Abstract
Doris Vargo discusses the history of Plymouth Church, its origins in Shaker Heights, and her own personal experiences with the church. This includes the church's community invovlement in Shaker Heights and its progressive beliefs. Vargo also discusses housing in Shaker Heights.
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Interviewee
Vargo, Doris (Interviewee)
Interviewer
Smith, Kelsey (Interviewer)
Project
Shaker Heights Centennial
Date
7-16-2012
Document Type
Oral History
Duration
79 minutes
Recommended Citation
"Doris Vargo Interview, 16 July 2012" (2012). Cleveland Regional Oral History Collection. Interview 915025.
https://engagedscholarship.csuohio.edu/crohc000/519
Transcript
Doris Vargo [00:00:00] 1922, around the corner from the church. He never went there until 1964. Well, no, I take that back. He went there in high school because the minister at that time was doing lectures on current affairs. This is during World War II, when my husband was in high school. And if you went to those lectures and wrote a report about these lectures by this famous minister who was well known in Cleveland. He and a rabbi were big time in Cleveland at that time. And if you went to his lectures and you wrote a report for your sociology class, you got extra points. So he never went to the church, well, he would go occasionally. His mother was unusual at those times. A working mother, a working single mother. And they had, as they still do, dinners at the church, inexpensive prices. And rather than cook, some nights she would take her son to dinner at the church and not have to cook. You know, big deal for her, it was a good deal. So later on, well, you’re going to want to hear this, why we joined the church. And I suppose. Well, that’ll come later. But anyway, I found this. I have a cookbook that I worked on in 1960. And then there’s one in between this. This one is. This one has a picture of the church as it was before they added the addition in the 60s. It has in here not only wonderful ads of all the merchants in Shaker Heights and Cleveland Heights at the time, but recipes by some rather famous people including the sisters of the Oris and Paxton Van Sweringen. Which is why Plymouth Church is where it is, the reason it’s there, the brochure that I forgot to get for you, which they probably have a copy of downstairs in the Shaker Historical Room. We put out a brochure recently and we’ve put out several. I’ve written some of them during the years. In any event, the Van Sweringen brothers wanted to donate certain land to, like they donated land for Laurel School and University School and Hathaway Brown. And they donated certain plots of land to churches, I think First Baptist and so on. The first donation was a plot of land which lies half in Cleveland, half in Shaker Heights on Coventry Road at Weymouth, one block south of Shaker Square and one block east of Shaker Square, one block south of Shaker Boulevard, and that is Plymouth Church of Shaker Heights. And since the Van Sweringens donated the land, they gave it to what was at that time a Congregational church to which their sisters belonged, their maiden sisters. One of the important things at that church recently gone under is the Candy Circle. The Candy Circle was started by the Van Sweringen sisters when they were at Case Western Reserve University. They made fudge and they sold it to raise money for the church. And thus began the famous candy circle. Sixty some years old until they abandoned it two years ago. It was abandoned because nobody but women my age were working in it anymore. Young women do not make candy for sale for the church. But that candy circle raised thousands of dollars for the church. When it was abandoned, there was enough money left to donate to the church treasury. And part of that money, the church wisely decided would be put in honor of the Candy Circle. So they took a meeting room off the main parlor and they fitted it out with Amish cabinets, a green floor, marble slabs on the sink for a kitchen, marble slabs on the sink, which are the original marble slabs used by the Candy circle on which they molded the stuff. And a plaque on the wall donated to the Candy Circle. There was a story about it in the Plain Dealer in the Sun Press. I don’t know. The Plain Dealer doesn’t cover anything much. You read the New York Times and the Plain Dealer and occasionally some opinion column. But it’s better than- It’s better than television, whatever. It’s a historic church because it was the first church built in Shaker. The others all came later. There are many churches in Shaker. It is also named Plymouth Church because Plymouth Church began during the Civil War. The people who started Plymouth Church were upset with a slow pace of old stone church on anti slavery. So they absconded from the church and for years and years they had a place in Cleveland. They had various churches. The last one was a brick building, 40th and, not Superior, I think Paine, which is now a German church. They still. It’s a Lutheran church where I still, I think up until recently they still did one service on Sunday in German. Unusual, but we’ve got a lot of German people in Cleveland, German heritage people. But basically Plymouth was a congregational church. And Henry Ward Beecher said call it, call it Plymouth, like my church in Boston. When they started the congregation and when they built the church in 1923, the architect was a guy named Schneider who was a well known Cleveland architect. Maybe you know some of this stuff, you’ve looked it up or something. But in any event, Mr. Schneider put up a Georgian church and it’s as you can see, perfect example of Georgian architecture. Have you ever been inside? We offer tours.
