pasadena.

It seemed indeed a rarity to find a man of Dr. Taylor's illustrious scientific status professing fundamentalist Christianity. And I was overjoyed. Dr. Taylor was appointed, as previously explained, as dean of instruction, and registrar.

Before the college was scarcely more than started, I was somewhat disillusioned. I soon learned that Dr. Taylor's religious beliefs were, indeed, those of traditional Christianity. Of course, he was sincere and unalterably confirmed in his convictions.

These basic differences of belief produced a certain friction, but later were resolved in a spirit of happy cooperation.

Bible Course Minimized

In planning the curriculum, class schedules, and the purely academic matters of the college, I left arrangements in the hands of Mr. Dillon and Dr. Taylor. In preparation of the college catalog, I wrote merely the introductory pages describing the kind of college, leaving all technical data, description of courses, curriculum, credits required, to Mr. Dillon and Dr. Taylor. I was not experienced in curricula-planning.

The catalog was not printed until after classes were started. But after they were actually in progress, and class schedules set, I discovered to my great dismay that my own Course in theology -- the real foundation course of the college -- had been reduced to a two-hour minor subject!

By then classes were under way. All students' schedules were fixed -- all records set. It was too late to change them -- for that year.

Sensing this undercurrent of hostility within the teaching staff, I immediately decreed that faculty members, as well as students, must attend all my classes. I taught entirely by the lecture method. I did this, not so much as a retaliatory measure, but as a means of getting the new college off to a start as the very kind of college God was

Since the BIBLE is the very foundation of all knowledge, I was determined to see that this approach to knowledge permeated the entire institution. This class provided me with a forum as a sounding board. It enabled me to keep constantly before both students and faculty the biblical FOUNDATION of knowledge, and the scriptural approach to understanding.

I was quite conscious of the materialistic educational backgrounds of faculty members. I was well aware of the evolutionary concepts most of them had imbibed. I kept my lectures on a reasonably dignified plane, and I constantly used the four gospels to demonstrate that the current teaching of traditional Christianity was at total variance with the inspired record.

I took great pains to make my lectures so rational and factual as to leave no room for refutation. And none was voiced!

I was reminded of a church service I had conducted back in Eugene, Oregon, a few years before, when a converted former atheist brought an atheist friend. After my service she asked her visiting guest what she thought of the sermon.

Well, the visitor answered curtly, I can't refute his statements, but I'm simply not interested in accepting them.

No one knows better than I that it is impossible to cram truth down unwilling and obstinate throats. But I did want the satisfaction of making the truth SO PLAIN that faculty members had but two choices -- to accept it, or deliberately reject it in which case it became a witness against them, for which they alone were responsible, and for which they would answer in the judgment.

I have been called merely to proclaim Christ's message as a witness. I am not sent to force conversion on the world, but to be a witness of the TRUTH, made plain, to those willing to receive it. And, of course I realized that unwilling minds can shut the door from allowing it to enter. I am sure that first school year was a bit uncomfortable to some of the faculty members attending my lectures.

But it did establish the educational FOUNDATION for Ambassador College. And it became very convincing to all four students!

At the beginning of the second year I compromised. I saw to it that the theological courses were three-hour majors that year -- that is, three hour long class periods per week. One of them I designated as my own forum period, at which attendance of all faculty members was required. The faculty was excused from further attendance at the other two periods from that time onward.

I was determined that the AMBASSADOR POLICY was going to be inculcated thoroughly in faculty and students alike. Ambassador was to be God's college -- not another rubber stamp of the educational institutions of this world! But, with a faculty trained in this world's scholarship, I found that it required determined dominance on my part, plus vigilance, to assure it.

By the third year, I felt sufficient progress had been made to this end that I could safely dispense with the requirement for faculty attendance at biblical lectures. Besides the three hours per week in theology, however, I continued the forum one hour a week, which continues to this day, attended by students and faculty alike.

The Broadcast Dilemma

But now, back to the main thread of the story. The most traumatic crisis of all was to come in the second school year.

This $30,000 headache I have described, in being forced to convert our main college building into a fireproof structure, played havoc with our financial situation generally. I was forced to get farther behind with our big radio station.

We had been forced to drop off XELO, the 150,000 watt clear-channel station at Juarez, Mexico, altogether. We had been on both XELO and XEG, the other superpowered 150,000-watt station. In those days these two stations could be heard over most of the United States, and even in central Canada. They had built a tremendous audience for us.

While the cost, per half hour, seemed very high to us, it was only half to two-thirds as much as many major-city 50,000-watt stations in the United States. And although the listening audience to those stations was not a concentrated metropolitan audience such as major-city American stations enjoy, it spread over most of the United States. The total audience, in those days, was much larger than that of any United States station.

We had means of checking and arriving at a close estimate of the number of listeners. I was able to say, then, that every radio dollar reached 2,000 people with a powerful half-hour message!

We can't make that claim any more. Already at that time, 1947-1948, more and more small radio stations were being licensed. Where there had been one small 100-watt station in Eugene, Oregon, in 1934 when we started, there were, in 1961, some five or six, and at least two of them 5,000-watt stations. The number of radio stations multiplied all over the country, in small towns and in major cities. Power increased also. And all this brought more and more interference over the airwaves, constantly reducing the coverage and clarity of signal of such superpowered stations as XELO and XEG.

Up until March, 1948, we were on XEG at 8 p.m. nightly except Saturdays, and 5:30 a.m. daily except Sunday. This was our only southern and midwestern coverage, but it was the most powerful and effective single station existing for a widespread coverage of all that vast area. In addition, we were then using five stations on the Pacific Coast -- XERB, 50,000 watts, Sunday only, Saturday and Sunday coverage in Portland, and Sunday only in Seattle. What a far cry that was from the television and radio coverage of today!

But, before the close of 1947 we were getting further and further behind in paying our bills with XEG. The management told me very pointedly that they were not in business for the purpose of financing the start of a college for me. If we were going to use our money to operate the college instead of paying their bills, we would have to go off the air.

It was a frustrating dilemma. I knew God had opened the way for the college. I knew the Eternal wanted the college. I knew the work of God could not continue to grow without the college.

But I knew also God wanted us on the air. He had called me to proclaim Christ's gospel.

Thrown off the Air!

Of course it will be easy for the armchair quarterbacks to say that the college should not have been started under these circumstances. Plenty of them did say that. Anyway, I was now into this dilemma, and I had to face it.

Of course I prayed -- continually and fervently. But if God had had a better way, perhaps He found my head so thick He couldn't get it through to me any faster. Now, however, I asked for deliverance out of the trouble. And it came -- later!

By the first of March XEG carried out their threat to throw us off. They allowed the program to stay on Sunday nights, only, provided I began to make progress in paying off the back indebtedness, and that this progress be continued.

Other bills were pressing. I was being hounded on every side for money by creditors. Many around me continued to harp about when this thing folds up. But I was determined it was not going to fold up!

We were off XEG with the week-night broadcasts until the following October. Somehow, we weathered the storm.

Loyalty of Co-Workers

One very precious lesson was learned by that experience. Our family of co-workers who regularly support God's work with their tithes and voluntary offerings, remained loyal, even though we were off the air except for Sunday nights. I had learned that it was the every night broadcasting that was really effective and resultful. One might have expected that the money to support the work would have stopped when the listeners no longer received the broadcast.

But they had accepted Christ's teaching from my voice, that it is more blessed to GIVE than to receive. Their hearts, as well as their tithes and contributions, were in the work of God. When they no longer received the broadcast, they DID NOT STOP GIVING! There was scarcely any lag in the income. But the expenses were greatly lessened.

This allowed us to make progress in paying the accumulated XEG bill sufficient to induce them to put us back on the air in October that year, 1948. Nevertheless, it was a harassing spring, summer, and fall -- and the frightful agony of it rose to a climax by October and November.

We had been forced to get behind even with the faculty payroll. Now of course that was a thing regarded among teachers generally as the unpardonable sin of an educational institution. One particular teacher tried to injure us legally.

But the Labor Relations Board -- or whoever it was that the matter came before -- allowed us to distribute the back pay over several months of time. So that attempt to put the college out of business failed.

It surely is needless to say, however, that experiences of this kind were a living nightmare to endure.

Reducing to Half-Time

During the summer of 1948 I was faced with a frightful situation and a tough decision. Everyone seemed to think I ought to simply give up, close the college down, and try to build back up the broadcasting work. But somehow I knew God wanted neither dropped. I had supreme and abiding FAITH that He would see us through. True, I had not yet learned to have relaxed faith. I continued to allow the strain of this situation to punish me. The following year I was to learn the secret of relaxed faith -- but I will come to that in due course.

After counsel, meditation, prayer, and much thinking, I made the decision of what to do. I decided to reduce the college schedule to half-time for one year. I could only pay half-salaries. And I could not continue to pay all of those. We would have to suffer through one year with a pruned-down faculty.

Just one of our women teachers remained with us -- and she is still loyally with us today -- Mrs. Lucy H. Martin. Of course Mr. Dillon remained on, and Dr. Taylor and Professor Mauler-Hiennecey. I found that Mrs. Martin was well qualified to teach English.

And then Mrs. Martin really surprised me. Perhaps I had not made it clear to you before, she said, but I happen to have degrees in music just as high as the former teacher -- and I can make them higher by going on, during summer vacations, to complete work at Juilliard [America's highest-ranking musical college in New York], for my master's degree in music. I'LL be happy to take over the music department if you'd like, besides teaching English and being librarian.

And so we started the second year of Ambassador College on half-schedule, with classes only three days a week. It was that or let the college die.

Three New Students Arrive

No effort had been made to recruit any additional students, due to this situation. However, one student showed up -- a fellow from Wisconsin, named Kenneth C. Herrmann.

A very few weeks after the 1948-49 school year had started, the front doorbell of our home rang one morning while I was shaving. My wife told me that two young radio listeners from Arkansas were there to see me. I hurried down.

They introduced themselves as Marion and Raymond McNair. They had been working in the apple harvest up in Washington, but wanted to swing by Pasadena and see me on the way home.

We had a nice talk, and I was surprised to learn how much they knew about the Bible. I was intensely interested in hearing of their experience leading to this biblical knowledge, and how they came to listen to The World Tomorrow.

These boys had not had Sunday school or other religious training. They had never been taught anything about immortal souls, or going to heaven when one dies. Their very first religious training began with the Bible. They studied it daily before they were teenagers.

Some years later, they happened to hear a religious broadcast on the radio. Why, they exclaimed in surprise, that fellow is not preaching what's in the Bible! He's telling people just the opposite of what the Bible says!

This aroused them to tune to other religious programs on their radio set. They were astonished and disillusioned! It seemed that all the radio preachers were preaching a Christianity that was very contrary to the Christianity of Christ, of Paul, and of the apostles which they had been receiving out of their Bible!

Then one day they heard a program coming in from a Mexican station. They were startled in happy surprise.

Why, they exclaimed, that fellow is preaching exactly what we have been getting out of the Bible! That program was The World Tomorrow! They became steady listeners.

This experience was just one more example of what I have always said: Give a Bible to someone who has never had any religious teaching, and let him study it diligently, without any of the popular teachings of Christianity, and he will believe precisely what is proclaimed on The World Tomorrow. Yet those who do believe and proclaim the PLAIN TRUTHS of the BIBLE will be branded today as false prophets.

