Summary of Interview with Dr. R. A. McLaren in Victoria, B.C. June 13, 1977

Transcription

1 Summary of Interview with Dr. R. A. McLaren in Victoria, B.C. June 13, 1977 By Rev. Lawrence G. Sieber Born in Crossfield, Alberta, then moved to Bowden where he attended school. ambitions - first of dentist, then as school teacher, then decided to go into church work. Idea of centre for young people. to Pouce Coupe Pastoral charge - marriage to Emmanuel College for B. D. degree to Castor, Alberta. Christian Education Secretary for four years. Beginnings of Naramata Christian Leadership Training School difficulties of beginning the school. First year an experiment friends of the school - students, staff, living conditions. Courses and staff rotation; school spirit; students future in the church; story of nurse in Calgary. the name included the word Christian second year, site approved, Jack Robinson s deposit on Army Surplus building from Vernon. spring of re- constructed building. Dinner at Vancouver Club with such dignitaries as Del Grauer - bus story. gift of two carloads of wheat but Government disallowed it Calves project from Alberta to Penticton, B. C. Lumber story - cottages Coal - carload from Drumheller, Alta. what does the school mean to people - looking back The Good News other schools. The summer course and winter course. The future. I am Lawrence Sieber of the Heritage Alive United Church History Seekers interviewing Rev. R. A. McLaren in his home in Victoria. June 13, Bob you were telling me awhile ago about your family and where you were born. Tell us that again. I was born at Crossfield, Alberta, and my people had come out from the Ottawa Valley, my dad, sometime before the turn of the century, and my mother sometime later, and they moved from Crossfield up to Bowden, Alberta, and that is where I was brought up, and something quite serious happened to me, and really changed my life. I had my leg broken in a hay bailer, my knee broken, and it meant that I couldn t really walk very much and really couldn t do farm work. This sent me to school, and then I went to teach school because I thought I could make more money later as a dentist. I was going to put myself through as a dentist. As teaching school I came close to boys and girls and I wanted to be a minister because I thought that I could light a fire in people s lives and felt this was one of the most significant things that could be done by me. I didn t know whether I could do it or not, but I felt there

2 was a great deal of young people, lay people, that had much ability if someone could waken in themselves their own worth, that this would be something that the Christian religion was about. And where did this idea come from, do you remember? Well, the idea came partly from just by seeing people, but then when I went on to college I felt more and more that the church could be doing a far bigger thing, that we did a really big and significant thing on the farm, and yet we didn t let the farm represent the kind of thing the church was really trying to represent, and I felt that I was aware of other school, there were a number of Bible schools. There was a huge one at Three Hills, Alberta, one at Briarcrest, the Mennonites had one at Didsbury, and I was impressed how they did the one at Didsbury. They brought I understand, 80 young people in, and the total cost in money for those students for about four months, was less than the salary of one professor that we had in St. Stephen s College, and our professors were certainly not yery well paid. And they did it because they had a farmer bring in a load of potatoes, another man a whole truck load of turnips, another a load of cabbage, and they would have 10 farmers who would give a whole beef each, and they had all the screened wheat, all the porridge meal they could eat. It was just a rich country, and I felt that if they could do that, we could do that. This got me thinking in terms of, we could have a centre where young people could have a sense of their own worth, that they could come as they were and are. And I also felt when I was out on the summer field, I wanted them, these young people to go on, to go on and felt they could, but they weren t quite ready. They had only had their Grade XI. They were older, they had dropped out and yet they were beautiful and able people, and I thought if somebody could help them to get started that we could have a school where they wouldn t have to wear special clothes, they wouldn t have to have some special academic training and we could open up some doors for them that would help them to get the kind of thing that would be accepted by the major colleges. This was the kind of thing in the back of my mind but I felt that there was greatness here, that we could get many people. I also felt that here was a boy and he wanted to go into the United Church ministry, but he lacked a subject or two and away he would go. He would go to Three Hills or he would go to Briarcrest, he was lost to our church, and I felt this was a great loss. It would plug that kind of a leak. I remember you talked to me about that when I came in from Stony Plain to audit some courses at St. Stephen s. But you didn t go right from graduation and ordination into a school work like this, you went to a pastoral charge. Yes, I went to Pouce Coupe and I was there for two years and while there I got married, and my wife and I went down and she took a year s course as a deaconess in the college in Toronto and I took my B. D. at Emmanuel College, and from there we came back to Castor, Alberta, where I had been a teacher for three years, and I was just there for two years when I was asked to be Field Secretary for British Columbia, and I came out to this. And as I moved around the province I was more and more convinced that we should have a centre, and that we could use material