Kelsey Smith [00:06:41] I have not been inside.
Doris Vargo [00:06:42] Well, I’ll tell you, I’ll take you there. We should have met there. It would have made more sense but you’re here. But basically you have to book a room or something. Basically, you should come sometime. We were offering free tours as part of the Shaker Centennial, but nobody came, so we decided to charge. People will come thinking it’s better than- And the money will go to the food center, the food program, whatever. You know, the Cleveland Food Center. Nobody- A church doesn’t want five bucks to show people around. But the Shaker Centennial Committee set up the tours and asked us to have them on Labor Day and Memorial Day weekend. Well, nobody came. Nobody’s going to come to tour. We had some tours about 18 months ago when the Friends of Shaker Square were running tours in the neighborhood. And so the church offered to. We donated our restroom and our parking lot so people who were touring the neighborhood of the square could park and walk around and they could come in the church. We had a jazz pianist playing in the chapel to play show tunes and junk. And we had our bathrooms available and we offered tours. And people did. When they came in to use the bathroom or just decided they wanted to look at the church, especially if they were from out of town, they wanted to look around. Well, if you walk into that church, you would think you were in Boston. It’s totally white, totally New England, totally gorgeous. The church that looks exactly like it is, strangely enough, St. Dominic’s Catholic Church at the end of the Van Aken rapid line. St. Dominic’s is totally white, totally New England, totally gorgeous, except for the Mary altar on the side, which is a little more elaborate. But it is also looks like this in the front. Got the pillars and the whole thing. It’s at the end of the line there. We’re kind of, you know, both at one end and the other of Van Aken. Someone I know who joined Plymouth after something or other, after some transformation in her life, said she felt right at home. She used to go to St. Dominic’s now she was at Plymouth and didn’t seem anything. I mean, service. The hymns weren’t even that different. We sing. I mean, Protestants and Catholics, they’re all Christians, they sing some of the same hymns. Big deal. You know, we say debtors instead of transgressors. And you say the Lord’s Prayer or Trespasses. Once in a while I go to a funeral and somebody behind me will say trespasses. And I know them. We print in our program debtors, debts and debtors because so many people say trespass. I don’t know when that change came, but whatever. People have to be reminded of it, but it’s an interesting thing. I guess we’re all coming closer and closer in the churches. Why not? Big deal. I mean, I don’t. If I go off into Catholic churches, I go to funerals and weddings and sometimes just for no good reason at all, because of a friend. But I have been known to stem it in Catholic churches and just sit there for a while. They’re good places to sit and meditate, if not to pray. But basically the difference being mostly that Protestant churches are usually more simple. Not all of them. I’ve been to St. Peter’s Lutheran Church in Cedar Road [00:10:00] in Cleveland Heights, and that’s much more elaborate than Plymouth. I’ve been to other churches like that. Well, the Episcopal church there at St. Paul’s is pretty. You’d think you were in London or England somewhere. You know, it’s not exactly- It’s a big stone mausoleum. But Plymouth and St Dominic’s are pretty simple places. They’re big, but they’re very simple inside. And I find it comforting, comfortable. Okay. You know, the acoustics are very good, which means that we have a lot of concerts there. We have a minister of music who is in charge of arts programs, and he has people who do a lot of other kinds of artwork. I mean, you’ll have an arts fair once a year. And people bring the crochet they do. They’ll bring the embroidery they do. They’ll bring the fact that they do their own postcards or stationery design their own stationery or paintings, stuff like that. We have people who. We have members who have done pictures of the church and of other things, watercolors and one thing, another hanging all over the place in the church. They’ve been donated and used, you know. But that candy circle room that I spoke about is a pretty interesting place. It’s a small meeting room, conference room off the main parlor, where you have meetings and conferences and the board of trustees meets there. And when there’s a funeral, that’s where the family stands to greet them, people who have attended the funeral. And the conference room next door to it has a doorway into it, and there’s a small lavatory thing with a sink. They’ve turned the conference room into a kind of a kitchen, as I said, so that they can use it when you do a funeral collation. And you invite people to come and meet the family and have a cup of tea or a glass of punch. You have to have all those cookies and things. And naturally, you never know when there’s going to be a funeral. So there’s a whole committee, a memorial committee that makes stuff all year round. And they store it in the freezers in the kitchen. And then they drag that stuff out when they need it and put it on trays and get the silver out of the locked drawer. The silver trays which have some name of some president of the women’s association from 19 what. No, whatever. 