Chapter 24 – An Adirondack Summer

Jim McNaughton (left) and Richard in 1951 at Stony Point Center, New York.

Richard decides he needs a change of pace for his second summer field assignment and signs up to work amidst the lakes and falls and trees in Upstate New York. He and his roommate, Jim MacNaughton, team up for a project in the Adirondacks larger parish. But first, during their second year at Union, Richard and Jim liven up Union Seminary politics, and Richard gives his first sermon in the wreckage of a violent wind and thunder storm that whips through the New Jersey Palisades community where he is doing his church field work. In the Adirondacks, Richard and Jim divide up the Sunday preaching responsibilities of a four-point parish, centered at the Syracuse University School of Forestry in Wanakena. Richard gets his fill of fresh air and sunshine as he and Jim spend the weekdays saving White Pine trees from weevil damage in the forests planted during the New Deal. They returned to Union with much preaching and even more “weeviling” under their belts.