Well, I hope you boys will come to Ambassador College when you've finished high school, I said.

Oh, we're older than we look! came the quick answer. We've already graduated from high school.

Well, how does it happen you're not in Ambassador College, then? I asked.

Well, we supposed we couldn't afford it, they replied. Well, look! I said. This is Friday morning. Can you boys find a part-time job before tonight? I explained that college was in session only three days a week.

Yes, Sir, we can, came the immediate and decisive answer. Well, you go find that job, and report to Ambassador College Monday morning, I said.

They left. And they did find jobs. Today Mr. Raymond F. McNair is an ordained minister and Deputy Chancellor of the Pasadena campus of Ambassador College.

Crisis with Dr. B. Approaches

I have previously explained the difficulties we experienced in dealing with Dr. B., from whom we purchased the college property. He had continued to harass us. He never had intended to let us obtain permanent possession of the property. But, as the fall and winter of 1948 approached, with the college now in its second school year, the wily Dr. B. had still one more card to play-his trump card!

We had been off the air in our daily broadcasting from March until October. We had been forced to operate the college on a half-time schedule for this second school year. We had been all but knocked out.

But there were a number of conditions that now loomed as the supreme crisis of all.

While we had paid the $25,000 as rent (to be converted into a $25,000 down payment via the lease option), we had, of course, paid no interest. Neither had we paid the taxes or insurance. These accumulated amounts were all to come due on December 27, 1948. They amounted to several thous and dollars. Taxes had to be paid, retroactive for the twenty-five months. Also interest on the unpaid balance, starting at $100,000, less $1,000 each month for the twenty-five months. Insurance for the twenty-five months also became due in one lump December 27.

HOW, in our strained circumstances, were we going to raise that large sum of money by December 27? It was a frightening dilemma.

A MIRACLE Happens

Altogether it was going to require something like $17,000. It seemed an insurmountable obstacle.

I began making plans for every means that I could think of that might help raise that money. But I realized fully that nothing I could plan or do could accomplish that apparently unattainable goal. I knew I had to rely on God. Nothing but a miracle could now save God's college.

Somehow, I knew we would be delivered from this crisis -- though I could not see how. I relied primarily on fervent, continuous prayer. I decided to do everything I could plan or think of, and then trust God with the result.

It must have been along about early November that our auditor, Mr. Bolivar O'Rear, and I, found it necessary to make a trip to Washington, D.C., to apply for a tax-exempt status as a nonprofit corporation. Mr. O'Rear had been an attorney in Washington for several years. While there, we had one long conference with a former friend of his -- an attorney -- in this lawyer's office. He was sympathetic in trying to help us come up with ideas that might raise the necessary funds.

Of course, I had written a letter to all our active co-workers acquainting them with our great problem and spoken of it to our radio audience.

Then, suddenly, about November 25, a miracle really did happen!

About $3,000 came in, through the mail, in one day. Our normal daily income for the work in those days was about $500. The $3,000 that came in one day was like a fortune being rained down from heaven.

The next day, to our utter amazement, another $3,000 came in. And then the next -- and the next -- and the next. This almost dumbfounding downpour of money continued until December 15. Our total income for that December exceeded $50,000! We could hardly believe it!

WHY did it come in? We could not account for it on the basis of anything we had done. No plans or ideas or efforts of ours had brought it. There was only one explanation -- GOD SENT IT!

It seemed like God had sent us a great deal more than we needed! But we were soon to see that He had not. The college could not have been saved, had there been less. It turned out we needed considerably more money by December 27 than we had realized. Dr. B. had a $17,000 mortgage on the property that he had to pay off in order to transfer the deed to us. He was several years behind in paying taxes. Under the circumstances, the way he acted -- and considering that he was planning to prevent allowing us to exercise our option -- unless we had some $15,000 to $20,000 to temporarily loan him, IN ADDITION to the money we had to pay him, he could have beaten us and we should have lost the property, after all!

But God knew precisely what we NEEDED -- and He SENT IT! Dr. B. Holds Out

We still owed a few thous and dollars in back teachers' salaries we had as yet been unable to pay. By December 15, when we were assured of having enough money to pay off Dr. B., we paid these back salaries. And I was human enough to enjoy paying FIRST those who had been loyal and were still with us -- even though we did send out the checks to the others later that same day!

We took no chances on coming up late in paying off Dr. B. We put the full amount due him in escrow on December 15. But he made no move whatever toward signing the papers for the transaction.

As the days passed, and it began to appear that he was going to try to avoid signing, we began to take action. Through the escrow company we learned that there was a mortgage against the property. It was past due -- long past due. I contacted the man who held the mortgage. I told him the situation.

He was sympathetic. If Dr. B. refuses to sign, and tries to block our exercising the option, I asked, will you be willing to SELL that mortgage to us?

Yes, I certainly will, he said. And I'll tell you what you can then do. Since he is so far in arrears with unpaid taxes, once you own the mortgage, you can foreclose and take the property away from him.

I did not want to take the property in that manner. But it was reassuring to know that God had now put me in position to do so.

Finally, Dr. B. said he would sign if we would loan him a few thous and dollars, in addition to the money we had deposited to pay accumulated interest, taxes, and insurance. We arranged to do this, and then pay him $750 per month in payments instead of the full $1,000, for the next year or two -- until in this manner he had paid us back.

Dr. B. thereupon signed -- but he was still tricky. The property was held as a joint-tenancy between him and his aged sister. His signature was not sufficient without his sister's also.

FORCING Dr. B. to Sign

That year, December 27, fell on a Monday. On Wednesday, the 22nd, we were having another conference in the office of our attorneys, Judge Morton and Mr. Wannamaker. They suggested that Dr. B., knowing every trick of the law, might contend that our option had to be exercised at least a day before December 27, in order to have been exercised ON December 27 Probably no judge would so interpret it, but they advised against taking chances.

Therefore, they advised that we force Dr. B., if possible, to have his sister's signature on the papers before 1 p.m. on Friday, the 24th, or we should start suit against him in Superior Court promptly at 1 p.m. on Friday, withdrawing all the money out of escrow and depositing it in the Superior Court.

They began a feverish activity of preparing the legal papers to file suit, working late Wednesday night, and almost all of Thursday night, to have everything ready by 1 p.m. Friday.

Friday morning came. By 11 a.m. Dr. B. had made no move to have his sister sign. We had the papers she was to sign, and decided to go to their home with the papers.

About noon, or a little after, on that Friday, Mr. O'Rear and I drove out to the home of Dr. B. He claimed his sister was upstairs in bed, too ill to be disturbed.

I knew he was not telling the truth. It was now less than an hour before Mr. Wannamaker would be on his way to Superior Court.

The chips were down. This was the final crisis MINUTE! All right, Dr. B., I said. Either your sister signs in the next thirty minutes, or I'll tell you what's going to happen. I have exhausted my patience on you. I have suffered your harassment now for two years. I'm going to end it HERE AND NOW!

Unless I telephone my attorneys that your sister has signed, before 1 o'clock, it will be TOO LATE -- they will be on the way to file suit in Superior Court. All the money will be withdrawn from escrow yet this afternoon, and placed with the judge. We know you NEED that money to live. We will then seek for every delay the law allows. My lawyers tell me we can delay action on the suit for years. Meanwhile we remain in possession of the property. The college will go right along. You will receive NO PAYMENTS whatsoever.

But that is not all. I have negotiated with Mr. Blank to purchase the trust deed on this property which you owe him. I have the money on hand to purchase it. Then, because you have violated the terms of the mortgage, by not paying taxes, I shall immediately FORECLOSE on you. In that manner we will take complete ownership of the property by paying only the amount of this mortgage. We will freeze you out completely. Once this is done, we can withdraw our suit, and recover all the money.

Dr. B., you are a smart lawyer. You know I can do this -- and I WILL! It's absolutely ridiculous, but here I am now, PLEADING with you to let us go on PAYING YOU for this property, instead of foreclosing on you and taking it away from you -- but we are now in position to do just that. It's almost 12:30. At 1 o'clock it will be too late!

Dr. B. was BEATEN! MARTHA! he called at the stairway, come on down right away! We've got to HURRY! We have to hunt up a notary public to witness your signature before 1 o'clock.

His sister was already dressed and ready. She had not been in bed, or ill, as he had said. We drove quickly to a neighboring business street and found a notary public.

At 12:30 -- just thirty minutes before our attorneys would have left their office to file the suit -- I telephoned them that I had the papers all signed, sealed and delivered!

And so ended Dr. B.'s efforts to have his cake and eat it too -- that is, to take our money for the purchase of the property, and then keep the property too!

There were a few minor harassments from him after that. Had we ever been one day late in making any payment, he would have filed suit to reclaim the property immediately. But we were never a day late.

Some years later, he sold the mortgage to a bank, and long ago it was paid out and we have owned the property, CLEAR, ever since.

In due time both his sister, and then Dr. B., himself, died. Ambassador College was over its first hump.

Click on image for larger clearer view

A letter to Uncle Frank Armstrong, leading advertising writer in Iowa in his day and mentor of Herbert W. Armstrong

Ambassador College expanded significantly in 1956 with acquisition of the Merritt estate

The first four students of ambassador College at entry to main classroom building, now the library

Snow remained all day on campus in February 1949 in second year of the college. There has been no snowfall of such magnitude in Pasadena since that date

Students of the fourth year

First commencement

Richard David flanked by Mother and Father

Mr. armstrong in his office on the Ambassador College campus in what is now the library annex

A lovely sunlit room of Mayfais, now a girls dormitory, acquired in the third year of college

Faculty and students at a weekly assembly in the fifth year of Ambassador-1951-1952. Area is now a reference room in the library

A graduate seminar in the library

The radio station from which emanated The World Tomorrow Early broadcast had a music interlude, here being sung by daughter Beverly

Richard Armstrong at the controls

Office wall map with radio stations carrying The World Tomorrow broadcast flagged

Strolling across the Big Sandy, texas festival site, later to become another Ambassador campus

At the typewriter preparing a script

The first attempt to go on television in 1955 with The World Tomorrow..... Handwritten cards to prompt speaker, have long been since replaced by the teleprompter

The first attempt to go on television in 1955 with The World Tomorrow... Introductory scene used Ambassador campus as background

The first attempt to go on television in 1955 with The World Tomorrow

The first attempt to go on television in 1955 with The World Tomorrow.... The Armstrongs at a desk in a set

Herbert Armstrong often stood in the set

At a tent west of Cairo, Egypt, in 1956, with the pyramids of Giza in the background

Near Megiddo in the Galilee.

The surviving wall of the Temple Mount, Jerusalem

The passports of Herbert and Loma Armstrong and son Richard David. In the 1956 trip the Armstrongs toured throughout the middle east and much of western Europe, providing new insights for future articles and broadcasts.

On tour in Cairo

At the microphone following the extensive 1956 trip abroad

Ribbon cutting as the grounds of Abassador College, Pasadena, take on their present configuration.

The first four-color Plain Truth, with Sir Winston Churchill on the cover.

The Plain Truth matures over 30-year period

The office in Sydney, Australia, is visited by Mr. Armstrong which approves of it's character and quality

Richard David Armstrong in the London Office, keeps in touch with Pasadena headquarters

The Yule estate in Bricket Wood, Herts, England, at the time of it's purchase

Again the Yule estate in Bricket Wood, Herts, England. The main residence was renovated and became Memorial Hall, in memory of Richard David Armstrong who died in 1958

The Loma D. Armstrong Academic Center Ambassador College, Pasadena. Ambassador Hall is flanked by the new Fine Arts and Science Buildings.