3 things. We could use some of the gifts of the land, and make it possible for the young people to have the sense of who they were and where they were going, and we were one of the very first people that used that phrase. I want to know who I really am. Later books have been written by, I don t know whether it was John Oliver Nelson, but we were one of the very first I know of to use that phrase, and it still can be used today. So you were in Christian Education work in B. C. for four years, and then how did you get started after that? At the end of the third year we felt very keenly that we should be having this and we sort of made plans for it. I continued as Field Secretary and we had Clyde Woollard, who came in as associate secretary in Boys Work, and Roy Stobie came on the staff. We devised a plan whereby we could make a beginning. We tried all over the place to get someone to be principal, but we couldn t seem to get anybody because we didn t have, the question would be, would I be sure to get the salary. But I said, where would I live? and they said, We ll find a place for you to live, and so here we didn t have students, we didn t have the money, we didn t have a curriculum, and we really didn t have a place to go but we were building a school and so I just said, I ll go, I ll do that. So working through Roy Stobie who was the minister at Penticton, he said that I could become the minister at Naramata and for this I would get a place to live and $500 a year, and on that basis that was the only money to be absolutely sure of. Other than that, everything to run the school and the rest of my salary had to come from gifts we had. Did the British Columbia Conference or the church in Toronto do anything or go along with your idea? They thought it was a good idea but the sects could run this, but this wasn t really for the United Church, and they were afraid that if we had a school like this that there would be zealots running about, and they also felt they couldn t see how it would really work, and so we had great difficulty. Some people really believed in it, particularly women believed in it. I think they were farther ahead in their mind than anybody, and we pulled a little board together and we talked about this and made our plans and submitted them to the Conference and the Conference took a dim view of it and finally they said, Alright if you can go out and get $3,000 in a few weeks time so that you ve really got something to begin with, we ll give you permission to go. So I went out and within three weeks we had $9,000 in money and they were surprised and pleased, mostly surprised, and we went from there to Toronto and when in Toronto, B.C. seemed so far away and sort of a scatter- brained idea. I remember Mac Gilmore who was then teaching New Testament in Queen s, he was a member of the Board of Christian Education, and he spoke about being a student out there and had stayed in our home, and he said he believed in the kind of people my mother and dad were, that if I undertook anything like this that I just simply couldn t help but make a success of it, and this carried a great deal of weight with the board, and they gave us a bit reluctantly, the O.K. of the Board of Christian Education to begin this experimental kind of work. But they didn t give you anything?

4 No financial obligation. It seems I remember now there was about $250 or something in some kind of a little kitty that was left over for something and that was given to us to be used, that s all we had, no guarantee or anything. And you were the minister in Naramata and this seemed to be the spot for the school? I wasn t the minister, I was the Field Secretary and I went to Naramata, we chose Naramata and we went on an experimental basis for the first year. We rented a hostel for $100 a month as a kind of a dormitory, and we used the basement of the Naramata church for classes. We had a little stove in the corner and had 32 students for that first winter. We began, I went up with my wife and so on, and got things in readiness in July, and in the first of January we began and we were doing it on an experimental basis. Where did the students come from? The students came from all over B. C. and some from Alberta, and we devised a pretty smart way of doing, we formed a plan of getting friends of the school and we didn t want to interrupt churches and their financial obligations to their boards, we had people who had become friends of the school who would give $5; a year or more, and then we wrote a letter. We got an old Gestetner and it had gone through a fire, and I can assure you this doesn t improve the quality of the Gestetner, and we mimeographed a letter that went out to the women s groups and I m amazed at the response of those women who thought that Naramata was a Japanese word, and all across Saskatchewan and across Alberta, way up in little tiny places, you would get letters like this, We really don t know about this Naramata, but if you are trying to do something for our boys and girls, then we want you to use this $25. And several thousand dollars came in because of that letter to those women s groups and we made that beginning.. Where did you find a cook, to cook the meals for the students? We didn t. One of the students who came in said, Well, I ll come next year and stay on as cook; so we gave her a very nominal fee, and she was the cook that winter. The only transportation we had was my car, and it was a 1937 Pontiac and it had a little trailer at the back that I used as Boys Work Secretary, and I brought in all the luggage of all the students that came by trains or busses, and it brought all the food that we used, the ten miles from Penticton to Naramata. We lived in the hostel and we had a dining room. Well, you didn t bring your staff that way? No, we didn t. But we were really smart, both in our choice and in our arrangement. We simply didn t have any money. I kept my salary $2,400 a year with no travel, and I kept it that way for at least eight years because every cent we had in addition to that, we poured into that school so we could get started, we could own what we were doing. For the first winter the students had no place but just their hostel, and they would have coffee in our home and that meant that at least twice a week we

