Way Corps--the good ones that I knew

[act2]

I would like to acknowledge that I have had good WC--G@ry Sm0ke was our first WC in Henderson that I recall. He was nothing but wonderful. He had a heart of gold, and a couple of years ago, I reconnected with him via email, though when I moved I lost his address.

Oh, before that, as a wow in LA, Becky B. (later Fugit) was our branch leader. She is remembered with only good thoughts, but then, she & her family were separated after a few months, and she went somewhere else. I really cant remember the details, as it was 30 years ago, and I was still a 'new grad', so to speak.

OK, back to Henderson--J@y & M@rj Wilson were next, I think. I am still in contact with them via email. They were and are a most wonderful couple who love God, imho.

Then, I think, it was Annette Linds@y, now married to Michael, cant remember his last name, maybe his last name is Lindsay. I connected w/her a few years ago. She was a lovely lady.

Then, I think it was Tori, from NJ, I think. She married a local man, but is now remarried. She also was a good person.

Then, Terry Dill@rd and his wife Donna, daughters Jennifer & Angela, came to town. Terry helped me & hubby-at-the-time build our log home. He was the first one to say in twig that we were supposed to be self supporting, etc... at a time that twi was wanting to make sure all the money went to them. They were in AL last I heard several years ago.... One time we even gave money to a family in our twig that had suffered extreme financial burdens, with ABS money!!! heehee... we got over on twi, and helped a family in need.

Then I moved to SC, and went to twig in Greenville with J@ck Karnes(WC) & his wife Sabrina. They were also sometimes saying things that went against what twi taught, but DUMB ME, I never saw that as BAD. I respected them for it. Sabrina was there for me many times. She was not WC.

In AL, no WC in my area.

Then I moved to Memphis, then across the river to AR, but still went to twig in Memphis, then Bartlett. C@rmen (WC) and P@t Holden were my first TC there. Only went there a few months, then was told to go 15 miles further to Bartlett to twig. TC were NOT WC, but I truly enjoyed R0n & Sheil@h C. I saw Sheil@h several months b4 I moved, she had remarried, and had a great job at Home Depot.

H@rve Pl@tig and Peggy, John & Catherine (if I remember correctly) were great to me also. Maybe I was living in lala land, but I had no problems with them. In fact, H@rve, one time, told me I had to change something in my life and he WAS right about that. I did, and everything else fell in place in my life FOR THE BETTER. For that, I am grateful to him. Then, Mitc# T#ompson and his wife & kids, dont remember, came, but I left a couple months after that, so did not get to know them at all.

Ok, that's my way corps experience.... BTW, I did sponsor Ev0n Pr!ddy (6th) and T0m Le#r in WC, and helped a couple others. T0m is back in Henderson, though I have only seen him once at a funeral home for my niece's grandma (his aunt, I think).

Tell me about your experiences, if you will.

[act2]

Let me add that I believe that MOST of those listed above had a love for people and the Lord and that shaped their lives and how they treated people.

[GrouchoMarxJr]

Perhaps in our zeal to expose the evils of twi, we often neglect the fact that there were MANY really fine people in the waycorps...afterall many of US were waycorps leaders

So many young people gave up promising careers and other secular endeavors to join a Christian ministry and to do the right thing for God...this in itself was noble and godly. I suppose that in the course of climbing the corporate way tree, many became jaded and corrupted from their original intentions...

...Maybe the greatest example of how many good people were in the waycorps can be seen most clearly by the fact that most of them departed from twi.

[Watered Garden]

I gotta vote for Mike and Janet Donovan in Charleston SC. They were always "there for you" literally as well as figuratively. Ask 2Life about the toga party some time! And the dinners!

Mike has always had a great concern for young people. Their home was always full of them.

It was the best of times...

WG

[coolchef1248 @adelphia.net]

i won't mention names but in the old days i met many more great way corps than bad

but the baddies were BAD

Edited December 9, 2005 by coolchef1248 @adelphia.net

[Belle]

I love the Offencr@ntz family! I hated it when they moved. Phyllis was always such joy to be around. I heard they got a really bad rap after being moved to HQ. :( Great folks, they are.

