It is still my hope after all these years that kids who thought they were spiritually saved during our neighborhood revivals in somebody’s garage eventually experienced real salvation.
Revivals were popular back then. There were evangelists like Billy Graham on the radio and our black and white television screens, and they inspired little towns and churches to hold revivals.
Calvary Baptist, where we went for Sunday morning and Sunday night services and Wednesday evening prayer meetings, had a week-long revival every year.
Preachers from big towns like Shreveport and Texarkana would deliver fire and brimstone sermons every night and twice on the final Sunday. They brought their music directors to put the congregation in the right spirit with old Baptist hymns.
Some summers, there would be a tent revival in a sprawling open field just outside town. Folks of every denomination gathered under the white canvas covering as some genuine and a few self-proclaimed evangelists preached, sweated and took up offerings.
My mother and most of the others in our paper mill community had their kids at all those revival services. So it was not unusual for us to simulate revivals just as we did western movies we saw on Saturdays and baseball games we heard on the radio.
On long summer days, we might have a game between the Yankees and Red Sox in an empty field, pretend to be Gene Autry or Hopalong Cassidy chasing cattle rustlers in the nearby woods or have a full-fledged revival in a single-car garage.
Every family in the village had those cookie-cutter, one-car garage and storage space buildings at the end of their gravel driveway. So there was always one available for our revivals.
The older boys did the preaching and song leading most of the time. But some of the rest of us would get to deliver a sermon occasionally or wave our arms to direct the singing, and a couple of junior high girls played hymns on their clarinets.
There was a guy a year or two ahead of us in school with wavy, blond hair who did most of the preaching. He had a black leather King James version Bible, and the rest of us had those pocket-size white New Testaments that we got for participating in Bible drills.
Word got around that he had written some page numbers on his palm to win the Bible drill competition, but nothing ever came of it.
A burly, older boy named Gerald on Second Street was never invited to the revivals, but he always found out about them and showed up to sing solos like Brother Caraway did at Calvary Baptist.
Brother Caraway worked for the railroad and was music director at the church on Sundays. They called him the Singing Engineer, and he performed Old Rugged Cross, Blessed Assurance and songs like that in a deep, rousing bass voice.
Gerald’s voice cracked on the high notes and faded during the low parts. He always left on his bike after his solo and didn’t stay for the preaching.
Nobody was ever saved when I preached, so I was never burdened with any guilt that might have resulted if they had been. I think it was because my sermons were not nearly as long or as loud as the pastor’s at Calvary Baptist or all those evangelists.
But I do remember some younger kids going up front when the boy with the King James Bible delivered the invitation at the end of his sermons.
There were not any facilities in our garage venues to baptize them, so those rituals were scheduled for the minnow ditch at the end of the street. It was muddy and about waist deep in the middle.
A few guys agreed to be dunked by the blond-haired preacher, but the girls would wade out up to their knees and just get a little water splashed on them.
I’m certain none of those baptisms took, so I was always relieved to see those friends and schoolmates get officially baptized later by bona fide preachers whose voices were not still changing.
REPRINTED FROM THE NATCHITOCHES TIMES