5 had 32 students for coffee all winter long in just our living room in the little manse that we had, and up until the first three months, all the washing of those students was done in our washing machine, which went constantly all Saturday and certain nights, because we had nothing to begin with. A word more about the staff, Lawrence. We didn t have the money to hire people to come in and be on the staff. I was the only member of the staff, but I didn t teach anything. I was so busy doing everything else, but we had wonderful cooperation from the ministers and their boards and churches who would let their ministers come to us and be with us for two weeks, and that meant he only had to miss one Sunday, he or she only missed the one Sunday, and we arranged our courses on the kind of semester system and we had a course run, we would eat and sleep, two courses at a time two weeks and we would house those ministers and they would be a part of the social life with the students, so we went through the who winter, we would have Old Testament, New Testament, the Life of Jesus, Life of Paul, Christian Theology, Public Speaking, and something on Crafts, and so the cost to this new venture for staff members was almost nothing, at least ministers came in and we just paid their transportation and board and room while they were there. And both the students and staff found the hostel a bit cold. When the wind blew from one direction we studied on the other side. You were there I think on Old Testament and you could say a word about that yourself. But there was a marvellous spirit among the young people there and I would say that it came from one called, Bob McLaren. Well, I wouldn t say that. It is a strange thing but this school and others like it have a kind of uniqueness that students work, play and live together, there is something of the very meaning of God in their midst. Do you remember what some of the first students did, and where they are now, didn t quite a number go into full time church work? Yes, there were a large number that went into the ministry and I know that George Searcey, now the minister at Shaughnessy, and he got going there, then later on, not the first year, but Bill Van Druten, another one, and I know that Bob Wallace and Tom Bulman and others, although they didn t take the winter course, were associated with the school so closely that they say themselves that they were quite strongly affected. Then there were a great many, and we ve been interested in the number that hadn t any, particularly the girls, that hadn t any occupation in view, but went on and became teachers and nurses. I think of one girl who was a nurse in the Calgary General Hospital. She tells the story that one day a young woman was brought in and she had a brain tumour and the doctor knew, and she knew that she would never return home and she had two beautiful little children, and she said to herself, and she said to herself, what can I say to her? I know I can fix the flowers and fix the bed and get the charts ready for the doctor and that, but what can I say to her. Surely there is something I can say. I am going to go someplace where there is