Painting of Loma D. Armstrong in Ambassador Hall

Groundbreaking for the academic complex

Chapter 58

Ambassador Begins To Grow!

AMBASSADOR COLLEGE had been saved. The property originally acquired was now secured -- as long as we kept up the monthly payments.

We were over the first hump in the struggle to establish and perpetuate this forward-looking college of TOMORROW! The nerve-shattering intense ordeals were behind us. Continuous problems were to be encountered in the path ahead -- but we would cross each of these bridges as we reached them.

Half-Time Operation

The decision, born of necessity, to operate the college on a half-time schedule through the 1948-49 school year proved a blessing in disguise. It was one of those occasional self-imposed temporary setbacks.

This half-time operation reduced the college budget by almost half. Together with the miraculous fifteen day in-pouring of income in December, we were off to a comparatively good start by January, 1949. Of course that providential downpour of funds of the first half of December did not continue. After December 15, the financial income was back to normal.

During 1948 we had been able to print The Plain Truth only twice, prior to September. We had gotten out an abbreviated eight-page issue in March. But then we were put off the air on our one BIG station, and we managed only one more -- a June number -- prior to September.

By holding publication down to eight pages, we were able to issue a Plain Truth every month for the remainder of that year -- September, October, November, and December.

In 1949 I felt we should get back to the 16-page size. This was possible only by combining the first issue as a January-February number.

It still was a tight financial struggle through 1949 as evidenced by the fact that I was able to print only two more editions that entire year -- one in July, the other in November.

Part of the difficulty, however, was due to the fact that more and more duties were demanding my time. I had no editorial help whatever. Up until this time, and even another year or two in the future, it had been necessary for me to do 100 percent of the writing of The Plain Truth.

Our Second Land Purchase

During those first two school years of the college we had no dormitory facilities. The seven students enrolled that second year -- 1948-49 -- were obliged to rent rooms around town. But in May, 1949, the first addition to the original two and one-quarter-acre campus came our way.

Adjoining this original bit of campus grounds, on the north, was the stately 28-room Tudor-style building called Mayfair, with 200 feet of frontage on Terrace Drive. It added about one and three-quarters acres, giving us a campus of four acres, with magnificently landscaped grounds.

The Mayfair grounds were not in the most desirable condition. Soon after acquiring them, we completely relandscaped them. Most of the work was done by our students, using a rented bulldozer to completely recontour the sloping grounds, bringing them into harmony with the original plot.

For some two years Mayfair had been used as a rooming house. Most of the tenants had leases running another year. We were able to obtain only partial possession during 1949.

But by that autumn, after two years of rooming off campus, our students were able to take up residence ON CAMPUS! We began to feel like a real college!

That autumn the student enrollment increased to TWELVE. I have said quite a little heretofore, about TWELVE being the number of organized BEGINNINGS. For one thing, that was the first year the college had an organized student council. The first student body president of Ambassador College was my son Richard David (Dick).

Among the five new students that fall was Roderick C. Meredith. Although he was a new student with us, he was a transfer from a college in Missouri, and consequently rated as a sophomore.

Our men students took up residence on third floor Mayfair in September, 1949. We were not yet prepared to feed students. During that school year the men really roughed it, preparing their own meals in a dark, depressing, foreboding basement room in Mayfair. It had been painted in a conglomeration of deep yellow, dark green, red, and black. In a later year, that room was modernized into a new-looking office, and served as an editorial room for The Plain Truth for some years.

Mrs. Annie M. Mann, who had moved to Pasadena from Eugene, Oregon, had been preappointed to become our House Mother for girls. She had been awaiting the time when we would have girl students and a girls' student residence. During the 1948-49 school year she and Betty Bates, our only girl student the first three years, had roomed together off campus. Now, however, they took up residence in one of the vacant ground-floor rooms in Mayfair. Most of the other Mayfair rooms still were occupied by lease-holding guests.

During 1949 we continued on our one superpower station, XEG, the program beaming out over most of North America at 8 p.m., Central Standard time, seven nights a week. We had also added another border station, XEMU, with the time of 6:30 p.m. every night. But though this station had a splendid dial-spot, 580, it never brought much of a response. But by November that year, the program had gone on a good 5,000-watt Chicago station, WAIT. It was only once a week -- 10 a.m., Sundays, but the response was good. The rating agencies showed The World Tomorrow the second highest rated program in Chicago during our half-hour.

During 1949 The World Tomorrow was still being heard over only nine stations. Yet the work as a whole continued to grow that year, its usual 30 percent over the year before.

1950 -- Still Tough Going

Although we had gotten over what I called the first hump by January, 1949, the upward climb of this work of God was still TOUGH GOING. It was not easy. Jesus Christ never promised easy going.

Through 1950 I do not remember any crises so severe that the very existence of the work hung in the balance. I had, at last, learned the lesson of RELAXED FAITH. I no longer let the problems we met put me under such an ordeal as I had gone through previously.

Now I was able to cast the burdens on the living CHRIST, meanwhile leaping to action to pray intensively for guidance, and to energetically DO whatever was in my own power to do -- but in a FAITH that was relaxed and confident, trusting God with the results.

During 1950 I was able to publish only FOUR issues of The Plain Truth -- in February, March, April, and August. As an evidence of the tight financial squeeze of the year, all four editions had to be reduced to a mere eight pages once again. Of course, as stated above, part of this was due to the heavy load on my shoulders of doing all of the writing, in addition to the many other responsibilities, now fast increasing.

For those first three years of the college, I taught all of the Bible and theology classes -- and that meant three classes the third year!

And Now, FOURTH College Year

When college classes began, early September, 1950, ten new students had enrolled. For the first time, we had a full FOUR-YEAR COLLEGE. The first year we had only a Freshman class. The second, a Freshman and Sophomore; and the third, we added a Junior Class. There had been the pioneer FOUR students the first year. There were seven the second, and twelve the third.

September, 1950, brought five new girl students. Until then, we had had only the one girl student -- Betty Bates. Now we had six girls and sixteen men. Now we had an enrollment of TWENTY-TWO!

And that autumn, for the first time, we had a real student residence on the campus. Yes, the college was growing up! To officials of any other college or university it would have seemed still to be smaller than almost any college had ever been. But to us, with only four the first year, and only an even dozen students the third year, the twenty-two -- with, at last, six girl students -- seemed like we were becoming a real college!

Now Mrs. Mann was our full-fledged House Mother, with six girls under wing. We had brought down from Oregon a nutritional cook, as we called her. Now we had FULL POSSESSION, for the first time, of Mayfair.

We had closed off the rear stairway so that it bypassed the second floor, and proceeded from ground floor to the third. All our men were housed that year on third-floor Mayfair. It was like a separate building altogether from the second floor. Our six girl students, and, in addition, the apartment we had done over for Mrs. Mann, occupied the second floor. The ground floor was dining and lounging.

Since we had operated on half-schedule in the 1948-49 year, it had been made virtually impossible for students to graduate in four years. However, by taking a heavier-than-normal load the last two years, both Herman Hoeh and Betty Bates graduated in June, 1951 -- completing their college work in four years.

First Graduation

That was another milestone attained. Our first commencement exercises were held, in our beautiful Garden Theater, on the last Friday of May, in 1951.

In order to qualify to confer degrees, the college had to be separately incorporated, show a minimum of $50,000 invested in college facilities, equipment, and library, and be officially empowered by the State of California to confer degrees. This, too, was hurdling another major milestone.

Until this time, Ambassador College had been operated as an activity of the Radio Church of God. But by May, 1951, we had managed to meet all of the state's requirements, and to be approved, and empowered by the state to confer degrees.

Small as we really were, we ourselves began to feel that our college was GROWING UP! It was a real THRILL!

Athletic Field Acquired

In November, 1950, our third property acquisition was achieved in a rather dramatic manner.

For some time, we had had our eyes on a camellia nursery, across Terrace Drive to the east of our original campus plot. I had visualized it as some day becoming our athletic field.

Meanwhile, Mr. Hulett C. Merritt, the multi-millionaire capitalist who owned the second estate north of Mayfair, had been moving onto several properties he owned in our immediate vicinity, a number of large old houses.

Several large houses, or frame apartment houses, along the right-of-way then being cleared for the new Hollywood Freeway, were being condemned. Mr. Merritt had been able to buy them at a very low sum. For some months large-scale house movers had been moving several of those monstrous frame structures to Pasadena, setting them on these vacant lots. In one or two cases, the structures had been actually cut in two, moved, and then joined back together again.

I think that Mr. Merritt had not counted quite the total cost. He probably obtained the houses for almost nothing. But he was not able to simply put them down on his vacant properties for nothing. He ran up against the very stiff Pasadena building codes. By the time he had constructed solid foundations under them, and brought plumbing and electric wiring and other services up to Pasadena codes, he probably had a lot more money invested in them than he had expected.

In any event, I learned that the owner of the camellia nursery was receptive to selling. Immediately we almost shuddered at the thought that possibly Mr. Merritt might purchase that plot of ground and move more of those old houses on it -- thus wrecking our hopes of an athletic field.

One Sunday morning I happened to be in our administration building, and a real estate broker, who had a listing of the camellia nursery, came in. The afternoon before, he said, he had been informed that a $50,000 check had been deposited with another real estate broker who also had the property listed, as full purchase price for the nursery plot, plus four other houses and lots. Three of the houses were over on Green Street, just across Terrace Drive from Mr. Merritt's fabulous mansion. One was on Camden Street to the east of Terrace Drive.

This $50,000 cash was to be put into escrow at a bank on Monday afternoon. The real estate broker said he would like to see the college acquire it if we were able. However, if we needed terms, and lacked the cash, we'd have to pay a higher price, and move fast.

I'll pay you $60,000, I said at once, with $5,000 now, to go into escrow tomorrow morning, as soon as the bank opens, and the balance on terms we can work out. Is it a deal?

It's a deal, he said. I'm sure the owners will accept. All right then, I said, let's move fast. I will have a quorum of our board of trustees here in this office by 2 o'clock this afternoon, and I'll have a $5,000 check ready. Can you have the necessary papers drawn up to put the deal into escrow by that time -- and can you get the owner and his wife here to sign?

He felt sure he could. He did. In our hurried special board meeting the transaction was approved. The owners signed the papers with us.

Next afternoon, when the other broker went to the escrow department with his $50,000 check, he found the property had been bought right out from under him.

I was expecting a furious call from Mr. Merritt. I was not dis appointed. Late that afternoon he was on the telephone. Now you look here, Mr. Armstrong, he said. You're the first man that ever got the jump on me and beat me in a business deal. I'm glad you got that nursery property, because I know you wanted that for an athletic field. But what in blazes do you want with these lots down here on Green Street?

Why, it was simply just one complete package deal, I said. We had to take the whole thing to get the athletic field.

Mr. Merritt wanted me to come over to see him. Those fellows charged you too much for these Green Street properties, he said. Now I'll take them off your hands. You paid $30,000 for them. You shouldn't have paid over $25,000. So, tell you what I'll do. I will DONATE to your college $10,000, and my wife will donate $10,000. We can deduct that on our income tax report. Then you sell me those four properties for $10,000 cash. That way you get your entire $30,000 back, and you've paid only $30,000 for the athletic field.

