Abiline Travel Log

Abilene Travel Log

I left early Wednesday morning (4 am) for Abilene, TX and arrived about 5:30 CT. I arrived back in Tucson last night. It was a wonderful trip. My purpose was to visit with Fran Moser Winkles and live in the library ... but more of that in a moment. First some interesting details ...

First it is a long way from Tucson to Abilene (about 750 miles). For such a trip you need plenty of things to spin in the CD player. So I listened to Jonathan Pennington's New Testament Greek Vocabulary (every word in the NT down to words that occur 10x). My musical companions were the Beatles (Rubber Soul), Pink Floyd (Echoes), Bruce Springsteen (The Rising), and U2 (The Best of 1990-2000).

Second, this is for my friend John Dixon in Milwaukee. I went through Sweetwater, the land of Windmills and Rattlesnake rounds. But I also learned that in Sweetwater, Texans confess the real glory of the better states, :-) There is a street called Alabama Avenue!!!

As I was traveling through El Paso I had a hard time finding an English language radio station. I found it humorous that I found on the Spanish language channel the best music I could understand ... AC/DC (Rock and Roll Ain't Noise Pollution) and the commercial for Pepsi ... :-)

On the way back, between Midland (the home of G.W. and Laura Bush) and Odessa the most interesting thing happened. I spotted a low flying aircraft crossing the hwy some distance in front of me. Then he flew parallel to I-20. Then he (or she!) literally buzzed us on the hwy. The plane flew no higher than 300 feet nearly right over my Saturn Vue. Now this was not a crop duster or a little Cessna. To my amazement it was a World War II B-24 Liberator heavy bomber. If you do not know what that looks like you can find one here.

In Abilene I received the generous hospitality Dr. Carisse Berryhill and her lovely family. She is the director of the Center for Restoration Studies at Abilene Christian University. While at the Library I ran into my friend Edward Robinson who wrote a wonderful study of one of my heroes called To Save My Race From Abuse: The Life of Samuel Robert Cassius. Ed has done a great service to the church through this book. Also while there I had one of those moments of special providence. Though I was looking for Moser treasure, I was given much more. I came away with an entire set of the Christian Baptist, The Campbell-Walker Debate, The Campbell-Purcell Debate, and Campbell's Popular Lectures and Addresses. I came away with DeGroot's The Restoration Principle; The Autobiography of J. W. McGarvey; Isbell's War and Conscience; and some fairly rare sermon books as well as other goodies and they literally dropped into my lap. God is good!!

I was able to stand in the very pulpit that Thomas Campbell preached in every Lord's Day while in Ahory, Ireland before he immigrated to the United States in 1807. That was fun.



I was also able to spend a good portion of the day with Fran and Dub Winkles on Thursday and Friday (we went to The Towne Crier for dinner on Friday nite). Fran graciously talked to me and answered dozens of my questions. She opened up her father's papers to me. I was able to tie together many loose ends in my Moser research. In the library I found lots of treasures hidden in obscure places (like a genuine letter from K. C. Moser to W.D. Ledlow in Batsell Baxter's Thorp Spring Christian College gradebook for 1918-1919!! I has been stuck there since 1920). I was able to locate some class materials that he gave out in 1965 and 1966. And most of all Fran let me read Moser's personal journals ... these are interesting!

Perhaps I will have enough material now to write my biography of K. C. Moser: Apostle of Grace to the Churches of Christ (or some such title!).