6 something to be said about life about people that are dying, so she came to the school. Later that girl went on and became matron of one of our hospitals like Lamont. They came because they had what other people had, plus a hunger for something that was deeper and something that had greater meaning, and very often in that kind of environment they found it and I want to say that it really was a rich thing to have ministers that were out of their charges, they were really in the front lines, they were dedicated people who knew loneliness and separation and agony as well as victory, they knew defeats as well as joy and they shared that at first hand, and this is always a rich thing, and this was a rich thing in that school. And this is one reason why it was called Christian, or was it called Christian with this hope ahead? It was hope. When we named it we knew we weren t a college, we didn t know what we were, but we did want it to be Christian, we meant it to be that, and we did want it to be leadership, and we wanted lay people to go back as leaders in their own community and help to take services and boys work, girls work and youth work, and we wanted to call it, maybe a better school so we called it, The Christian Leadership, and it was a Training School, so it became the Christian Leadership Training School. Later it became Naramata; incidentally Naramata is an Indian word for the Smile of the Heavenly Father is the meaning of it. Well, that was the first year. Now the second year a lot happened before the fall class came in? We had a board meeting. They came up to the school and they found out how we got along, because we were just using rented facilities, they didn t know whether this was the place we should stay or not. The board decided this was a good place to stay, partly because it was on a big lake and could run a summer program, half way between Calgary and Vancouver. It was near a city but not in it. The city of Penticton where they had planes and trains and busses and wholesalers, wholesale houses, so we decided we d stay, and Jack Robinson who was a layman from Vancouver and in Ryerson, he was a very eager, hard working fellow, and he heard of an army building in Vernon that the War Assets were selling off and he put the deposit down until we could clear with our board. The deposit was about $250. We bought that building for about $2,000. A huge, huge army officers mess building, that was 80 miles away and we tore it all apart, dismantled it for $2,000, and we hauled it down for $1,000, and it took 35 truckloads of five tons each. We did it for $1,000 because we had many trucks go and brought a load free to help us get going until we piled all that stuff, and we had Dr. Dobson s son, Hugh. I think it was, an architect who had drawn up the plans for the bus station in Vancouver, the B. C. Electric, and who later drew up plans for one of the big construction companies. He drew the building as an architect, on butcher s paper, and then we re- assembled it, staying within the 24 rafter span that the army used on so much of its construction, so the building was quite well drawn. And the land that you put it on, how did you get that?

7 It was orchard land and we got it for not very much, I think it was only about two or three thousand dollars we paid, $2,000 I think for the land. There was about an acre or an acre and a half. And when was it ready to occupy? We built it that spring and we didn t use it that summer, but it was ready to be occupied in the fall of the year, and the following summer we had Howard Thurman come as a speaker and we used him that time, and some very well known persons like John Oliver Nelson, Nels Ferré, one of the great theologians of our land I remember being there when Nels Ferré was there. When you opened the building did you have some kind of ceremony? Yes, we did and we asked President MacKenzie, Dr. Norman MacKenzie, President of the University to come up and open the building. We talked to him in the first place and he was very instrumental in helping us. He was very busy and a very busy person. I went out to see him when I was Field Secretary before we got even passed by the Conference. Well, he said, Bob, you ve got a real good idea here, but if you are just trying to train ministers, I don t think I d be prepared to help very much, but if you are trying to light a fire in lay people and help them to do what they could be doing, then I d be willing to help you. Well, later, he put on a dinner in the Vancouver Club and I went and told my story, and at that dinner there were Robson, of Robson Lumber, there was Van Dusen and there was Guy Flavelle, there was Evans from Evans, C Coleman & Evans, cement people from Vancouver. Some of them weren t all that interested. Dal Grauer was there, and then I remember following, going back and taking all the rest of the day to get into Dal Grauer s office to talk to him. Then I finally got him at the end of the day and he said, What do you want? And I said, I would like you to give a thousand dollars. Well, he said, We really can t be giving to one church, we can t begin to be giving to all these churches, but he said, I really believe our board will give you a thousand dollars. And I said, There is another thing I would like you to give us, I would like you to give us a bus. It should be a big bus and a good bus and a strong bus or it is no good to us. He said, This is an unusual request, and I said, This is an unusual school, and he said, I really think you are crying and I believe in you, I believe you are going to do this thing. He said, And I will see the board about that-. Within three weeks I had a letter and the letter said, We have retired 15 of our big busses, you can use one that is 54 passenger, or one that is 32, and one 40 passenger. Well, we took one, a 40 passenger and they put it through a body plant for a day and they put it through the motor plant for a day, and their sign writer wrote our name on it, and one of their drivers drove that bus up, a huge bus as a gift to our school, with an additional $1,000. Where did you get the license? Well, that was the catch. And it cost $190 for the license and we went to the government agent and the government agent said, Bob, you ve got a dandy school

