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560 MOTION PICTURES I 9 2 2 I 9 4 5
thought it was poor policy to have all the churches open Sunday evening, often with few people in them; it seemed a waste of fuel, janitor service, and light— to say the least. So I made a survey of the state to find out how many Protestant churches there were in each town or city, the total seating capacity, and the average attendance on Sunday evenings. Then I figured out that if all would agree to hold union services, "they could pay their preachers four or five times as much." Many ministers at that time, especially in the smaller places, were receiving less than a thousand dollars a year, even with "donations"! I am sure that my readiness to pitch into the Presbyterian Pension Fund, when the call came, traces back to my getting worked up over this question so young.
Three other factors may have helped. As an elder in our little Sullivan church I learned that church finances should be the job of laymen and that they should make decent provision for their pastors. Politics had taught me that you need national organization to bring about changes. Working with the movie industry was emphasizing that continual education of the public brought results and that the priests and ministers of the country are a tremendous force.
I'll never forget how the Pension Fund was first put up to me, right out of the blue. The Reverend George Francis Greene, D.D., long-time president of the Presbyterian Board which had to do with "ministerial relief," asked me to meet him. We had lunch at the old Union League Club in New York.
Dr. Greene was a great old boy and, as I soon came to know, a real man of God. It was his spirit that first fired the project. It is a joy to have served with him! He explained to me that the General Assembly— the national governing body of our church— had authorized his Board to form a Lavmen's Committee to study the possibilities of a better pension plan and to develop it. He said they were going to enlist a group of laymen suitable for the task, and asked me if I would be willing to be a member. I remember I told him at the time that I would do it, provided I could "raise a little hell." He said that was just what they would like to have done!
I know I felt the downright outrage of inadequate pay to preachers— the men who baptize our babies and bury our mothers— many of whom, to this day, we pay far less than a "living wage." Some of these convictions, which I had put into a piece written for our Young People's Club thirty years earlier, were to form the core of a speech in behalf of the Pension Fund appeal which went all over the country.
So I tackled the job.
In talking for three years to groups of men up and down the country, I found no better way to open the story than to say, as at Indianapolis in 1927: "Two hundred and ten years ago today, somewhere, Presbyterians were meeting to discuss this same subject. For more than two centuries