This is the story of an ordinary man who has inspired countless individuals around the world with his devotion to the Baptist church and his belief in the goodness of people. Robert Garber, once a young hot-rodding farmboy, married his high school sweetheart and started his adulthood as a soft drink salesman before heeding his call from God. He has traveled the world to spread his understanding of God and endured tragedy, loss, and heartache that tested his faith to the limits over his storied lifetime. Pastor Bob has inspired thousands through the numerous churches he has founded and led throughout the Pennsylvania region, and he continues to touch the lives of many near and far.
Tracks: The Call of an Average Man to be More
The Biography of Pastor Robert GarberBy Huy NgoTrafford Publishing
Copyright © 2012 Huy Ngo
All right reserved.ISBN: 978-1-4669-3011-7Contents
Introduction...............................................ixChapter 1. Life on the Farm................................1Chapter 2. Growing Up After Growing Up.....................14Chapter 3. Those First Steps...............................23Chapter 4. The Trail of Churches...........................42Chapter 5. Across the World................................50Chapter 6. A Need, An Opportunity..........................71A Dark Time................................................82Back in Step...............................................95Afterword..................................................105Index......................................................109
Chapter One
Life on the Farm
Robert Garber was born on September 8, 1934, in Ironville, Pennsylvania. His future wife, Ginny, was born on April 6, 1935, in nearby Norwood, Pennsylvania. Both small towns are part of the Columbia area of Pennsylvania's Lancaster County where there is a large community of Pennsylvania Dutch Amish and Mennonites.
Bob's parents, Elmer Herr and Ethel Mae Garber, were both active Christians. Elmer was a member of the local Mennonite Church while Ethel attended the nearby United Brethren Church. The family was always partaking in some church activity, but Bob and his family primarily attended his mother's church because she was more active there than his father was in his. Moreover, the United Brethren Church was only a block away from his school, so Bob could also hang out with his buddies and classmates who also attended United Brethren.
Elmer Garber owned two properties in Ironville, a small twenty-five-acre farm and a larger 117-acre farm. The Garber family initially lived in the smaller plot and grew wheat and tobacco. Tenant farmers worked the larger farm until the Garbers moved onto it when Bob was fifteen years old. Here, the family grew corn and raised dairy cattle. They sold the milk to the nearby Hershey company. In early spring, when the cows would find and eat wild garlic in the meadow, the Hershey company would reject and return the garlic-tainted milk, but Bob and his siblings never minded because the family would churn that milk into ice cream (enough chocolate syrup would mask any tinge of garlic in the frozen treat).
The tobacco grown on the large farm was part of a four-year rotation that saw wheat, then hay, then corn, and finally back to tobacco. Tomatoes were a side crop, which they sold to Heinz and other companies to make ketchup and tomato soup. Later on, the Garbers would raise "broilers," large chickens that were popularly for barbecuing.
Elmer was quite well-known in the area for being one of the first around to buy a farm tractor, a "Farmall A" model built by International. Furthermore, he made rigs to tow plows and harrows behind tractors. Elmer often helped prepare people's gardens during the planting season by tilling them with his farm tractor. This solidified his popularity among the community.
Growing up in rural Pennsylvania, Bob attended a small two-room school where they had four classes in each room. His mother developed one of the first hot-lunch programs for public schools in the area. What a treat it was to get hot soup from the lunch wagon along with a quarter pint of chocolate milk or orange drink. Ethel volunteered to prepare the food while the local municipalities helped with the food costs.
There was always work to do on the farm. Bob helped with the tobacco harvest by dropping the lathe from the back of a tractor. By the time Bob was five, he was running farm equipment. He pulled the hay rake and hauled hay. He drove his dad's Farmall tractor, pulling a harrow and disc to till the fields. As he progressed in age, farm equipment progressed as well. Turning ten, Bob drove the bigger Farmall H tractor, which pulled the new John Deere combine or a New Holland baler. The cattle needed milking, which he did by hand all the way through eighth grade. Then, high school brought the advent of mechanical milking to the Garber farm, which took a load off Bob.
Life wasn't all work though. Chicken egg fights often broke out with his three siblings in the chicken coup. Hunting was part of life and leisure on the farm. Bob employed a single-shot .410 shotgun and help from his dad's pack of well-trained beagles to hunt wild turkey, pheasant, squirrel, and rabbit. Squirrel potpie was normal table fair at the farmhouse, and rabbits shot in the fall helped get the family through the winter. Bob usually shot seventy-five to eighty-five rabbits in a season. That feat was made easier when his father bought him a twenty-gauge double-barrel shotgun.
Besides hunting, the Garber kids played baseball in their fields and basketball with the hoop nailed to the side of the barn. They even broke out the nets and racquets for badminton and mallets for croquet after mowing the lawn.
Entertainment usually came from doing something as opposed to watching something. Bob wasn't against television or anything like that. Television just wasn't invented when he was born. TV entered the scene when Bob entered his teens. He and his uncle Johnny, who lived on the farm with them, hooked up their first set together and patted each other on the back one foggy night when they managed to get a picture from WBAL TV in Baltimore just by adjusting the aerial out on the porch of their farmhouse.