8 but there s nothing in the book that says you can get a license for less than $190. And I said, That s all Greyhound pay and they go 250,000 miles a year with their busses, and we only do 2,000 miles a year with a bus, and there s got to be a way in which, and I said these were the same people that in the time of war they drove the Spitfire planes and the bomber planes in the time of war and they were burnt to death in the tanks. If they could do something in the time of war, surely we could do something for these young people in times of peace. Anyway there is nothing in the book that says you can get a license for less than $190, I said, you are looking in the wrong book, and I went to our member of Parliament for that area in the Okanagan and I told the story to him, and he took it to the Council and by an order in Council they passed this order in Council, that this bus would get a free license every year with the exception of 50 which it cost and they made that available, not only to us, but every school like us, every church and Sunday School that needed a bus to haul children, they got it for 50. You were talking Bob about losing some wheat and some lumber, what happened? We believed. We really believed in our school, we believed in these people and this gave us the courage to go and ask the people. We didn t ask with tongue in cheek in a humiliated way, we really, really felt in our heart that we were doing more for you that you were doing for us no matter what you gave to us. We believed that and felt that and immediately people believed that too, and so we went to the farmers around in the Drumheller area with the minister from the Drumheller church and before you knew it, we had two carloads of #2 northern wheat given to us. But the there was a snag. They wouldn t let it go out because they were only allowed a certain quota and we lost that wheat, we couldn t take it, but anyway we had it given to us. Who wouldn t allow it? The government wouldn t allow it to leave the country, wouldn t allow those farmers to do it. From Alberta to British Columbia? Yes, they wouldn t because the farmers were only allowed to deliver so much wheat on a quota, we weren t allowed to get it. However there is one more interesting story I would like to share with you, partly because my dad was a rancher, not many things I know, but I know something about cattle and calves, and I know ranching because there was a time when he had about 700 head of cattle, when he was a younger man, and so we know in quite a lot of these areas it was nothing for a person to give a calf, and so before we knew it we had gathered 22 calves from different farms. We said to the farmer, Now, we want you to keep it until it is quite a big calf, like a year old or more, and so he did, and then we ll gather them up, and then we went to another person who had a huge truck that would haul cattle, it would haul 22 head of cattle, a little over a year old, up to two years old, and he said Yes Bob, I ll take that truck and I ll haul those out for you, from Calgary, from the

9 Didsbury area, I ll haul those out free but there was another catch. You are not allowed to have those calves leave Alberta into British Columbia without them all being vaccinated for blackleg or inspected. A vet heard about and he said I ll vaccinate all those cattle and inspect them for the government and it won t cost you a cent. An oil company heard about it and they said, We ll supply all the oil and all the gas for that truck, every time you take it, we ll supply it. And so there arrived 22 head of cattle, and you said, Well, what did you do with them? They were all alive. Well, we arranged for a farm a little bit south of Penticton to board them, and we gave once a month, we would give one critter, I think it was, to the man who owned the farm, and we had a butcher butcher two of those a week until they were all gone and it cost us nothing, absolutely nothing for that whole 22 head of cattle. Well, we could have done that every year but we got involved just about then in our You were talking about lumber for building and that you had some, and somehow or other it didn t get there. Well, that was one thing, we had a mill in the Fraser Valley that gave us the siding, enough siding for that big building McLaren Hall, but that was the year of the big flood you remember, and all our siding was washed away, and half the mill, so we lost that. But we did an interesting thing with lumber. Because my dad was a contractor, I knew quite a little bit about saws and about lumber, and we went to different mills and we asked them if they could help us, never for money, but if there was some lumber that had missed the plainer or two by eights, or whatever, or two by fours and so on, and they gave us lumber and then we got a contractor that gave us a saw. It was worth $1,000, a real Radial saw, with a 12 inch blade, and a motor that travelled 3400, and so Commonwealth Construction and Ralph Pybus, gave us this saw and we would run that stuff through again and trim it up until it was all true if it needed it, and that saw would cut up enough for a whole cottage in a day. It, and another saw were the ones that built that big, huge Sears in New Westminster, and that was the construction saw. But we got at least eight or ten mills who would give us 8,000 feet a year and did so for about eight years. And you used that to build the summer cottages? Yes, we used that to build the summer cottages and residences, and houses and later Alberta Hall and Columbia Hall, and those mills really felt that their lumber was going to something that was going someplace, it was for youth and they were very glad to do it. There was no difficulty in getting it every year, the same mill doing the same thing again and again. This building that you bought in Vernon and brought down and used and designed by Dr. Hugh Dobson s son, you used what to heat it with? Well we used coal and we went to Drumheller and got in touch with the mill there and had them give us a carload of coal, and they gave us a carload of coal every year. The amusing story was they wrote to us and said Well, what kind of a car can you unload? Well, I was smart, I knew there was only one kind of a car, a box car, the

