Wilbo Follows the Traces of Twentieth Century Ministers

Wilbo had driven out to his parent's house in Shiawassee County for Thanksgiving dinner and he stayed the night in their guest bedroom. It didn't make sense to drive home in the dark when he could drive home along a river road, following the Shiawassee River, and visit mill towns in the late fall sunlight. In Linden, home of Linden Mills, the locals had built a walkway across the mill dam, and there Wilbo found a historical marker honoring Linden's favorite son, Dr. Preston Bradley, who made good in Chicago as a famous minister of an independent church that packed them in weekends and weekdays. In 1936, Adolph Hitler refused Bradley entry into Germany, a fact that made Bradley popular amongst Chicago's Jewish community. He also was a constant reader and angler who discovered Izaak Walton's The Compleat Angler, published 1653. With a group of worthies from Fort Wayne, Indiana, he made the Izaak Walton League into an national organization that still is working hard to preserve habitat for fish and fishermen.

Wilbo has to be careful reading historical markers. He usually ends up chasing after that person's trace, so to speak, on the earth. It's a quixotic undertaking. For example, stopping in Ingersoll, Ontario, He read a historical marker about a traveling minister named Aimee Semple McPherson, who delivered sermons with a megaphone, standing on the back seat of a 1912 Packard. Since she had the car and driver, she made her way to Los Angeles. When Wilbo lived there for a short time, he looked into the majestic church she built on the outskirts of Hollywood. Hollywood's elite came to services for salvation, but they also came to learn from her stagecraft. Wilbo was drinking wine at the Inn of the Seventh Ray, an outdoor oasis in the heights of Topanga Canyon serviced by a sheltered kitchen in the center of all the wrought iron tables covered with purple linen table cloths, and he discovered that Aimee Semple had established her summer retreat upon the property decades before. Wilbo would have loved driving up Topanga Canyon in a Packard !

Wilbo Says: McPherson Drove a Packard with a Purpose.