In high school, Bob was a member of the 4-H Club [See Figure 1], an agricultural youth organization similar to the Boy or Girl Scouts. "Four H" stood for "Head, Heart, Health, and Hands." As part of the club, he bought his own Ayrshire cow and learned how to train and prepare his cow for show competitions.
Every fall, the club selected several of its members to form various judging teams. Bob tried for the dairy judging team and was selected. His father didn't think he would make the team because he was the youngest one trying out. Much to his father's chagrin, Bob shipped off to State College with his teammates to compete in the dairy judging competition. The judging team was evaluated on how they assessed and presented the attributes of their cows. He had to learn the judging criteria and lingo, such as "the cow had balance of symmetry," "she had good utters," and "she stood good at the withers." Bob was a quick study, and the terminology flowed from his mouth like a mountain spring.
Bob was determined to win the competition, and his team from Lancaster County beat out fifty-three other county teams that year to take home the championship trophy. On top of the team honor, Bob also won personal honors as a lead judge. The youngest member of the Lancaster County team demonstrated overwhelming self-confidence during his presentation. Bob won despite transposing two of the four cattle; the man judging Bob told him that despite the two mistakes, Bob's presentation was so convincing that he scored him higher anyhow. That award was the first formal recognition of one of Bob's greatest gifts, the gift of gab.
Bob led a productive and sometimes carefree life at the farmhouse, working and playing with two brothers and a sister. By the time he reached his teens, though, the farm was a lonely place. World War 2 had broken out, and his older brothers answered their country's call. His eldest brother, Richard, served in the US Navy PT-boats with John F. Kennedy. After the navy, Richard bought their grandfather's farm nearby and settled down with his wife, Betty. Bob's other brother, Jim, went on to serve in the US Army during the war and later settled down south of Lancaster County where he was one of the original employees of the Trojan Boat Company, building pleasure boats. His sister, Betty, married a navy man; they settled in the Lancaster area initially but later moved to her husband's hometown in Lewistown, Maine.
Ginny grew up on the edge of a farm in a family with seven kids. She was the eldest of her siblings with three brothers and three sisters—Henry, Jane, Ed, Emily, Susan, and Donald. Bob's father rented some property across the street from where she lived. Young Bob, working on that property, met Ginny when he was only five years old.
Ginny's parents came from similar religious backgrounds as her father attended a Mennonite Church before becoming a member of a Baptist congregation. Her mother attended various churches before settling into the Kinderhook Evangelical Church.
Although the two met when they could count their ages on one hand, twelve years would pass before they would really meet. When he was seventeen, Bob owned a little dark green 1930 Ford Model A Coupe with the rumble seats in the back. [See Figure 2] Bob sold a calf and bought that car for a hundred dollars. Driving down the road with a friend, "Chicken" Smith, he saw Ginny and her friend, Blanche, walking down the street. They stopped and briefly chatted up the girls. That exchange resulted in a double date later that evening with the four of them playing some miniature golf. They saw each other more regularly and started dating seriously a year later.
It also helped that Ginny's brothers, Henry and Ed, worked on the Garbers' property as farmhands, picking tomatoes and tobacco, helping with the combining, and filling the silos. Bob would take Ginny's brothers back and forth between the farm and her home, where he found an excuse to get more acquainted with her.
During their courtship, they both got into roller skating. Bob's skating skills progressed with frequency, and he soon graduated up to a pair with semiprecision bearings in the wheels. Like his Ford coupe, he took great pride in the speed and upgrades of his skates.
On a typical day, Bob picked Ginny up from her work, which was at a local five-and-dime store in Columbia, Pennsylvania. She made the exorbitant wage of fifty-one cents per hour operating the cash register and stocking and straightening the shelves. Ginny's unwavering father made dating a challenge for the two. He forbade her to wear makeup; he was even upset at her for wearing lipstick the day before her wedding! She had a strict curfew of ten o'clock, an hour after her father went to bed. Bob would oftentimes get her back to the house late after a date, coasting his coupe so the sound of the loud muffler wouldn't wake her father.
That loud muffler did help him out though. Bob was quite the gearhead, modifying his coupe to outdo the locals. The modifications paid off. Perhaps Ginny was impressed by his nice set of wheels, but they definitely proved their worth on the weekends during impromptu drag races. Bob knew his car, and he knew the roads too. He would line up his unwitting opponents on the loose gravel for these races. Additionally, he made sure these contests were short, less than a hundred feet, since he geared his coupe so low that his car would pounce from the start but top out shortly thereafter like a spring. He wouldn't have had much of a chance after one hundred feet. Luckily, his opponents were oblivious to his lane choice and gearing. These little street wagers financed their courtship, paying for the couple's cheeseburgers, milkshakes, and miniature golf.