I do and did like Lind@ McDuffie and pretty much all the WC Alums in my area....and....lessee, pretty much any other great WC folks I met were the ones I met here on GSpot and at WayDale. :wub:

[WordWolf]

No names,

but even the ones I thought were dead wrong,

of those I knew,

they all at least MEANT well and TRIED to do the

right thing.

(With one or 2 exceptions.)

[Too Gray Now]

Some of the finest people I ever met in my life were WC. No exaggeration, either.

Kind of makes you wonder... such a dangerous and destructive cult - LURES some of the finest people on the face of the earth...

Seems a little bit like a contradiction of sorts, ya know?

Kind of like the fine plumage on a peacock - attractive, nice, beautiful -

But, damn - the bird that those feathers cover is one nasty, little creature.

Edited December 10, 2005 by Too Gray Now

[markomalley]

Some of the finest people I ever met in my life were WC. No exaggeration, either.

Kind of makes you wonder... such a dangerous and destructive cult - LURES some of the finest people on the face of the earth...

Seems a little bit like a contradiction of sorts, ya know?

Kind of like the fine plumage on a peacock - attractive, nice, beautiful -

But, damn - the bird that those feathers cover is one nasty, little creature.

TGN,

It makes complete sense to me (and I'll agree that some of the best people I've ever associated with were in TWI -- along with some of the worst).

Think about it: you have young adults, with a whole lot of talent and a whole lot to offer...dealing with a horribly cynical time like the '70s...and then on comes old Vic who provided them with a 'positive' vision ... seems to me a natural combination, the idealism along with a beatific vision such as he portrayed. It doesn't surprise me a bit.

One comment I made shortly after getting involved with TWI that I still remember was "If the mainstream churches were doing their jobs, there would never have been a need for TWI."

I got some really nasty stares when I made that comment ... I didn't understand it at the time ... but years later, I still think that it was absolutely correct.

[coolchef1248 @adelphia.net]

we had a wonderful wc couple in our town and i will go to my grave thankful for those two people steve and margurette kyle

margurette painted 4 wall murels in the nursery of my home when the mother of my children was preggers for our twins

it was wonderful they were great people and i wish i knew where they are now

they handled prombles with unconditional love and they were lovely people

we named one of the twins after steve, kyle being one of the twins first name and steven the others middle name

Edited December 10, 2005 by coolchef1248 @adelphia.net

[Bramble]

I did know some great Way Corps through the years. I was in nearly 20 years, left late nineties.

Great Way corps in our area was why Hubby and I decided to stay with TWI in 1989. In fact, an imapssioned teaching from the twig area coord/friend of the 'TWI saved my life' variety was pivotal to our staying in.We saw our dear friends move up in TWI world, become limb leaders, move to HQ...one was on the President's cabinet. We were happy for them, they were great people.

Now while they were moving up in TWI, we were stuck with over zealous LCM wannabe leadership in a place our ol'buddies would never ever even visit again. We'd hear rarely from our ol'corp friends...we were in different levels of TWI ranking now. We might have a 5 minute conversation at an Advance or ROA--not a friendship, really.

When we could no longer take the crap and left, a TWI friend did call me. She actually believed my sad story about our struggles with Leadshi+ X , she had managed to get out of our fellowship and get into the other one in our area, because she didn't like the crap from Mr.X. She tried to persuade me to contact my old buddy now on the president's cabinet at HQ, to bring in the big gun and shoot it at the local leadership so we could 'stand' with TWI. I knew it wouldn't help. We'd still be under constant scrutiny.We just wanted to be out of it.

Our ol' budies are out now...we have never felt like contacting them, or they, us. In a sense, I feel betrayed by them, because they knew(as I've heard through the grape vine) so much more than we did back in 1989 and then in all the following years. Heck we never had access to POP until we found it here, never heard of the Adultery papaer...

If they were friends, why didn't they say, "Run away, move on, find a safe harbor?" They said nothing, I think, because we really weren't that important, our lives could be shredded while they played the Way leadership game with more important players.

We left after nearly 20 years in with No exway friends, just a few aquaintences. Everyone through the years that I thought was a dear friend of the heart turned out to be not that at all.