1942 or something. And that’s another thing that’s gone by the board. We no longer have a formal Women’s Association, but instead we have fellowship meetings once a month. Our Women’s association was extremely active. There were six circles, circles within the group. The Women’s association met once a week on Tuesday throughout the year, except on Christmas week, because you were too busy, you didn’t have time. They met once a week. There were groups called circles that met in between for lunch in their homes. Some of them played bridge, some of them folded bandages. Some of them knitted and crocheted stuff. I belonged to circle seven. They had six circles. The candy circle was number six. And then after World War II, they started the seventh circle. And it was composed of people like myself who were either new members or were maybe not new members, but were newly married people who couldn’t afford to do all that stuff in the daytime because we couldn’t afford to hire a sitter. So we would meet once a month in our homes. We had to take our turn serving at the luncheons. Everybody had to serve at them. The luncheons were huge. One of the regular luncheons was the PTA annual meeting where all the PTA presidents and officials met from the Shaker School District. They would serve lunch to 100 people. The men’s association used to serve dinners. There was a men’s group that cooked and served dinners to fathers and sons. My husband and my son used to go to. They would have Browns players come and talk, you know, football players, baseball players, they. Sports night, you know, for the fathers and sons. The Women’s Association served luncheons and occasional dinners. Because there would always be church dinners. The Women’s Association would serve a lunch once a week. Many women who were not members of the church came to these lunches, including Paul Newman’s mother. And we know it because she came every week. She lived in Moreland Courts. And there were a whole contingency of women who lived in Moreland Courts who did not. Some of them belonged to Plymouth, Most of them did not. But they came regularly. They used to lunch on the square when there were lots of restaurants like Clark’s and so on. Not the restaurants that are there. Stouffer’s and so not the kind that are there today, but ladies lunch in kind of like places. And these women would get tired of eating in restaurants. So once a week they would come to Plymouth and eat there. And you could get for very little money a superb luncheon. Because we always had one of our women who was a volunteer who was in charge of the kitchen. And we have some of those recipes are in here. The Plymouth punch cookies for 200, you know, whatever, canapes for a thousand, whatever. No, you know, you serve big meals to a lot of people. Now we don’t do that anymore because nobody does that anymore. But one of one of the few places anymore. And there are women from Our lady of Peace and women who live in the neighborhood who come to the once a month luncheons at Plymouth Church. We have a fellowship luncheon. Retired men come as well as women. People who for some reason are available at lunchtime come. For six bucks you get a lunch which includes soup or some kind of introductory thing, an entree, a salad, coffee, tea or milk, and a dessert. Now the guy, we had a woman doing the luncheons from a young woman and she’s gone back to school so she doesn’t have time to do it. She’s not that young, but she’s gone back to graduate school or something. But instead we now have Hans. Hans is a member of our church who happens to be a chef and caterer. And he does the lunches. So for $6 you get this meal. He serves strawberry shortcake the other day. And when he serves strawberry shortcake, he doesn’t use those little things you buy in the supermarket. No, no, no. The shortcake itself is puff pastry and the strawberries are fresh and the whipped cream is real. You have to mess around. Six bucks for lunch. Dinner is five dollars. We get the same kind of meal at dinner. He does dinner too. Dinner comes in Lent and before Christmas we have dinners as a fellowship thing. It’s five bucks a piece on my son’s birthday, I said, I’ll take you out to dinner. He said, yeah, take me to Plymouth. They’re doing, I noticed in your bulletin they’re having something good on the menu. Close to my birthday, they’re having a meal I like and I want to go there. So I took him. Cost me 10 bucks to take my son out to dinner. But it’s $5 a piece. No family pays more than $15. If you bring your whole kids, it’s 15 bucks. Because the object is not to make money, the object is to pay for the food. The chef is a volunteer. You go, you serve yourself. You know, you don’t have to have waitresses, but you do have someone helping out in the kitchen, cleaning up and stuff like that. We have dishwashers, but so what? You know, you still have to have somebody who cleans up. But it’s always an entree, some kind of appetizer, an entree, a salad, coffee, tea and milk, dessert, bread and right on the counter because they know kids. Peanut butter and jelly and bread. If they won’t eat it, you got something they’ll eat, you know, because it’s a way of getting together. My son who doesn’t go to church anymore, although he was a member, you know, the kids joined the church at whatever, 12 or something. But he goes to dinners