I'll consult my tax attorney, I replied, but I'm sure the Internal Revenue people will not approve a $20,000 deductible donation from you, when, in actual fact, the entire $20,000 reverts back to you, in the form of this property.

But Mr. Merritt remained adamant. This was in November, or December. Along about the following March or April, a real estate salesman came into my office.

I understand you own those houses down on Green Street, he said. Would you be willing to list them? I think maybe I could find a buyer.

Immediately I deduced that Mr. Merritt sent him. No, I wouldn't sell them, I replied. We need them for college dormitories. And besides, if I ever sold them to anybody it would be to our neighbor Mr. Merritt.

Well, he said a little sheepishly, to tell you the truth, it was Mr. Merritt who sent me here.

For years we used those houses for men's dormitories, then we tore them down. They were getting too old for use. Today those properties form a beautifully landscaped entrance to our new four-story Hall of Administration.

Chapter 59

First Fruits of Right Education

AFTER THE purchase of the camellia nursery, and the Green Street properties, we felt that Ambassador College was really on its way!

The camellia nursery would give us an athletic field. It was small -- there would not be space for a quarter-mile track, a stadium, or football field. But there was sufficient ground for an eighth-mile running track, and two new tennis courts. There was also room for the pole vault and broad jump, and space for the high jump, and the shotput.

Then the Green Street houses could be converted into men's dormitories. Mayfair could be made exclusively a girls' student residence.

We felt that, with a classroom building, an administration building, both men's and women's residences on campus, and an athletic field, even though small, we were coming to have a college campus.

First FRUITS of College

During 1950 I had been able to issue only four numbers of The Plain Truth -- and they were all reduced to mere eight-page numbers. I have stated before that one reason was my personal inability to fully execute all the fast-growing responsibilities of this expanding work in mere twenty-four-hour days.

By the autumn of 1950 I was having to teach FOUR different classes in theology, and now three hours each class. That meant twelve hours of teaching each week.

Up to this time I had written every word that went into The Plain Truth. I had been doing a half-hour broadcast seven days a week.

The early years in Eugene, Oregon, had resulted in the raising up of several small churches in the Pacific Northwest, through evangelistic campaigns I had conducted. But there were no pastors to minister to those churches. Only two remained -- in Eugene and in Portland.

All these years the broadcasting work was expanding. By the end of 1942 it had grown to a national audience. This necessitated my absence from Eugene and Portland much of the time beginning with 1943, and all of the time after April, 1947, when we moved to Pasadena.

The whole work was a one-man ministry in those years. In my absence, attendance at Eugene dwindled from around one hundred to about thirty. You know what the Israelites got into when God called Moses away from them for just forty days at Mount Sinai; the people abandoned God and made for themselves an idol.

... As for this Moses, they said, ... we wot not what is become of him. And then, in effect, Come on, let us make an idol god of our own to worship.

At Eugene, three would-be leaders said, in effect: As for this Herbert Armstrong, we wot not what has become of him. Come on, let us make an idol god of our own to worship in the form of a local social club, like all the worldly churches. And so even the thirty members remaining were split into two differing camps.

The Portland and the Vancouver, Washington, churches had consolidated into the one church at Portland. And even that had diminished to eleven or twelve members.

A one-man ministry could not maintain several local churches, an expanding broadcasting work, editing and writing all the articles for a fast-growing magazine, teach four college classes, and act as executive head of a growing college, without something slipping backward somewhere.

But 1951 was the year that produced the first fruits of the new college.

In April of that year we began the first activity toward an enlarged Plain Truth. I was still unwilling to publish, in The Plain Truth, articles written by students. Yet something had to be done.

A new idea was born. The Plain Truth circulation had grown to more than 50,000 copies, and it was too costly to publish every month on our income of that period. That, combined with the fact I simply could not find time to write the entire edition every month, by myself alone, forced the new idea.

I decided to completely scrap the entire mailing list! We would start building a new mailing list from scratch. That would solve half the problem -- the lack of funds to publish a sixteen-page magazine every month.

Twelve years before I had started a second magazine, called The Good News. It was to have been a church membership organ, edited exclusively for baptized church members. The Plain Truth was to continue as the general magazine for as many of the general public as would request it. But at that time -- February, 1939 -- I had been unable to continue publication of The Good News beyond the first issue! The reason? Same reason -- lack of funds, and inability of ONE MAN to do so much.

But now, twelve years later, I decided to bring The Good News back to life. It would circulate, at the start, only to co-workers whose tithes and offerings made this growing work possible.

If we could no longer afford to offer The Plain Truth to the entire radio audience, it seemed to me imperative that we provide, at least, a regular monthly publication for those who voluntarily financed God's work, and Ambassador College. And our students could share with me the burden of writing the articles.

Consequently, in April, 1951, The Good News was reborn! Now, for the first time, our students began to make active contributions to the activities of this expanding work!

The New GOOD NEWS

The leading article, beginning on the front cover of the April, 1951, Good News, written by me, expressed the situation.

Here is a condensation of what it said: Quote from that article: A new idea is born! The Good News is re-born!

With the turn of the war in Korea world events speed up in the chaotic plunge to oblivion! And beginning now, the all-important work of God also must speed up! The pace must be accelerated! It must expand now to dynamic WORLDWIDE ACTIVITY!

It is later than we think! When God first started Ambassador College, many brethren and co-workers lacked faith. They couldn't see God's hand in it. Some felt your pastor's duty was solely to preach the gospel to the world -- not realizing that one man alone can't do it all!

They had forgotten that Jesus, Peter and Paul surrounded themselves with specially God-called men whom they trained to assist them in their great mission.

Some said, 'Why, there isn't time! It will be four years before the first students graduate, and even then they will still be just youths without maturity or actual experience.

But there was, and still is, enough time -- though there is not a day to lose. The end of this age can't come until this very gospel of the kingdom has been preached and published in all the world as a witness to all nations(Matt. 24:3, 14).

Students Now Ready

Our students have been gaining actual experience during their college years!

By their fruits we know they have been called of God for their important parts in this great commission of Christ. They are trained and ready. They are consecrated and Spirit-led.

Already more than one hundred and fifty, brought to repentance and conversion through this work, have been baptized by these competent disciples (and the word 'disciple' means student, or learner).

It is already ably demonstrated that God made no mistake when He started Ambassador College!

The New Idea

And now, with this issue, A NEW IDEA is born. Through Ambassador College students, The Good News is re-born! With this issue, our students launch a new activity in Christ's ministry -- and at the same time, a new college activity.

It was back in February, 1939 -- twelve years ago -- that with only Mrs. Armstrong's help, from a little stuffy inside office without windows or ventilation in Eugene, Oregon, the first issue of The Good News was printed -- on a second-hand mimeograph ....

But the commission to 'feed my sheep' is second to the great commission, 'This gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world' One man alone could not carry on a campaign of evangelism then expanding local to national, and conduct a personalized ministry to so many at the same time. And so no other issues of The Good News were published -- until now.

But now, at long last, The Good News is re-born, as one of the first fruits of Ambassador College -- one of the evidences that this college was necessary.

But, even with the editorial help of students, finances permitted the publication of only four sixteen-page issues during the remainder of 1951 -- plus one sixteen-page Plain Truth, issued October, 1951 -- written wholly by me.

Still Struggling Upward

All this history, in retrospect, about the struggle to publish The Plain Truth, will remind the reader, once again, that it has been a long, hard, and persevering upward struggle to bring God's work to its present position of worldwide activity, power, and influence.

But back, for a moment, to this April, 1951, Good News. In it appeared the very first article by Herman L. Hoeh we had ever published -- and even this was not -- yet -- in The Plain Truth. Its caption sounds, to me today, rather tame compared to many he has written since. It was Are Good Manners Good? It had to do with the right or wrong of etiquette.

The radio log shows that, at that time, The World Tomorrow was being broadcast on only seven stations: XEG, seven nights a week; a local Pasadena station, KALI, at 7:30 seven mornings a week; and all others were Sunday only -- stations WAIT, Chicago; XERB, Southern California; KXL, Portland, Oregon; KVI, Seattle; and XENT, Mexico, just below the Texas border.

In the second issue of this reborn Good News appeared the very first article we ever published under the by-line of Roderick C. Meredith. It was the lead article starting on the front cover: College Atmosphere at Ambassador.

In the November, 1951, number, my picture appeared -- for the first time in the eighteen years of this work. The caption at the top of the page was You Asked for It -- followed by this sub-caption: Ten thous and of you have demanded Mr. Armstrong's picture. For the first time in the 18 years of this work, he has finally consented. Here are four pages of pictures of Mr. and Mrs. Armstrong, faculty and students, and the campus of Ambassador College. There were thirty separate pictures -- mostly of faculty members, students, and campus scenes.

Why Picture Finally Published

I remember how it came about that my picture appeared. For many years I had not even permitted a picture to be taken of me. If anyone came around with a camera, I ducked, dodged, or ran. But when Mrs. Armstrong and I went to Europe in 1947, it was obligatory that passport photos be taken.

We had arrived in Washington, D.C., one morning. We had to obtain passports and vis as, and take the train next afternoon for New York. We hurried, first thing that morning in Washington, to a photograph studio for passport photos. We had to have these before applying for passports.

Those photographs were more than four years old by November, 1951. But they were all I had, except a few camera shots I had finally allowed to be snapped after our first college commencement exercises on June 15 of that same year.

WHY did I refuse, prior to this time, to be shot by a camera -- or to have my picture published? No scriptural reason, certainly. It was merely my own personal feeling in the matter.

I reasoned this way: God had called me to preach His gospel -- not show off my person. It was Christ's MESSAGE I sought to focus attention on -- not myself. In my preconversion years I had been vain, egotistical, conceited. I knew full well that God had brought me low, especially in an economic way -- to crush out the ego, and to bring humility. Consequently, from the time of conversion, I did my best to keep down the SELF.

But WHAT, then, changed the attitude -- induced willingness to allow pictures to be published? It was a letter I received from a radio listener. I can't quote that letter word for word -- but it said, in effect: What have you got to hide, Mr. Armstrong? Why do you refuse to let us listeners know what you look like? Are you trying to cover up something? Suppose you attend a church service, and the pastor HIDES behind the pulpit. Suppose he lets the congregation hear his voice, but he hides his face. Wouldn't you get suspicious? Wouldn't you think he was covering up something? When I go to church, I want to SEE what the preacher looks like, as well as to listen to his sermon. A man's character shows in his face. Are you ashamed of yours? WHY WON'T YOU PUBLISH YOUR PICTURE?

THAT DID IT! I simply could not answer that man's argument any way except to let him -- and all our readers -- know what I looked like. So, in this November, 1951, Good News, I came out of hiding, so to speak!

AT LAST! Publishing Monthly

The results of the college were beginning to show. Without it the work never could have expanded much beyond its status in the forties.

In 1952, for the first time in our history, we were able to publish a sixteen-page magazine every month -- twelve full issues! e rapid development of students -- and, now, our first graduates -- made this possible. Ten of these issues were of The Good News. But the June and August numbers were The Plain Truth.

The very first time that any articles, written by someone other than myself, appeared in The Plain Truth, was the issue of August, 1952. Reporting from London, articles were published under the by-lines of Richard D. Armstrong and Herman L. Hoeh.