[Too Gray Now]

Think about it: you have young adults, with a whole lot of talent and a whole lot to offer...dealing with a horribly cynical time like the '70s...and then on comes old Vic who provided them with a 'positive' vision ...

That, my friend, is an observation I can get behind.

:P

I was just thinking that we, the corps, that were liked and appreciated... were like the plumage on a peacock. In other words, we supplied part of the "glory" of what otherwise was, a nasty bird.

I believe Mrs. W. would have agreed as well with my analogy.

Edited December 10, 2005 by Too Gray Now

[waterbuffalo]

...yes, too gray, and that "positive vision" kept many of us from ministering to the world in the way that we were trained to via our education (b.c. (degrees we earned "before corps"))--because we took all of that gumption, vision, and zeal and wasted it on a corrupt organization. Thankfully, it's never too late as long as we can draw breath, and some of us are now back reclaiming our lives and doing what we were meant to do.

[excathedra]

If they were friends, why didn't they say, "Run away, move on, find a safe harbor?" They said nothing, I think, because we really weren't that important, our lives could be shredded while they played the Way leadership game with more important players.

We left after nearly 20 years in with No exway friends, just a few aquaintences. Everyone through the years that I thought was a dear friend of the heart turned out to be not that at all.

oh man, bramble that sucks. i hope they were just scared and stupid and clueless. i hate to think you weren't important to them. but i do know what you mean and how you could feel that way. playing the way game with more important players like most corps did when push came to shove.

i never felt important as way corps. i felt like s hit. and honestly from my heart, my best friends were the people we hung with in twig. but i don't think i ever should have been "corps" i sucked at it as did my husband

i was at a special corps meeting wtih limb leader in the POP time and he said we have to shut up and not tell "our people" (what an egotistical term) what's going on for the sake of i forget some such s hit

so we (my then husband and i) went back and reported every single solitary word told to us

mainly because our friends were so important to us, but selfishly maybe because we were already so burned out and abused at that point because we were not sterling corps, but we definitely didn't buy the thing "protect our people from the truth" s hit

i don't know how else to explain it. they were telling us it was "loving" not to tell all the crap

does that make sense ?

i don't think i'm doing a good job of explaining

i'm sorry you were hurt and i'm sorry i was hurt and we are all equal people trying to get along in this stinking life. i'm glad we're out of the way

i just read your post more carefully, they were climbing the ladder

i'm really sorry

i have some friends still who were in the corps and they wish people would realize how much they loved god and people etc. and that's why they went in there. mind you, these people never got to be big leaders and they didn't make the grade for some reason. but they truly sacrificed a lot and wanted to sell their soul for service to god

i hope some people see what i mean

because if you start to try to explain it yourself, it makes you look like you're trying to be important or special

Edited December 11, 2005 by excathedra

[Jim]

Del Duncan - I don't know what happened to him after '74 or so, but when he was the limb leader of Califorinia, he was great. An incredible speaker, motivated and driving.

Johnny Townsend - again, I don't know what happened to him during and after the fog years, but as Cal limb leader after DD, and as head of staff at HQ, I have nothing but good to say about him.

Joe Coulter - Still on staff, a true paradox. Joe was not the easiest person to get along with, but I always respected his tremendous leadership ability and his organizational skills.

Mark Glukin, Tom Mausoff, Susan Miller, Bo Rehard - all great people. The best to work with.

There were many more. People whose equal I've never seen in the secular world. I miss them all.

[J0nny Ling0]

David and Rhonda Schmidt, Linda MacDuffy, Tim Stiles, Kirk Malmberg, Tony Ruda, Gabe Ortiz, a whole slew of Tenth Corps pals, and, I really loved a gal named Suzy Wassung. Yes, she was/is pretty, and I was a bit smitten by her, but man, that girl really just loved people, and that was what was so beautiful about her. I just love love I guess. Really, now that I have started to think it through, there were so many who loved and tried to make this old world a better place, and for that I am totally thankful for the time I spent in The Way and in the Way Corps....