because the people are nice. He says that church does good work. I approve of what they do and I’m not coming to the sermons, but I’ll go to dinner. The dinners are good and the people are nice. So big deal. I mean he just, well, for one thing he’s been in retail for a long time and he said to work on Sundays in retail, you don’t ask, you just do. You don’t have a choice. So he’s still doing that. He worked for Borders for 15 years and you know what happened to Borders? So he got a part time job which he’s happy to have. He sells Omaha Steaks in the same mall he was working at before La Place, doing what he said he started out doing when he got out of college. His first job out of college was working for Sears taking photographs at Richmond Mall. He was a good photographer, but you didn’t have to be a good photographer because your job was you couldn’t miss. The cameras were great, he would take good pictures. [00:20:00] Your job was to sell the package. All this money, his job is to sell the package of meat. His grandfather was a meat cutter and a store owner of grocery and meat markets all his life. But Alex said, I don’t know anything. My grandfather knew, I sell the package, it’s already cut. It’s right. That’s the way life has changed. But we’ve been members of Plymouth. Well, my husband of course is gone now, but we joined in 1964. We moved when we were first married. We lived in Euclid. We didn’t join a church as most people. We didn’t think about joining a church. We had been married by a justice of the peace in my parents living room because neither of us was going to church. And I had not gone to church at all growing up. Most of my friends were Catholic. I lived in the North Collinwood neighborhood, and that’s a heavily Slovenian, Italian and mixed neighborhood where most of the people are Catholic. A lot of kids go to Catholic school and then they go to public school later on. But my husband had grown up here and was also not a church goer. But of course we were looking for a church when we had children and moved to Shaker and we were looking for a Sunday school, as most young people do at first. We originally we were living in Cleveland Heights, so we went to. Thought about going to Fairmont Presbyterian, but my husband was working at the CEI. He was an economist there. And his boss was Bob Ginn, who was a very active member of Plymouth Church. And he said, what do you want to go to Fairmount for? So John said to me, he’s telling me we should go to Plymouth. I said, is that an order as your boss? He said, no, it’s not an order suggestion. I said, okay, let’s try it. So we went one Sunday. Well, at that time, we didn’t have three kids. We had two. My son was four. Our daughter was, no, he was three and our daughter was six. So she talks. She goes off to the Sunday school and he goes into Barbara Van Sweringen’s class for toddlers. Well, not only is Barbara, great woman, whom he adored, but they had what they call (?) toys. Those are these wooden toys, wooden cars and trucks and trains. The best toys in the world. Alex had such a great time. We pick him up at the end of the service and he says, do we have to wait till next week to come back? We thought, oh, boy, we’re not going to get him anywhere else. This has got to be it. And it’s true. Until he got older and got to be critical, like all teenagers do. And along with my, no, my daughter stayed there. My older daughter stayed at Plymouth because she was one of the first girls to get usher when they finally decided to come into the 20th, let alone the 21st century, and they let girls usher. But my son started going to Heights Christian to the teenage group because all of his friends were going, you know, that kind. And we figured, big deal, we’re not going to fuss about it. He’s going. He had become a member at Plymouth. That was a little bit of a bone of contention too, because my older children had not been baptized. Our youngest was but the oldest when they became members, had to be baptized. Well, we were not about to ask 12 year olds, 11, well, 12, 14, whatever they were to be baptized in front of everybody. They would have been embarrassed to death. So at that time our minister was Skip Holliday, who’s gone out to California years ago. But Skip, as they called him, was a great minister, really nice man, a very, very devout man. He was the one who did my husband’s funeral. And I was very glad he did because he was. When my husband was sick, he was there always for him. In any event, he said, well, just meet me late afternoon from work to my husband, someone come down here and we’ll go in the parlor and I’ll baptize the kids. They don’t have to stand in front of the whole church on Sunday. We’ll do a private baptism, which was fine with the kids. And that was fine for us too. So then they met all the qualifications, stand up and become members. So they all became members and the kids were all members of the, we had a minister of music called John Hur from Pennsylvania Dutch country. And John Hur always had a children’s choir. And all of my kids were members of the children’s choir. Everybody liked the children’s choir. The other thing, the church always did, and I have pictures of this that are riot. The angel pageant at Christmas. You know, Protestant churches do the angel pageant and I mean I- They probably do them in Catholic churches too. I don’t know. I know ours is- I don’t really know.