In a sense, that was the very BEGINNING of the larger, regularly published Plain Truth of today.

The following month The Good News was published. The lead article, starting on the front cover, was by Richard D. Armstrong, written from Paris. This number contained also an article written from Frankfurt, Germany, by Herman L. Hoeh.

This was the first tour abroad taken by Ambassador graduates. It was the high-spot of Dick Armstrong's life, up to that time.

Speaking Like a Native

For years, seeing Paris had been the great dream of my son Dick's life. He had taken his preliminary work in the French language while in high school at Eugene, Oregon.

One policy I had been determined to set for Ambassador College had to do with teaching foreign languages. I wanted them taught so thoroughly that a student would learn to speak the language he pursued precisely as that language is spoken natively in its own country -- without any accent whatever.

French has always been taught here by men who grew up in France or French-speaking Switzerland. Dick took to French as a duck takes to water.

Actually we have learned that some students have the knack of adapting themselves to a foreign language. Others have no such aptitude, and probably could never learn to speak such a language natively -- unless they had started learning at about age six.

Under old Professor Mauler-Hiennecey, Dick became very proficient after his four college years. It was the fulfillment of his life's dream when, near graduation time, 1952, he learned he was really going to be sent to Paris after graduation.

Dick still had enough boy in him to want to see if he could pass himself off in France as a native Frenchman. In Paris he bought a beret, dressed like a Frenchman, and sallied forth to see if he would be accepted as a native.

He was! It was a great thrill to him. Later, in 1954, Mrs. Armstrong and I were being driven by Dick in his British Hillman-Minx car from Paris to Luxembourg to visit our radio station there. It was a hot afternoon. Mrs. Armstrong and I were thirsty, so we decided to stop at the next town for a Coca-Cola. Dick drove us up to a soft-drink parlor. He needed to fill the fuel tank with petrol, so he let us out saying he would join after gassing up.

In the soft-drink parlor we had a terrible time making the proprietor understand what we wanted. Coca-Cola may be everywhere, as their commercials and advertisements say, but this Frenchman simply could not understand our way of saying it. Finally I pointed to a Coca-Cola sign I found on a wall. He nodded assent and served us.

In five or ten minutes Dick drove up, parked outside, and strolled in. He began talking to the proprietor.

I don't understand! said the proprietor, in French. You are a Frenchman; these people seem to be your parents -- but they are Americans; and your car is English with a British tag on it. It's all confusing! he exclaimed with a French shrug.

He was SURE that Dick was a Frenchman! Then how could Americans be his parents? All this gave Dick very great satisfaction. And me, too -- for here I had EVIDENCE that Ambassador College taught French so students could speak it natively, without accent!

Chapter 60

A Giant Leap to Europe!

WE NEED, now, to go back a few years, to fill in some interesting parts of the story concerning the opening of Ambassador College in Pasadena.

The reader will remember that a few of the church members at Eugene opposed the founding of the college. When I signed the lease-and-option contract to purchase the first two-and-one-quarter-acre block of our college campus, they screamed Armstrong extravagance!

SAVING by Extravagance

And yet, we were actually being paid $100 per month for the privilege of becoming owner of this $100,000 estate!

Here is how it worked out. Our office staff had finally enlarged at Eugene to a payroll of fifteen people. The office space had expanded until we were paying $350 per month rent. Also I was having to spend money for the broadcast line between my office and Portland -- and also for the frequent trips then necessary to Hollywood for recording. But, most of all, the fees for recording were running up to several hundred dollars per month.

When the new college was opened I went, for a few months at first, from Pasadena to Hollywood to record the program. But within a very short time we had remodeled the northwest corner of the second floor of our library-classroom building into our own radio studio. We purchased two secondhand recording lathes. My son Dick became our first radio studio operator. We began making our own recordings. The only cost, now, was the slight amount of electric power, and the cost of the blank acetate discs.

The savings -- actual reductions in necessary expenditures for operation of the broadcast work -- amounted to $1,100 per month! That figure I do remember -- definitely!

Out of that saving we paid the $1,000 per month payments on the property, and came out $100 per month to the good!

It was one or two years after we began doing our own broadcast recording in our own studio that tape recording came along. The more cumbersome electrical transcription method was made obsolete. We purchased two good quality tape recorders at the start. Later we installed the large top-quality Ampex recorders -- the same equipment used in large network headquarters. Gradually, as the number of stations increased, more and more of these had to be added.

The radio studio served also as a classroom for students. Plain Truth Resumed Monthly

During 1952, you will remember, for the first time in the history of this work, we had been able to publish a sixteen-page magazine every month. Ten of those were The Good News, which had been introduced as a temporary stopgap, written and edited by students as well as myself.

The radio log published in the January, 1953, issue shows that we were by then on eleven radio stations. We had gone back on two more of the superpower border stations -- XELO and XERB, beside XEG. The number of stations was growing gradually. Every phase of the work was growing.

During the year 1953 we were able to publish a 16-page magazine every month except December. The first five issues were all of The Good News. However, by this time Herman L. Hoeh, my son Dick, Roderick C. Meredith and others had graduated, and had sufficient experience writing articles that I felt there was no need to continue The Good News as a college magazine for co-workers, substituting for The Plain Truth, any longer.

Beginning the June number, 1953, I began once again to offer The Plain Truth, over the air, to all listeners. I now had the editorial help of a handful of college graduates and advanced students. So, it might be said that the present subscription list of The Plain Truth actually began with the issue of June, 1953.

Broadcast to Europe

But some very tremendous leaps of progress were taken with the broadcasting program during 1953.

Beginning the first Thursday in that year, which was January 1, The World Tomorrow leaped to EUROPE. The door of the most powerful radio station on earth swung open. The same gospel Jesus Christ taught His disciples went to Europe with power for the first time in eighteen and one-half centuries!

That gospel was first preached by the Apostle Peter on the day of Pentecost, A.D. 31. Nineteen years later, A.D. 50, A DOOR was opened to the Apostle Paul to preach that gospel in Europe for the first time.

Just as a DOOR was opened for the gospel to go to Europe, in the first century, after nineteen years, so a DOOR was opened for the same gospel to go to Europe in our time, after nineteen years!

For the past few years, as I now write in January, 1964, I have been assuming we started on Radio Luxembourg on the first MONDAY in 1953. Looking into the radio log of The Good News for February, 1953, I am reminded that we did not get to start on the medium wave band, known as 208, on Radio Luxembourg at that time. That came later. We started on a long-wave band, and the time was 4:15 to 4:45 p.m., Thursdays.

The lead front-page article in that February number was captioned NOW ON THE AIR -- OVER ALL EUROPE!

Another article reported that on the preceding December 20 (1952), five young ministers had been fully ordained.

Then it was reported in the next paragraph, that two more of our young ministers will be fully ordained following their graduation from the college January 30, 1953.

When it was written only five had been ordained. But, before the magazine was printed and reached its readers, the other two also had been ordained.

Was I crazy to start a liberal arts coeducational college? There was no fund of several million dollars for such a project. There was no fund of even several hundred dollars. For this purpose, there was no fund -- period! At all!

What There Was -- and Wasn't

There was no endowment. There was no sponsoring philanthropist.

There was opposition. There were obstacles. They piled up mountain high. There were problems, seemingly unsolvable.

But there was something else. There was vision. There was clear and definite realization of the imperative need. And there was faith and determination; a sense of mission, a fired-up zeal and energy that refused to be defeated or to quit.

I think most anyone would say that a man would be either crazy or a fool to attempt to found a college under those circumstances. It costs money to operate a college. No college can finance its operations by income from tuitions and fees. These pay for only a part -- and often a small part -- of the costs of conducting a college.

State colleges and universities are financed by the taxes of the people. Privately owned colleges are financed by large endowments, and contributions from successful and prosperous alumni, by foundations, and commercial or industrial corporations who have an interest in what such colleges can do for them.

We had to pay taxes, not receive them. That is, until the college was established, incorporated, and recognized by the state a few years later. Then we were granted tax exemption on properties used exclusively for college educational purposes. We had no endowment or hope of any. We had no alumni, wealthy or otherwise. No large business corporations had any interest in supporting our kind of college.

We had a radio broadcast -- but that cost money. We had nothing to sell, made no appeal for contributions. Rather we constantly offered absolutely FREE literature. We published a monthly magazine -- whenever funds permitted, only it was not coming out monthly then, because funds did not permit! There was no subscription price -- no advertising revenue.

Here we had no visible source of income. No one owed us anything. We had no accounts receivable. We were on the giving end, with no assurance except faith there would be anything to give.

You might try this experiment. Go interview one hundred college or university presidents. Briefly state the circumstances given above. Ask each what he would think of any man who would attempt to found a new college -- especially a man who was devoid of any experience whatsoever as an educator -- under those conditions. I'm quite sure every apprais al -- if each college president did not call you a fool for even asking such a question -- would be that such a man would be either an idiot, a fool, or insane.

WHY the College Succeeded!

But, of course, there is one other factor. One I'm equally certain none of these college presidents would grasp.

This is the WORK OF GOD! And the work of God required a college.

That statement, too, would, of course, be foolishness to such men. I knew there had to be the college or GOD'S WORK could not grow. Therefore I knew it was God's will. And if it were His will, I had the power of the limitless UNIVERSE back of it! I had the assurance of FAITH!

During our first college year, early in 1948, I attended a convention of the college and university presidents of the nation, in Chicago. Beside general plenary sessions, there were morning and afternoon special group meetings most days, during the convention. I attended the meetings of the group devoted to study and discussion of college financing -- attended mostly by presidents, with a few controllers or business managers, of privately owned institutions.

I already knew that most privately owned colleges faced extreme financial difficulties. These sessions put loud emphasis on that knowledge. Many of these college heads were desperate. All or nearly all wanted federal government aid, and devoted most of the discussions to ideas and methods for obtaining it. For several sessions I remained silent and listened. In the end, however, I think I convinced them they didn't really want government help after all. It would mean, inevitably, government supervision, regulation and interference as well. When government, big business, or foundations put large chunks of money in a college, they first assure themselves that they are buying policy-making prerogatives. The institution is no longer free.

Ambassador College never has, and never will, sell out to such influences. Ambassador College is not a Bible school. The campuses are not religious colleges. They are straight educational liberal arts institutions. But they are guided by GOD'S principles as those principles apply to general cultural education. And they rely solely on GOD ALMIGHTY, in living faith, as their sole source of financial support! Of course, we are well aware that, if GOD sponsors and finances us, HE is going to insist upon directing our policies -- just as human government, corporations, or foundations see to it that they pretty largely direct the policies of institutions they finance. We know well that if Ambassador College departs from GOD'S ways and policies, God's financial sponsorship will stop forthwith.

But that's precisely the way we want it! And that is the real reason for the miraculous, almost incredible SUCCESS of these institutions! God Almighty will back financially -- to an extent almost beyond human belief -- any person or institution that will place himself or itself unreservedly and vigorously under His direction!

Now, of course, there have been problems -- obstacles -- oppositions -- persecutions -- setbacks. It hasn't been EASY! God doesn't make it easy to go His way. Jesus Christ taught us to count the cost! We have to learn that God does most things with us, and through us as His instruments. He only does for us what we are utterly unable to do ourselves.

