In the middle of losing my job at Geneva Construction and starting a totally new position at Blaney Baptist Church in Elgin, a crisis developed with my family in Texas. My dad who was my best friend my entire life, my biggest booster in every possible way, was diagnosed with colon cancer in August of 1974; and the prognosis wasn’t good. He had several surgeries, radiation, and chemotherapy during the next two years while my mother taught second grade in a Lamar Consolidated elementary school in Rosenberg, a suburb of Houston. She needed help getting him to treatments and hospital stays at M.D. Anderson Hospital which meant part of her teacher’s salary had to be used to fly me regularly to Texas from South Carolina to be with him.
When he felt well enough after his first surgery, he and I talked in his hospital room while we watched Richard Nixon leaving Washington on the television there. My dad reminded me once again as he had done too many times that he blamed me for Nixon’s election in 1968 since his only offspring cast her first vote in a presidential election for a Republican. He and my grandparents were horrified at my confession of such a mistake and made me promise to not repeat what they considered to be a major political failure in my upbringing. On that fateful August day a disgraced and defiant Nixon flashed his famous “V” for victory salute before he entered Air Force One for his final trip as President. Nixon’s behavior revealed during the Watergate hearings had been profoundly disappointing to my father whose loyalty to the Democratic Party was overshadowed by his love of the country he served in the Army Air Corps in World War II.
I changed the subject by telling my father the company I worked for in South Carolina was going under, and I didn’t feel as confident as Nixon seemed to when he walked away from his job. I couldn’t pay my bills on fifty dollars a week from my new work at Blaney Baptist Church, but I didn’t want to start another job search.
Well, you have this CPA certificate, don’t you? he asked. I nodded yes. Why don’t you open your own office, he continued. Do taxes, keep books for small businesses. You ought to know enough people like that by now, don’t you? Talk to the Mormons. They might have some ideas, he added.
Why hadn’t I thought of that? If I had my own business, no one could tell me what I would be paid. I could be dull and boring if I wanted to because I would be the boss. Something clicked in my naive brain that had no idea what becoming an entrepreneur meant. I’ll do it, Dad, I said. I’ll give it a try.
I know you can make it, my father replied. I always wanted to have my own business, he continued, but I won’t have that chance now. So you go for it. Work hard. The sky’s the limit. He gave me his weak “V” for victory signal, smiled and went back to sleep.
Dad was right. I began my new business venture by contacting one of the two young men from Geneva Construction who remained in Columbia and in the Mormon church leadership. The Mormon community was loyal to each other’s businesses and equally loyal to a young Southern Baptist female CPA they learned to trust with their financial needs over the years in spite of her lack of interest in converting to their religion. I worked hard, and the CPA business began to grow with referrals from the Mormons along with recommendations by Flynn Harrell, the first business/financial officer of the South Carolina Baptist Convention. I met him through Janie’s work with the Convention, and he sent a number of Baptist ministers to me for tax preparation every year. I developed two diverse niche markets with one common religious thread at a time during the mid 1970s when advertising was considered to be not only unethical but also prohibited behavior for CPAs. My two years at Southwestern Seminary were plus factors in both markets, opening doors of opportunities I would never have had without them.
I kept working in the little church in Elgin for two years and then was “called” to a larger church in Cayce across the river from Columbia. I was the part-time minister of music and youth at State Street Baptist Church as I had been at Blaney Baptist. The hours increased, but the pay jumped to a whopping $75. per week. The pastor, Earl Vaughn, was a dear sweet misguided man who dialed telephone time every Sunday morning in my little office behind the sanctuary to make sure the worship service started on the stroke of 11:00. We had two Sunday morning worship services – the first one started at 8:30, but he didn’t care if we were a few minutes late for the early bird service. Mr. Vaughn also had a small rental house down the street from the church, and he told me when I interviewed he would make Janie and me an offer we couldn’t refuse, which we didn’t; we moved from our apartment to a house we didn’t own, but I was used to that – my family and I had lived in rental houses in Texas during my teen years. While I encouraged my clients to invest in a home for tax purposes, I personally wasn’t concerned about real estate equity when I was thirty years old. The American dream for me was survival.
Bigger churches meant more members. I discovered the more members on the roll at the church meant more people for the paid staff to please. My choir members and young people were great as they had been at Blaney Baptist, but church work was a chore I got paid to do with the internal politics to prove it. I had a revelation of an 11th Commandment: thou shalt not make a youth choir parent mad, especially one who was chairman of the Board of Deacons which functioned as a governing body for the church. I stayed at State Street for three years while my CPA business grew steadily.
At the end of my third year at State Street I had to make a choice facing a new crossroads again without the counsel of my father who lost his battle with colon cancer in 1976. I felt I couldn’t continue to focus on the people and their needs in my church when the CPA business required more deadlines to meet. Another complication in the equation was that my partner Janie (who sang in my church choir at State Street) and I were splitting awkwardly to end a seven-year tumultuous relationship so I decided to leave church work to focus on additional services to my clients…and my new “straight” girlfriend.
I'll Call It Like I See It 