Kelsey Smith [00:25:05] Well I’m Protestant too, so.
Doris Vargo [00:25:06] Well, they’re not going to do it in the synagogues, of course. But basically we have this pageant, you know, with the shepherds and the fake baby. Although one year we had a real baby. Someone donated their baby who didn’t whimper during the whole thing. It was incredible. Everybody expected to hear wah during the whole thing. But this baby just lay there. We had a real life baby, but you know, you get the fake lambs and the tall blonde girl is always, you know, Gabriel the angel. And the other kids are all just whatever. The other girls, the short, fat, and dark-haired ones or anything, they’re just something.
Kelsey Smith [00:25:47] That’s always a wise man.
Doris Vargo [00:25:50] A wise man. Yeah, yeah, wise man. See, I was always just in the chorus. We used to do them. This is the funny thing too. This has nothing to do with church. But when I was at Oliver Hazard Perry’s school growing up, back in the days when it was permissible to sing Christmas carols in public schools and we did a Christmas pageant and that would have been [gagging sound] today because it would be considered too religious. But we did a Christmas pageant, kind of. I mean, it wasn’t very religious. But I still remember for years the girl who played Mary was the only Jewish girl in our school. She was a beautiful girl, and it was certainly appropriate that she was Jewish when you think about it. But the teacher didn’t even think about it. She just chose this girl because she looked the part, you know, you could put the veil on her and whatever, and she could hold the baby, and she looked like Mary. Mary doesn’t have to be a blonde, you know. I don’t know what Mary looked like. None of us do. But it was so funny. I mean, I didn’t realize that until much later when I was growing up. And I thought, oh, my God, Ruth Schaeffer was Mary all those years. The rest of us were who knows what shepherds, wise men. Anyway, going back to church, we joined the church. We were active in the church. My husband did the finance drive every year. He also did the finance drive for the United Way. When you worked at the CEI, you were expected to do your civic duty and go out and do good works. That was part of your resume, for God’s sake. They didn’t force you to do it, but you knew darn well if you were bucking for a promotion, you better have a few things on your resume that looked like you cared about the community, you know? Well, on top of which, we always sort of thought, well, yeah, you ought to do something. You shouldn’t just sit there like a lum. And then we were members of the couples club, and we went to church dinners, and my husband ushered through the years, and I was in the Women’s association, and I did the newsletter back when it was hot type. When you didn’t have computers and you typed stuff and you took it to a printer and you proofread and all of that stuff. And I worked on the archives, and I worked on a number of. A guy that just died was the first member of the church who kept the archives, kept all the important stuff. And years later, when he was no longer active, it almost got trashed. Somebody threw everything into a closet. And then another guy came along and said, you can’t do this, and rescued it all. So the second guy, Jack Doxie, set up a real archive, and he set it up so that some of the archives of this church, which is important to Shaker, ended up in the Shaker Heights Library downstairs here in the A Shaker room, which is appropriate. Some of Them went to. One of the members of his committee, was a real archivist who worked for the Historical Society or somebody like that. And she took some stuff down to the Cleveland Historical Society because it’s part of Cleveland, and then most importantly, it’s part of Shaker as an early church. But one of the things the church does is as part of the community. Of course, we do a lot of active stuff we are involved in. I’m involved and have been for 15 years in tutoring at Buckeye Woodland School. That’s an important thing. That was set up originally by a couple of our members, one of whom was a retired teacher who had substituted Buckeye Woodland. And she said, there’s a need. So we filled the need. A bunch of us went down and started tutoring. Now the Jewish Community Federation runs the program now. They have people coming from John Carroll, kids from John Carroll. They have people from the temples. They have people from Plymouth. There’s like 45 people that are tutoring. [00:30:00] There are 500 kids at Buckeye Woodland from K through 8th grade, and they all need tutoring. One of the kids recently, the woman in charge of the tutoring program, has a list of kids who want to be tutored. They don’t share enough tutors. Some of us tutor more than one kid, but there’s still not enough tutors. You can only do so much. She had tried to find tutors for everybody, but couldn’t find tutors for everybody. But there was one little boy who really wanted to be tutored. And one day I’ve gotten friendly, as everybody has, with the secretary at the school. The lead secretary has been there a long time. Right now she’s probably the interim social worker, because they don’t have social workers in the Cleveland schools. She handles all situations. But in any event, she was in the office and this kid came in and he had a postcard. And he asked her if she had a stamp for postcard or knew how much it cost or what to get one. And she said, what’s this? She looked at the postcard. It was a postcard addressed to the woman in charge of the program asking for a tutor. He really wanted