We have had to fight the way through! We have had to think, to apply ourselves energetically, to drive ourselves on to the limit of our capacity. In this sense, God has let us do it -- He merely directed us! But He also empowered us where necessary, and He brought about circumstances.

God has never rained money down from heaven. While HE financed us, He has always done it through human instruments willingly yielded, even at great personal sacrifice, to serving Him -- and voluntarily -- with their tithes and offerings. Yet GOD financed us! He did it through those He could use!

That is the secret of our success. It's the way to success for anybody and everybody -- whether individual, or group, or organization! And it has developed not only these campuses -- it has developed those of us -- and in constantly increasing numbers -- who are dedicated to this great WORK OF GOD!

The College Develops

I have already covered student participation in producing The Plain Truth and The Good News, which became its temporary substitute, from April, 1951, through May, 1953. This was the real firstfruits of the college in the growing WORK OF GOD.

The growth of the GOSPEL work has directly paralleled the development of Ambassador College! Without the college, the work of thundering Christ's GOSPEL around the whole world could not have been possible. It could never have gone around the world.

It was the development of the college in Pasadena that made possible the growth of the whole gospel work!

The college in Pasadena started, remember, in October, 1947 with just four pioneer students. There were eight professors and instructors. The second college year, 1948-49, there were seven students. That was the half-time year. It was operate half-time or give up and quit. Never would we do the latter.

The third school year, 1949-50, there were twelve students -- eleven men and one girl. We felt we were now large enough to organize, for the first time, a student council. This was our first student organization.

For the year 1950-51, there were twenty-two students. The fifth college year, 1951-52, there were thirty-two students. The college was growing!

First Yearbook

At the close of the 1950-51 year, the students produced their first annual, or yearbook, The Envoy. It contained thirty-six pages -- counting the cover. Of course it was pretty thin, compared to the annuals of larger, older, established colleges. But it was a beginning. Today The Envoy is one of the finest published by any college-grade institution anywhere -- a fine book with heavy stiff covers, and printed in full color.

Where there is life, and spirit, and constant GROWTH, small beginnings mean only a START. It was the same with The Envoy as with every other phase of this dynamic, fast-growing work!

The 1952 Envoy did not grow in pages, but improved in quality. Just as The Plain Truth had its struggle through the early years, so did the student publication, The Envoy. The 1953 book was a BIG improvement, but we had to skip 1954 altogether.

However, the 1953 edition came out with a thick, heavy cover for the first time. It was all black and white -- that is, black ink only. But it contained sixty pages beside cover, and was a much improved production. The 1955 edition went to sixty-eight pages, and improved contents, especially the photography and art work. The 1956 Envoy continued the improvement, with seventy-six pages, but still black and white. By 1961 it reached two hundred pages, a much finer cover, much improved photography and design, and we were getting into color pages.

The Foreign Language Clubs

By the 1951-52 college year, extracurricular activities were getting organized. That year three foreign language dinner clubs were organized. These are dinner clubs, at which no English is spoken -- only the language of each specific club. There was the French Club, the German Club, and the Spanish Club.

They were initiated at Ambassador College in order to give the students of each language the experience of speaking and hearing that language outside of class -- in actual continuous conversation -- to help them learn to express themselves fluently in that tongue.

We in GOD'S WORK are commissioned to proclaim Christ's original gospel to ALL NATIONS. We knew, then, that this would require much printed literature in various languages, as well as called and trained ministers experienced in speaking and broadcasting fluently, and without broken accent, in the various languages. This training began the very first college year -- but the language dinner clubs began in 1951.

Other languages were later added to the curriculum at Ambassador College.

The Ambassador Clubs

In February, 1953, Mr. Jack R. Elliott, then dean of students, asked me if I would go with him as a guest to visit a businessman's Toastmasters' Club. These clubs are, I believe, worldwide. They are evening dinner speech clubs. First, several men are called on without advance notice to stand and discuss, in one or two minutes, some topic assigned by the table topics chairman. Later there are a number of prepared speeches, usually limited to about six minutes.

Mr. Elliott wanted to introduce speech clubs into Ambassador College activities, patterned after these clubs, but with a few variations adapted to our needs. We saw at once the value of such an activity at Ambassador.

In February, 1953, the first of these clubs was organized and under way. Our adaptation was called the Ambassador Club. Soon there were two such clubs on the Pasadena campus, then three, then four. In 1954, there were seven at the Pasadena campus.

These clubs have done more to develop public-speaking ability than any other activity. They are a most effective addition to our regular courses in public speaking. They teach men to think on their feet, develop personality and familiarity with world events and many important topics.

Soon the first women's club was formed. These, too, have continued to expand. I'm quite sure they are different, at Ambassador, than any other women's clubs. They have a very definite effect in the cultural development of our young women.

Campus Paper

About November, 1951, the students started the first campus paper. It is called The Portfolio. It contains college news, personal items about students, news of the progress of the work, and a certain sprinkling of campus fun. It gives students training in writing.

The Portfolio started crude and small -- mimeographed. In due time it became a real printed campus paper of quality.

Comes the Ambassador Chorale

In the college year 1951-52 we had thirty-two students. In the spring of that year, Mr. Leon Ettinger, director of the voice department in the school of music, decided to organize the students into a singing group, train them secretly at his home, and then spring the whole thing on me as a surprise!

How they all kept the secret through many weeks of rehearsals I'll never know. But they did.

At the annual spring concert of the music department -- consisting of piano and vocal solo numbers by students -- the whole group stood together, and to my amazement, sang the Fred Waring arrangement of The Battle Hymn of the Republic like veterans. Actually there was not a trained singer among them -- but they had put their whole hearts and energies into it through many weeks.

As Mr. Ettinger later wrote about it: At that time we scraped the bottom of the barrel to find talent. If you could put two notes together on an instrument or sing a little song in tune, you were on the program. When we gathered together all our resources, we had twelve singers for our little chorus.

We practiced faithfully for several months, always at Ettinger's to keep it quiet, and at last the great day arrived. At the end of the evening Mr. Ettinger announced that a new musical organization had been formed, called the Ambassador Chorale; and that, with Mrs. Ettinger at the piano, they would sing 'The Battle Hymn of the Republic,' and that they were dedicating this first performance anywhere to Mr. Herbert W. Armstrong. The years have smoothed away any slight imperfections, and we only remember that it was an absolute smash.

Actually, I remember, I was overcome with surprise, rather choked with emotion, and unable to speak.

That was the beginning of one of our outstanding activities at Ambassador College -- the Ambassador Chorale. From that small beginning it has grown into a musical organization that I feel would do credit to any college or university ten to twenty times our size.

At Last! ABC Network!

In autumn, 1953, a new door was opened -- a national radio network. For nineteen years the vision of broadcasting coast-to-coast over a great national network had been a dream -- and a hope. At last it was realized!

The November, 1953, Plain Truth carried this big-type, full-page announcement:

And now ... ABC NETWORK! The article said: GOD now opens another door -- a very great door! Perhaps this is the greatest news we have ever been privileged to announce! Beginning Sunday, October 25, The World Tomorrow went on one of the great major networks, ABC, transcontinental! This means millions of new listeners every week. It means tremendous prestige. It means approximately ninety additional radio stations. THINK OF IT! -- ninety additional radio stations -- including the great basic 50,000-watt ABC stations in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Buffalo, and other major cities. There followed the log of the ninety stations, taking the remaining two thirds of the page. There was a two-page map showing the location and area of coverage of each station -- blanketing the United States.

Of course, this network broadcasting was Sunday only! We had learned by experience that it was the DAILY broadcasting that was really effective. Of course, that was impossible over a network. But the network was a TREMENDOUS step forward.

Chapter 61

Our First Experience with Television

BY 1955 television had become the popular craze in the United States. That year there were some forty three million television sets in the United States. That year the manufacture of television sets hit an all-time peak in the U.S. -- 7,800,000 sets manufactured.

Suddenly we became frightened. Almost in a panic, we decided to make a frantic dash to put The World Tomorrow on television -- before radio went completely dead.

Rise of Television

Television has been referred to by the term one-eyed monster. Millions of people spend four, six, or eight hours a day looking into a television screen.

I first remember radio in about 1920 or 1921. I was still in the advertising business in Chicago, then. But the primitive radio sets of that time that come vaguely, in blurred focus, to my memory were little wireless sets heard only through earphones.

My earliest memory of radio, as it is today, however, dates back to 1932. At that time I was advertising manager of a daily newspaper in Astoria, Oregon. It was the very depth of the Great Depression. It had become necessary to trade advertising space for merchandise. Money, as a medium of exchange, was too scarce. I had traded advertising space for a portable radio set. It was rather large in size, for a portable. But it would receive stations from greater distances than any I have ever had since.

When we moved back to Salem, Oregon, in February 1933, and I reentered the ministry, I began, for the first time, to listen to some radio religious broadcasts.

At that time I never even remotely contemplated going on the air myself. But when I heard that time was open on our little local station in Eugene, in October, 1933, I seized the opportunity. That led to the broadcasting of The World Tomorrow, starting the first Sunday in 1934.

HOW SUDDENLY have these inventions sprung up! WHAT A DOOR Jesus Christ has opened, that HIS MESSAGE may go boldly to the world for the first time in 18½ centuries!

Even in the year 1930 there were comparatively few radio sets in America. But by 1934 most United States homes had radio.

And THAT VERY YEAR that we started on the air -- 1934 -- TELEVISION WAS INVENTED!

Think of it! Television, so common everywhere today, was not even invented until the very year The World Tomorrow STARTED ON RADIO!

My first memory of television was at radio station KNX, the CBS network headquarters in Hollywood, in 1942. The CBS network was giving a rather elementary demonstration of television -- still in the experimental stages. They then hoped to be broadcasting television after the end of the war.

We moved into our home in Pasadena in July, 1947. There were very few television sets in use then -- but television was in operation on the air.

The sets at that time were mostly little nine-inch screens. I bought one because I knew it would be developed, and felt I needed to keep abreast of progress. If it became popular like radio, I felt we might need to put the program on television.

At that time there was no network television. There were two local stations in Los Angeles -- KTLA (still on), and one other, which was then difficult to tune in at our home. The KTLA programs were all local programs. There was local wrestling, and other purely local programs.

The BIG shows, then, were still on radio over the national networks. Actually the image orthicon pickup tube was not developed until 1946 by RCA. The first network television, transcontinental, was inaugurated September 4, 1951. By 1952 we were getting several of the so-called BIG SHOWS, with the top radio talent now on television, coast to coast via the networks.

With the advent of these big-time network shows, television began to sweep the nation. In 1950 there were seventy-four million television sets in the United States. But the one year of 1955 saw the record production of 7,800,000 sets.

We Race to Television

By 1955 the big-name network shows had all left radio for television and were almost monopolizing nighttime entertainment in America. The motion picture business was on the skids. The first of the notorious big-money quiz shows, The $64,000 Question, attracted television audiences above sixty million people.

This, and one other circumstance, conspired to give us the jitters. We had learned that it was the EVERYNIGHT, or daily broadcasting, seven days a week, which proved really effective. We were spending BIG MONEY, now, on coast-to-coast network radio -- Sunday only -- one program a week. This once-a-week radio was not producing results commensurate with the DAILY broadcasting over the superpower stations. At that time we were on superpowerful WLS, Chicago, seven times per week. Also on the equally powerful WWVA, West Virginia, and we had been for some years broadcasting EVERY NIGHT on the superpower Mexican border stations. The mail response from the Sunday ONLY network broadcasting, per dollar spent, was very low by comparison with the DAILY broadcasting on these super-power stations.