[Bramble]

oh man, bramble that sucks. i hope they were just scared and stupid and clueless. i hate to think you weren't important to them. but i do know what you mean and how you could feel that way. playing the way game with more important players like most corps did when push came to shove.

Excathedra, I guess they were caught up in their situations. I do believe they went in with a heart to serve and take care of people...

I do suspect they thought they were protecting us, the small town twig leaders with the little happy twig. We had people that drove 50ml one way every Sunday to go to fellowship because they no longer had a twig leader in their towns. I guess they didn't want to shake it up. Instead it got thoroughly ground up in the nineties.

I do know the limb guy who counselled us to sell our house and move to the HOT limb city was sincere. Stupid, but sincere. He really believed that was the magic formula for taking care of some huge medical bills (we had crap insurance and I had complications with a delivery, thwap, $20k.) But then, when it didn't work and we were the ones who struggled for years to make rent, ABS, feed the family, pay the medical bills(hospitals will sue for non payment, ya know?) Plus we were no longer on the good believer list...

My husband is still angry (really angry, as in don't even mention the Way)about it, all those years of Absing when we could have been putting that money to medical bills, while LCM wore suits that cost $3K and was sending his gals on shopping sprees. All those years of stress with the extra scrutiny we had to take because we were in major debt.

Heck, if we'd been sane we would have taken a second mortgage. A new 4 lane highway was coming passed our little town, subdivisions were being planned, housing prices in the little city went way up a few years later. And we knew about the 4 lane and the subdivision!

We got the 20k paid off the year that child started school.

[J0nny Ling0]

Bummer, Bramble. No doubt about it. You probably could have made some nice coin on your house had you kept it and then sold it later. And so, back to the topic: Did you know any good ones that were in the WC at all?

Another good one, at least to me was a guy named Glen Edmondson, from one of the Carolinas. Ashville, I think. A finer pure hearted man would be hard to find. Blond guy, with an awesome Southern accent and a heart of pure gold. 11th Corps I think. I don't think he rose too far up the leadership ladder, for, he just wasn't that kind of a guy. He was a WOW when I was a new guy, and later went into the Corps.

[excathedra]

bramble, i can't blame your husband one little bit. your story is really heartwrenching. how dare all the honchos live high on the hog while all the "regular folk" support them. it's just downright criminal. hope there's some kind of big reward for you somewhere along the line

[WhiteDove]

Jim - Johnny Townsend lives just outside Dayton Ohio he is well but his hair has greyed now.

edited for OOOP's feeling stupid wrong Jim........ Thanks Bowtwi for the heads up!

Edited December 11, 2005 by WhiteDove

[Bramble]

That was my good way corps story, Johnny Lingo. They were friends for a while, seemed like great people with great heart. We stayed in the Way because of some of them. Sorry it didn't turn out Rah Rah enough for your thread.

[Lifted Up]

Yea i have mostly good rememberances of John Townsend at HQ. He did get upset with me on a couple of occasions but when he was letting me have it personally, his voice stayed as soft as normal. One time I missed a shadow appointment with himand he couldn't understand how I could memorize as much scripture as I did but forget a simpe appointment like that.

But if you want a good rememberance here, I have one of Naomi. It was she who helped us corps men out when we raided the women having a nacho party in the Wierwille home. Later they caught her eating the stolen nachos with us.

[J0nny Ling0]

Another really great guy was Bob Ledman...

This isn't my thread. I believe if you will look at the first post, you will see that it was started by Act 2, a pretty lady with a bonnet on. Have a great day Bramble!

And by the way Act 2, I really like Gary Smoke also!

[igotout]

Yes, there were some really good ones. Like John Richxxx in Florida who was never mean. Whatever happened to him, anyway?

Sadly. some of the original good ones became, mean old bastards as the legalism and hypocrisy saturated their lives without their knowing it. They were miserable really.

Sometimes they changed back to being good people AFTER they left TWI. I am sure even LCM himself is a different person today albeit with a tornado-like path left behind him.

[act2]

Johnny Lingo, thanks for the compliment!!! Gary Smoke is a good man, imho.

Keep on posting..... good and bad!!!!!!!!!!!!!!