a tutor. So he thought maybe if he sent her a postcard, she’d put him on the list. So this touched the lady so much that she said, I’ll take care of it. I’ll take care of it. I’ll get a post. So she just handed it to this woman and said, get him a tutor. And she did get him a tutor. That was pretty impressive. That a kid was smart enough. But I know that I’ve tutored kids for 15 years and after they get older, once they leave the school, of course I don’t see them. But I don’t always recognize them when I see them on the playground. When they grow up, they change. I don’t change well, I get grayer, but I don’t change as much as they do. But they yell at me, you know, hey, Ms. Wargo, how are you doing? Because I’m not teaching them anything. I’m their non critical friend who urges them to pick up a book and enjoy it. That’s my job and I can do that because I can always pick up a book and enjoy it and so can my whole family. We’ve always done that. And I believe strongly that these kids are not going to have a shot at life if they don’t learn to pick up a book and read. That’s plain and simple where it’s at and we know it. And I don’t care how much money they spend or how much reform they bring or who runs the schools or how good or bad the teachers are. If you can’t get the kids caring about reading and wanting to read and trying to read, somebody’s got to inspire them to do that. The teacher, the parent. I have a feeling this has got nothing to do with Plymouth, but I’ve wondered sometimes because I’ve also worked my children, my two daughters rather have worked as English as a second language. My one daughter is Spanish and the other worked up in Canada for a number of years. She’s a professor of English literature in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. When she was in Toronto at graduate school, she worked in the Chinese neighborhood where they taught English as a second language to oriental immigrants. But in any event, they’ve both done English to grownups. And Julie, my younger one, not only has done Spanish, but she worked in Chicago and she taught English to Polish immigrants. I mean, you know, they just thought it was a good thing to do. And I’ve done that too. But teaching English to adults, I thought about and I thought part of the problem, they always say the problem is in the home. The problem is in the home the parents don’t care. Maybe the parents can’t read either. I’m sure many of them can’t. Maybe we should be also looking at the parents and helping them read. And maybe they care more when I read things like the fact that this has nothing to do with Plymouth, but it does because we’re strong on supporting reading. When I read things like the fact that a good portion of the Cleveland population can’t read a timetable for the buses because they read so poorly. I think, oh, my God, where are we going? Who’s going to do the. I don’t know if everybody needs a college education, but everybody has to know how to read. That’s it. Plain and simple. So I’m very proud of Plymouth Church for being involved in a program that helps with reading. They’re also doing the usual stuff with the food bank and raising money for all kinds of missions. Our children in the high school and junior high school go on missions. They’ve been to Indian reservations. They’ve been to North Carolina and Kentucky and all kinds of places. They also go on trips for fun. They went to Washington, D.C. Kids used to do that in high school, but I don’t know if they do that anymore. They used to be part of their social studies classes. They would go to Columbus and they would go to Washington and learn about government. Now it seems like kids do that more likely from church. The other thing my church is doing along with the. I was going to say Episcopal, but it’s not Episcopal, certainly not Unitarian Church. We are offering sex education only with parents permission. Parents go to a class first to find out what will be taught, and then children are taught. Not in Sunday school, but children are invited at a tender age to a sex education class. I still remember when there was a big fuss at Fernway School when the PTA considered whether or not we should have sex education classes at the elementary school in the sixth grade, I guess. And one of the mothers was very upset. I always don’t want to talk about this. Well, I reported this at dinner that night, and my older daughter, who knew her voice, said she doesn’t know what they’re talking about on the playground. You know, we never think that our children need what they probably need. We don’t know. We forget what it was like when we were kids. And I think if the parents can’t always do it, if you belong to a church, maybe the church can help. So I don’t think that’s inappropriate. I think it’s a good idea. I would have welcomed any help I could get in educating my children in any way. And I think that there are lots of ways. But beyond that, the physical things that the church does, we are open and affirming, which means we welcome gays. We have gay members. Our ministers will perform weddings for not only gays, but beyond, and funerals for gays. One of the first things I think Our ministers were asked to do was once a gay person died and the family wanted a funeral. It was very hard to find a church. But Plymouth has been open to that for a long time. It’s not a matter of everybody being happy about it. That’s not true. I know a lot of people. Plymouth isn’t what it used to be. Well, what is? What’s wrong with the world if we don’t change? I mean, things are going to chan
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