There were two reasons for that. One was the fact of the DAILY broadcasting -- the other the fact that MOST of the ABC stations we were using were comparatively small-powered stations. I had found that a BIG-powered station, while it may cost two to four times as much, will bring a mail response from ten to fifty times greater than small stations.

But the main cause of our fears was the fear of television. It seemed that everybody was turning to television. It began to look like radio would soon be a thing of the past.

All these factors caused us to decide to plunge, quickly, into television. I issued advance notice of cancellation of the Sunday network broadcast.

Our advertising agent of that time brought in an associate, who was some kind of production manager at the new Television City plant of CBS, Hollywood. He was engaged as our director-producer.

Today television is using TAPE for TV recording. But at that time it had to be on FILM.

Suddenly I found that I was IN THE MOVIES! So, We're in the Movies, Now!

The campus paper, The Portfolio, for April 21, 1955, carried a front-page story about our sudden rush to get on television.

It stated: The nation is going crazy over television! Millions of viewers are sitting hunched in their TV chairs for many hours each day. They're forgetting about God's message -- forgetting about the rocking, reeling world they live in -- DRUGGING their minds with lethargy.

And so, the story continued, the truth of God will be THUNDERED at them right from their own TV sets!

Mr. Armstrong announced that the first World Tomorrow program will be seen over channel KLOR, Portland, Oregon, within a few more weeks.

Continuing, the campus paper stated: Planning far in advance, Mr. Armstrong said production will begin within a very few weeks, with other TV stations being added as fast as God provides the way.

The supreme, all-important turning point has been reached! God's work must make a shift from one medium of circulation to another. It will be no easy task.

And it certainly was NO EASY TASK! The programs would have to be filmed at a Hollywood motion picture studio. There would have to be sets. First, under direction of our producers, an artist was engaged to sketch a picture, and draw plans for these sets. We decided on two sketches.

First was a sort of stage, with a podium, and a large globe of the world suspended from the ceiling, hanging in the background. This would be emblematic of the world tomorrow! The second stage setting would be that of a private study, with bookcases, and an office desk. For this we used the same desk I had used as my desk in my office in Eugene, Oregon -- and was still using in Pasadena.

For the first set, we transported one of our semi-concert grand Steinway pianos from the college music department.

After receiving and approving the sketches, the sets were constructed in Hollywood. Meanwhile I began work on planning the type of program, and the format.

As we got into production on the first three or four programs, we began to use more and more film stock -- that is, news-events motion picture film obtained from the NBC film library in New York, to illustrate the speaking message, and after the first few programs, we dropped all singing from the program.

A Lion on the Campus

Our original idea for a format to put the program on the air was to show one or two views of our magnificently landscaped campus, as the announcer's voice announced From the beautiful campus of Ambassador College, in Pasadena, California, its President, Herbert W. Armstrong, brings you the real meaning behind today's world news, with the PROPHECIES of the WORLD TOMORROW!

Then, as the announcer's voice moved into the words with the PROPHECIES of the WORLD TOMORROW, the scene was to shift to another picture on our grounds, showing a little girl leading a big lion and a little lamb -- as a picture (Isa. 11:6-7) of tame animals in tomorrow's world.

Later we discarded this beginning, too. But we did start out with it.

But HOW were we going to show an actual motion picture of a big lion, being led by a little girl, and with a lamb alongside? THIS HAD TO BE PHOTOGRAPHED! And there are no tame lions, TODAY. There will be, tomorrow. But we had no time-machine to project ourselves into the future, take motion pictures, and then come back to the year 1955!

Immediately I thought of the famous MGM lion, so often shown in motion pictures. Our producers were able to obtain the use of this lion, for a fee, of course. He was big, powerful looking, kingly. And he was almost tame -- ALMOST, but we dared not trust that he was altogether tame!

This lion -- a real lion, in the flesh! -- was brought by his trainers over to the Ambassador College campus, and allowed to walk out of his cage in his big truck, and on the grounds, in front of Mayfair, one of our girls' student residences. He surely seemed tame. But his trainer explained that he was neither tired nor altogether tame -- he was just LAZY!

We had to obtain a permit from the City of Pasadena to have him there.

But, in planning this, we had to decide HOW we could photograph a helpless lamb beside this big beast, and a little girl leading. We decided not to risk it. Our motion-picture producers said we could do it with trick double-photography.

The producers decided the little girl must be a professional child actress. I think union requirements had something to do with this. They obtained the girl and the lamb. We photographed the lion, coached by his trainer to move slowly toward the camera. Then, after the lion was again safely in his cage, and with the camera securely locked in the same exact position in its tripod, we had the little girl and the lamb walk toward the camera, and a foot or two beside the spot where the lion had walked. Later the film editor blended the two together, so that, when it appeared on the TV screens in broadcast, we had the picture of the little girl leading the ferocious lion and the gentle little lamb.

Yes, WE WERE IN THE MOVIES, NOW! By the time we had the first few telecasts finished, on motion picture film, sound track and all, we managed to obtain time on TWELVE television stations. So, once again, our organized BEGINNING on television, like so many other beginnings, started out with TWELVE. We didn't plan it to be twelve. It just happened that was the number of stations, coast to coast, in the cities and areas we wanted, which opened to us. Also, by the time we obtained that number, we hit the limit of our budget!

Later we were on thirteen stations -- adding Hawaii -- but we started with twelve.

Camera Jitters

I think I should record, here, something of my personal experience in performing in front of professional motion picture cameras.

Emphatically, I did not take to it as a duck takes to water. Trying to preach a sermon before a cigarette-smoking Hollywood crew of about nineteen people -- cameramen, electricians, sound men, script girl, directors, helpers -- a full crew, with two television cameras trained on me -- well, it proved a NIGHTMARE!

Actually, once the bright klieg lights were turned on me, I was almost blinded, and I could see little in front of me except blackness. The powerful lights were shining straight into my face!

On our first day of shooting in the Hollywood studio, we were scheduled to go through three whole programs on the one full day of shooting.

When our announcer, Art Gilmore, announced me, I walked out to the podium. I began to try to talk. I did try! But it was no go! Just before this I had been made nervous and a little irritated by the fact our director brought a make-up man into my dressing room, and announced I had to wear make-up.

What! I exclaimed, indignantly, Me wear make-up? Never in a million years!

You'll have to, Mr. Armstrong, replied the director soothingly. Everyone does who appears on motion picture film.

Let movie actors wear all the false faces and make-up they wish, I replied defiantly. But I'm not a movie actor, and I won't wear make-up.

But, Mr. Armstrong, pursued the director, this is only to make you LOOK, on the television sets, perfectly natural. Your face won't look natural, as the cameras show it, unless we do put on make-up. We only do it to make you look as if you DID NOT have anything on your face.

They simply were not going to start shooting until I gave in. Finally, on promise I could try it later without make-up, I consented to let the make-up man start chalking up my face.

But I was nettled by it. The whole thing was a totally NEW experience to me. I felt that every one of that television crew in the studio was naturally hostile to what I was going to say. I decided I would talk to THEM, and challenge them as my skeptics! Finally I did, and found afterward that, far from being hostile, many of them were quite interested in what I had to say. They had never heard anything like it before. But it didn't happen that day.

A Nerve-shattering Experience

I made false start after false start. Through the morning I struggled with it. The director tried to help me concentrate and get going. But nothing seemed to help.

During noon hour there was no time to drive back over to Pasadena. The producers had arranged an apartment in a nearby bungalow-hotel for Mrs. Armstrong and me, where she could prepare a lunch that would help quiet my nerves and leave me alert for the afternoon's work. I had lemon juice, I remember. I also tried to get in a brief nap.

The afternoon was no better. By day's end, we had shot and wasted a lot of expensive film -- out of which the film editor was able afterwards to piece together enough usable footage to make the first half-hour telecast. I never did think it was any good -- but it brought a huge response from listeners.

I do not now remember details of these events as well as I do those happenings when I was a boy. But it seems to me that we had to engage these movie crews, and the studio, for three straight days at a time.

It was frightfully expensive. We were trying to reduce this production expense by shooting three programs per day. I had to have the first NINE programs all ready -- in brief notes, and other material -- before we even started this actual production.

But that first day we salvaged just ONE program out of a hard and nerve-shattering day's work. As I remember it, we did a little better the second day -- I think we completed TWO programs, and got to our quota of three on the third day.

High Cost of Television Production

I suppose most of my readers know little or nothing about the cost of PRODUCING a half-hour television program. At that time -- 1955 -- the average half-hour evening show on any one of the three big networks was costing between $30,000 and $35,000 for production. That means JUST TO PUT IT ON FILM. Then the purchase of station time for broadcasting came extra. That, also, on a major network, averaged about $35,000 for the half hour. Total cost, about $70,000 for each weekly half-hour show. That is what the sponsors of the big shows were spending.

We had estimated that, by shooting three programs per day, we could produce The World Tomorrow for television at around $900 per program. But that was mere wishful thinking. That first program cost over $2,500 to produce. Later we did get production costs down to around $2,000.

Of course the heaviest item of expense on the big entertainment shows is the high fees paid the stars. Many television stars were paid $6,000 for their acting in just one half-hour show. Lesser stars and supporting actors and actresses were paid from $500 to $3,000 -- depending on how big a name they had. Of course, they go in for very expensive sets -- with often several sets for a single show.

Perhaps the lowest-cost production of all was a show like The $64,000 Question, and similar quiz shows. There were no stars, except the master of ceremonies, and staff members, none of whom drew down the fabulous fees of the big stars.

We had succeeded in obtaining reasonably good times for The World Tomorrow on a number of very fine stations. In New York we were on the ABC network station, WABC, channel 7. The hour was late -- 11:30 p.m. But that does not seem so late, in New York, as it would be for viewers in Kansas City, where people go to bed earlier. Later we switched to WPIX in New York -- a station which had a very big viewing audience.

In Chicago we were also on the ABC network station, WBKB, channel 7. Our time there was not so good -- 9:00 a.m. Sunday. In Los Angeles we were on KTLA, channel 5, at 10:30 p.m.

It was impossible for our type program to obtain time during the PRIME TIME hours of 7:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. But we did obtain the 10:30 p.m. spot on KLZ, channel 7, Denver; KOVR, channel 13, San Francisco-Stockton; KTNT, channel 11, Tacoma-Seattle, Washington; KMBC, channel 9, Kansas City; KGMB, Honolulu; and KCMC, channel 6, Texarkana.

We had even a better time, 9:30 p.m., in Portland, Oregon, on KLOR, channel 12. Also we were on KPRC, channel 2, Houston, Texas, and on stations in Tyler, Texas, and Hutchinson, Kansas.

Our ratings, as shown by the principal rating agencies, showing approximate size of viewing audiences, were extremely HIGH.

Most religious programs on television were rated, on the regular rating systems, below one point. Ratings were 0.3, or 0.7, etc. The best known prime-time big network entertainment shows had ratings averaging in the 20s and 30s. A rating of, say, 32, was excellent and considered well worth $70,000 to the sponsor. It meant approximately 32 million people viewing the program.