10 C.P.R. had them and they were all painted red, and they hauled cattle and all sorts of stuff. I was away and my wife went to the coal dealer in Penticton and she says, Is there a difference in cars? Oh, goodness, he said, A box car only holds about 35 tons, and a hopper car holds about 50 tons, but a gondola car holds tons. So we wrote right away saying that the kind of car that we could unload easiest would be a gondola car, and so we had a gondola car, 70 tons of coal put in, free of charge in the dock in Naramata every year. Where would you store the coal? We built big bins and we stored it. We got used stokers because people were taking stokers out. Then later I think they changed stokers, but then I think it s a smart thing that the whole country is moving back again to coal. They are moving away from oil and gas, and back again to coal, we had neither. Is Naramata still fired with coal? No, it s not. I think they ve changed over now, but there are lots of changes, and they have to make changes. Bob, what did the school really mean to people as you look back? Well, we really built that school far better than we knew ourselves because the good news as I understand it now, and I am retired from the ministry, is for a person to feel, not in his mind only, but in his stomach, to really feel his sense of worth, his sense of foreverness, and that school it was a kind of medium in which the people, particularly the young people, of any age, could come and sort themselves out again, something of the earth, the sun and the sky, and the lake, and the feeling of togetherness could well up through them and they could have a sense of meaning and a sense of being and a sense of wonder, and so the school really established a centre where new forms of expressing that good news could emerge, and there would be many changes, they do different things now than we did, and that will change and that tomorrow will hold different things than they are doing now, and they are doing so many things, but some of the things in particular now that impresses me is the kind of thing that can happen through groups. You mentioned it awhile back, that there was a kind of feeling, kind of a fellowship, a warm kind of comradeship that grew. I think it was Clyde Reid when he came to Parksville, in his little book said something very significant when he said, Groups Alive, Congregations Alive., This centre wrote in its summer program and in its winter programs makes it possible for small groups to wrestle with the sense of who they are and where they are going and what it is that is important and they become alive, they come on fire, and to go back and become your Sunday School teachers, they are the ones who pick up the boys work and the girls work, they are the ones who volunteer to go to camp, you don t have to be at them to do it, that s the unique thing.

11 Not the academic thing that you are giving them, that s there too, not the formal training, that s there too, but the sense that they belong, and that groups alive and congregations in the tomorrow of the church will become alive, and that is why I think that school is such a significant, can be such a significant thing. Then it has sort of fulfilled your hopes? Yes, it did. It grew faster and better than I thought we could, and I think you know that the Baptist people came and used some of our materials, and we ve kept in touch with them as they have established one in Calgary, and the Presbyterians have established one in Medicine Hat, and I think you know too, that they established one kind of programs but similar. Then we helped the Anglicans at Shuswap Lake, at Sorrento, to get going. We shared with them our victories and our defeats, we had both, but we feel that it is really very significant. Ivan was saying something that since we started this school, the summer program alone, has had something like 48,000 take the summer course. This is altogether apart from the winter course, that you taught at back in 1947 and the winter of 1948, but I feel for people to draw apart, I think that we foreshadowed the very thing that is happening elsewhere where people are doing yoga, and they are doing meditations, and are going all kinds of different things, its good, but this school gave a media or gave a place in which this kind of growth of renewal, could operate. It could be a place of study, a place of aloneness. This goes over from Naramata, a first attempt experiment and confirmed dreams into others in Canada, they are all still thriving. Yes, they are. And an interesting thing should be said here, that here we did this alone, we did this not knowing what was happening elsewhere in the world. But as we really established we found that the World Council of Churches in Switzerland had established one not unlike it and in Kirkridge and other centres in the United States had something, and it was kind of an idea whose time had come and they all grew almost at the same time unbeknown to each other. Isn t that an interesting thing? Very much so. And the future, what do you see in the future? Well, I can t see the future, but I can see this kind of centre helping to train, helping to make possible the very material and the very genius that can be used in the local congregations, and if the congregations would grow apace, if they would use this centre as much as they can, even if it cost them some to help send people to it, that the very thing that is going on there can be done with some adaptations back in the local church, and I feel the next 50 years it can have a most significant influence, not on the life of people as individuals but on whole congregations in new areas. Out of it can grow something, what do they call it, cottage church or small groups in learning, expressing themselves. Well, thank you very much Bob.