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Remembering the Creator in the Days of My YouthThe Watchtower—1971 | September 1
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I will never forget the first big convention I attended. This was at Madison Square Garden in New York city in 1939. The Watch Tower Society’s then president, J. F. Rutherford, was delivering the public talk “Government and Peace” to an audience of over 18,000. After about twenty minutes, a crowd of Fascist-minded followers of the Roman Catholic priest Charles Coughlin tried to break up the meeting. They began to boo, shout and howl, some wildly crying out “Heil Hitler!” The Society’s president did not become afraid but courageously said: “The Nazis and Catholics would like to break up this meeting, but by God’s grace they cannot do it.” The speech was delivered in its entirety. When I saw the courage and confidence that my older Christian brothers displayed, it impressed on my young mind that to be a servant of Jehovah God one needs to be courageous.
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Remembering the Creator in the Days of My YouthThe Watchtower—1971 | September 1
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FACING MOB VIOLENCE
I preached God’s truths in South Pasadena for about a year and a half. In 1942, while working there, I attended a convention of Jehovah’s people in Klamath Falls, Oregon, about 700 miles north. Fifty-one other cities were tied in by wire from Cleveland, Ohio, the key city. Klamath Falls was another very patriotic town. We heard rumors that this assembly was going to be mobbed. However, everything went smoothly until Sunday, when the public talk, “Peace—Can It Last?” was coming over the telephone wire from the key city. Peace did not last long in Klamath Falls, because a mob of over one thousand adults and youths broke into the Witnesses’ cars, smashed them, put crowbars through the radiators, got all the literature and other equipment and piled them up in the middle of the street.
Then they broke into the hall, took Bibles, books and whatever they could from the literature department. They put all of it together in the street and lit a bonfire.
The mobsters tried to push their way into the main building, but the Witnesses closed off all entrances and guarded them. The mob did succeed, however, in cutting the telephone wire, so the rest of the talk being given by the Society’s president had to be delivered by a local Witness, who was prepared to give the talk from a manuscript, if necessary. This angered the crowd more, and they began throwing stones through the windows. We had to put benches against the windows so that the stones would not hit the people in the auditorium. Despite this, some were hurt.
This mob action continued throughout the rest of the afternoon program, and eventually the police succeeded in pushing the mob down the road. The police advised us to get out of the building and not to continue the evening program because they said it would not be possible for them to control the mob when it got dark. The assembly was brought to an end, and we had to work our way through the crowd to get to our hotel rooms. Outside the building, it looked as if a hurricane had struck. Although I was young, I knew that Jehovah can protect his people, and that was proved to me right there. Following my experiences at that assembly, I went back to my assignment and remained there until Jehovah’s organization saw fit to send me elsewhere.
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