Programs like Meet the Press, though probably much more worthwhile, did not have as many listeners as Bob Hope, Jack Benny, Red Skelton, and big-time entertainment shows. Even at our late hour, we had a higher rating in some cities than Meet the Press. On stations like Portland, Seattle, and Kansas City, we had ratings of around 10 and 11, indicating ten to twenty times as many viewers as most religious television programs.

In Kansas City, at the time, the Steve Allen Show, then at the height of its popularity, was shown at 9:30 p.m. and The World Tomorrow at 10:30 p.m. -- a much poorer time. Yet we slightly topped it in ratings.

Our mail response was big, considering the number of stations -- only 12. It was bigger than from similar radio broadcasts -- but television was so much more costly, we felt it had to bring a much heavier mail response, to justify its heavier cost. Actually, even with only twelve stations, The World Tomorrow was being viewed by a million or more people -- perhaps two or three million. We were delivering a dynamic message in power to a huge audience, who were not only hearing -- but also seeing -- for a full half-hour.

If I told you the total cost, including the production of the master film (low-cost copies were sent out to each station) and the charge for station time, I suppose some of our readers would think it was EXCESSIVE extravagance. But it was not!

Stop a moment and figure. If, in 1964 you sent a message to someone on a 4 cents (in the U.S.A.) postal card, you would never have called that extravagance. If you sent a million postal cards to a million people, just figure the cost -- forty thous and dollars! And that is lowest-cost ECONOMY!

A near as I remember, without checking 30-year-old records at our accounting department, we paid about an average of $300 per station for the half-hour broadcast -- a total of about $3,600, plus about $2,000 for production cost -- total, NOT $40,000, as postal cards would cost, but ONLY $5,600 -- less than one seventh as much as those small postal cards!

Chapter 62

The Crossroads -- TV or Radio?

THE YEAR was now 1955. The World Tomorrow was on television, coast to coast in the United States -- and in Hawaii (it was not yet a state). But it was a harassing experience.

Actually, this whole work had reached a crossroads. Shift to Television

I have related how, by the spring of 1955, television had made such a leap in popularity in the United States that we became frightened. It began to look as if radio was going dead. Unless we shifted immediately to television, it began to appear that this work of God would go dead.

The decision was made. We entered a crash program to get on television -- QUICK!

But we were to learn as the weeks passed by that we were still at the crossroads. Television was not the road to take. Three factors became distressingly plain about television broadcasting. The cost was greater than we were really prepared to meet. Second, it was only a ONCE-A-WEEK telecast. And third, this telecast was absorbing almost 100 percent of my personal time and energy. It was a nerve-shattering experience to keep up with the type of programming we were doing. I was having to neglect other top-level responsibilities -- and, if this kept up, it threatened the future growth of the entire work.

But at the same time, another factor developed. As the weeks and months sped by, during that latter half of 1955, we began to realize that radio was not dead, after all.

Of course, the big-time network shows had all left radio and gone over to television. But people were still listening to radio. We checked and found that radio sets were being sold in greater volume than television. In 1955, about 14,500,000 radio sets were manufactured, and 7,800,000 television sets.

Many people were beginning to buy two, three, or four radio sets per home -- placing sets in bedrooms, kitchens and other rooms, while the average home had only one television set.

The trend has been maintained since. The Crossroads Solution

Yes, in the work of God in broadcasting Christ's own gospel to the world, we had reached a crossroads.

Once-a-week network radio, paying for so many small-power stations with only one broadcast per week, had not proved effective. Believing television was totally replacing radio, we had made the plunge into television. But it was too costly for our income at that time; it was once a week only and we had learned that we had a type program that needed to be aired daily; we were on only thirteen television stations; it was, under the type programming we were doing, proving too strenuous for me and monopolizing all my time.

And, on top of all these points against continuing on television, we were learning that RADIO WAS NOT DEAD AT ALL.

We had not gone off radio. We had canceled out the once-a-week network, and a few of the once-a-week 50,000-watt radio stations we were using in addition. But we were still broadcasting The World Tomorrow on a daily basis on superpower WLS, Chicago, WWVA, Wheeling, West Virginia, the powerful border stations XEG, XELO and XERB, besides daily broadcasting in Los Angeles, Portland and Seattle.

And we learned that about 99 percent of the income to pay for all this costly television programming was coming from RADIO listeners -- not television. Of course that was to be expected. There is never any appeal for money on any World Tomorrow program. There is no charge for any literature. There is no solicitation for contributions, except to our own inner family of co-workers who voluntarily, on their own initiative and without original solicitation, have become co-workers.

Only an infinitesimal percent of listeners -- either radio or television -- ever become co-workers and start sending in tithes and offerings for this work the first few months after they begin listening. This we well knew. We knew it would be three or four years before any sizable number of newer viewers and listeners to the television program would become co-workers -- for we would never solicit this.

Truly, we had reached a crossroads decision. We had leaped to television, but we soon learned that was not the road to go from there.

The decision became obvious. Go back onto radio -- but concentrate on putting The World Tomorrow on the major POWERFUL radio stations, and ON A DAILY BASIS.

That was the road we took until the radio audience did change listening habits.

As the weeks sped by, we found ways to improve the remaining television programs. Our advertising agent, production director and I flew to New York to arrange for the use of NBC film stock.

The one complete film library was owned by the National Broadcasting Company. They had gotten the start on this even prior to the earliest days of telecasting, and had developed a film library so complete that other networks did not try to build one of their own. It was less costly to rent what they wanted from the NBC library.

We found the manager of this library very sympathetic toward our problem. Arrangements were made so that we could have virtually unlimited use of film stock from NBC.

Thus, if I were speaking about Hitler, the viewers would see on the television screen pictures in motion of Hitler, while hearing my voice. If I were talking about the alarming rise of crime, the viewer would see motion pictures of a crime being committed. After each of these sequences, the picture would flash back to me, as I talked. When I read a passage of Scripture, a portion of a page of a Bible would flash on the television screen, with the passage I was reading underlined, and enlarged big enough so viewers could read along with me as I read it.

Toward the end of our twenty-seven weeks of telecasting, I began bringing certain men from the East to appear on television with me in conversation, or as an interview. One was Montgomery M. Green, a World War II intelligence officer in the United States Navy. I interviewed him on the program about Russia's super-secret weapons.

Another was Joseph Zack Kornfeder. He was an American, born in Slovakia. Mr. Kornfeder had been a charter member of the Communist Party in the United States. The Party sent him, in 1928, to receive special political education at the University of Moscow. Later he became disillusioned with communism, defected, and supplied United States officials with a great deal of information about Communist secret plans. His wife and son were held in Moscow as hostages, in retaliation. He gave our television audience some startling facts about communism.

Leaving the Crossroads

But early in 1956 we left the crossroads dilemma behind. The road to take was that of daily broadcasting on the more powerful major radio stations in the United States.

We were still on Radio Luxembourg, world's most powerful commercial station, at 11:30 p.m., Mondays. We were on the three superpower bands of Radio Ceylon. From this we received considerable mail from far-off Burma, Malaya and Singapore. Also from India, Ceylon, and portions of eastern Africa. We were broadcasting once a week over Radio Lourenço Marques, at the border of the Republic of South Africa. By March, 1956, we were broadcasting once a week over Radio Formosa.

April, 1956, saw a big improvement in The Plain Truth. It was the first issue to come out with a real front cover. Until then, the leading article always had started on the front cover. That first pictorial cover was all black and white, and showed a picture of the Library of Ambassador College. This front cover design has been further improved since, beside adding color and a heavier cover paper. Also that issue made another BIG jump ahead -- it went to twenty-four pages. Until then, the Plain Truth magazine had never gone beyond sixteen pages.

By August that year, we had made our first advance along the new road of daily broadcasting on major radio stations. The ABC network originating station in New York -- the 50,000-watt WABC -- opened a daily week-night spot for The World Tomorrow. The time was very late, 11:15 p.m., Monday through Saturday. But it gave us one of the major big-power outlets in the United States' biggest population center. The total listening area had a population of some fifteen million people.

A month later we started on KARM, Sacramento, California, with a good listening time nightly. This was the first daily broadcasting in the central California area. By November, we were back on the air in our original home-base city, Eugene, Oregon -- and on the best local station, 5,000-watt KUGN, at the prime listening time of 7:30 every night.

Also by November, 1956, we had started broadcasting in Australia. At that time we had started on a small Australian network of eight stations, including Sydney but none of the other major cities. This was only once a week, at the start.

Another Plain Truth Improvement

With the February, 1957, issue, The Plain Truth made another important advance. For the first time it came out in two colors! In size, it continued with twenty-four pages. We were then beginning to announce booklets in the Spanish language, preparatory to Spanish-language broadcasting.

Progress was not rapid in adding important stations for daily broadcasting. Daily broadcasting of a religious program had never been done by the major top-ranking stations. It took time to break the barriers of precedent and convince station managers that The World Tomorrow was really top-quality programming -- and that it was a top-rated program that would build a listening audience, rather than lose listeners. But we were diligently working on this new policy. By this time we had a large, more aggressive advertising agency.

By July, 1957, we broke ice in St. Louis, Missouri, with daily broadcasting for the first time there. We were now, also, on the air on a network in the Philippines.

With the September number, that year, we published the first installment of this Autobiography. At the time I expected it to run for some six months to a year. But the response was such that I continued the series for several years -- ultimately publishing these volumes.

By September, 1957, The World Tomorrow took a really BIG leap ahead. Only one more station was added at that time -- but it was to prove our most responsive station -- the superpower WLAC, Nashville, Tennessee. This great station cleared for us the valuable time of 7 p.m., week nights. Then by December, 1957, came the break-through in Denver. Station KVOD opened a good time for The World Tomorrow -- seven nights a week.

New Policy Leaps Ahead

Beginning 1958, we added Radio Tangier International, and we were broadcasting into Franco's Spain. We were now on Formosa's powerful station beamed into China twice a week, and on Radio Bangkok five times a week. Also on Radio Goa in India five times a week. We now added Radio Okinawa, and two stations in South America in the Spanish language, at Lima, Peru, and Montevideo, Uruguay. At last the new broadcast policy was leaping ahead, all around the world! By this time the radio log was taking a one-half page in The Plain Truth.

In March, 1958, the giant Radio Luxembourg opened up to us TWO broadcasts a week, and our British audience grew more rapidly. During the summer and early fall of that year, daily broadcasting was begun in Tulsa, Oklahoma, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and Springfield, Missouri. Eight more stations were added in Australia, making sixteen -- but still once a week.

But by October, 1958, another major radio station, San Francisco's great KGO, began broadcasting The World Tomorrow every night.

The November, 1958, issue of The Plain Truth took another leap ahead. With the first installment of The Bible Story by Basil Wolverton, the magazine was enlarged from twenty-four up to thirty-two pages.

The beginning of 1959 saw the work of God gaining momentum fast. The World Tomorrow was now broadcast worldwide, on five million watts of radio power weekly.

This was the 25th anniversary of this work. It was now expanding everywhere as a major work, constantly multiplying in power and scope. Its impact was being felt around the world. By the end of 1959 the radio log was occupying nearly a full page in The Plain Truth. From that time the policy of daily radio broadcasting multiplied rapidly.

I have pursued the progress of the radio broadcasting and the growth of The Plain Truth to the beginning of the decade of the sixties. But this has brought us considerably beyond other phases of this life story.

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