Next posting, the World War and the Changing Mood at Home....
Tuesday, June 25, 2013
How a World War changed an Alabama Family, Part 4
by Glenn N. Holliman
1940...the Storm Grows....
At this time in his life two decades after the Great War, Bishop Holliman was, as were millions of other Americans, an isolationist, one who wanted no involvement in European conflicts. This opinion was shared by many during the late 1930s and early 1940s.
However, by summer 1940 Czechoslovakia, Poland, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Norway and Denmark had fallen before the Nazi war machine. These frightening events moved more and more Americans to support rearmament and aid to England. Great Britain stood alone against increasing fears of a world dominated by an aggressive government of Germany, a militant Japan and a Mediterranean bully, Benito Mussolini's Italy. Collectively, these were the Axis powers of World War II. Below the two dictators who lost their lives in 1945 in the conflagration they initiated.
Ulyss and Pearl Holliman of Irondale, Alabama were devout Christians, and had raised their family as Methodists. Their second daughter, Loudelle, married a Methodist minister in 1935, Charles T. Ferrell, born in Mississippi, and educated at Birmingham-Southern College and Yale Divinity School. Loudelle and Charles helped Bishop obtain a part time job as youth director with the North Alabama Methodist Conference in the late 1930s. This work - several summer youth conferences and his own deep commitment to the Christian faith - are evident in Bishop's pacifistic and humane opinions captured in memoirs written in 1991:
"And so it was as the clouds of war loomed ever more ominous on the horizon that I was a student at Birmingham-Southern College, having entered in 1937. During those years I was very active in youth activities in the Methodist Church, and a principle focus in those times was 'world peace'. At all of our youth conferences, programs, and camps, ironically one of the courses would be labeled, with some variations, 'World Peace."- H. Bishop Holliman, 1991
Above, Christmas 1940, young Charles Halford Ferrell tries out his new Greyhound wagon for his parents, The Rev. Charles and Loudelle Holliman Ferrell. Loudelle and Charles would write faithfully to her siblings, while Charles pastored Methodist Churches in North Alabama during the war.
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