After a lovely courtship, Bob talked to his mom about marrying Ginny. On one calm October night, armed with a half-carat diamond ring his mother helped him select, Bob took Ginny to their usual hang-out spot, Texas Bill's. It was a little dump on the side of the road where customers could walk up and get some suds and hot dogs. The evening was clear, and the stars twinkled in the night sky. Bob was dressed in his usual pegged jeans and a white T-shirt. But before they arrived at Texas Bill's, Bob stopped his coupe on the side of the highway, across the street from their secret drive-in theater where they occasionally went on dates. He looked directly at her sitting next to him on the bench seat with only three on the floor between them. Bob popped the question simply, "Will you marry me?" She replied just as simply, "Yes." (The cost of the engagement ring and their wedding bands totaled a hundred dollars—same price as the car.)
Four months later, they tied the knot at the United Brethren Church on January 3, 1954, with four attendants, a flower girl, and ring bearer. [See Figure 3] They stayed at the farmhouse on their wedding night, but the newly married couple left the next morning in Elmer's freshly minted black 1953 Mercury hardtop to honeymoon in Fort Bragg, North Carolina. After a fortnight, they returned to the farmhouse where they had their own section to themselves, including their own kitchen. There, Bob and Ginny started their first several years as husband and wife.
Chapter Two
Growing Up After Growing Up
Nearly two years later, Bob and Ginny had their first child, a daughter they named LuAnn. For the first time, Bob felt a sense of significance but also consequence. There was another life that truly depended on him. It brought about a feeling of completeness of manhood to him—to have an offspring. Ginny was absolutely ecstatic! Having children was a highly anticipated moment for her, and the couple couldn't have felt any happier at that point together.
Bob supported their burgeoning family by shilling for the 7-Up company in Lancaster. He was quite the route salesman, and he built a solid reputation that didn't go unnoticed by his managers.
The young Garber family's life in Pennsylvania was short-lived, though. They were forced to move to Colorado as a result of Ginny's asthma. Some years ago, Ginny had contracted some respiratory ailment while on a high school field trip to Coney Island. Originally, she was diagnosed with the whooping cough and was placed on medication for that. Since the medicine seemed to have no positive effect, Bob demanded other answers; other doctors later determined that Ginny had asthma. The doctors told her that if asthma didn't kill her, the medication would by the time she was thirty. So Bob and Ginny set out to find a new place to live where there was fresh air to help Ginny's condition.
Bob's former manager wrote recommendation letters to several of the company's facilities across the country. The plant in Colorado Springs was the first to respond, and Bob accepted a job as a delivery supervisor for that location.
So the couple sold their 1954 Rambler, which they got for trading in their Model A and their 1934 Ford. They headed west to Colorado, as recommended by Ginny's allergist for the state's cleaner air.
On George Washington's birthday in 1957, they bought one-way bus tickets to Colorado Springs, Colorado, in hopes of alleviating Ginny's asthma. The bus ride took fifty-seven hours with one transfer in Pittsburgh. Going through the flat plains of Kansas, the passengers saw a hill in the distance thinking it was about a hundred or so miles away. The driver quickly pointed out that the hill was over four hundred miles away. That Hill was the famous Pikes Peak, the gateway to the Rockies. The trip was especially long for their daughter, Lu-Ann, who was already potty-trained; she had to be in diapers for the trip.
After arriving in Colorado, they found out Ginny was pregnant with their second daughter, Robin, who was born in Colorado on November 7, 1957. The Garbers rejoiced in their growing family. The young couple and their two kids took up residence in a motel, and Bob's company arranged to have a small kitchenette installed so that they could have some semblance of a traditional home. They later moved into various modest apartments. While Bob worked at the plant, Ginny took care of the kids at home with a little help here and there from a babysitter. She also worked in the PX at the Fort Carson army base in Colorado.
Finally, after Bob was promoted to general manager at the company's plant in Salida, Colorado, they moved into a company-owned house located in the plant itself. Ginny was able to take a job as the office manager in the Salida plant. This negated the need for help with the kids since Ginny could watch the girls while at work. By then, Lu-Ann had already started elementary school, and Robin was at the apartment in the plant where Ginny could easily keep an eye on her.
Motivated to support his growing family no matter what it took, Bob enrolled in a one-week course at clown school. He felt this experience would help promote sales of 7-Up on his retail distribution route in the summer of 1958. He learned that each professional clown had a patent on his or her particular "look," so Bob conjured up his own look as to not infringe on the standing patents. With another skill under his belt, he offered up his clown presence at certain retail outlets that agreed to display several hundred cases of his soda product. He didn't stop at playing a clown either. Bob also donned Santa garb to attract retail sales over the holidays.
Times were moving petty fast for the Garbers. They looked after the kids, plugged away at work, and moved from place to place. Life in Colorado was different than life back in Pennsylvania. Although they had regularly attended church back east, they did not do so consistently in Colorado because they were away from home and didn't feel that they had to. One of Bob's employees, VC Hopson, constantly invited the Garbers to attend his church ever since they moved out to Colorado Springs. Mr. Hopson sent other members from his congregation to Bob and Ginny's home on Thursday nights to try to persuade them to go to church. After much persistence, the Garbers decided to attend Sunday service with Mr. Hopson. And besides, with their Thursday nights freed up again, Bob and Ginny could finally go back to watching Gunsmoke on the tube.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Tracks: The Call of an Average Man to be Moreby Huy Ngo Copyright © 2012 by Huy Ngo. Excerpted by permission of Trafford Publishing. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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