NORTH CAROLINA HILLS--VANCE HAVNER

I grew up in the North Carolina hills. From our front porch we could see at night the lights of five little towns. From the back porch one could see Grandfather Mountain, Table Rock, and companion peaks standing like sentinels along the western skyline. My home community was called Jugtown because in the early years there were little shops up and down the road where the potters wrought vessels of clay. I lived the simple, happy life of an old-fashioned country boy. I tramped the woods with a shepherd dog... Father was an austere but devout Christian, the pastor's right-hand man at old Corinth Baptist Church. The country preachers always stayed at our house on Saturday before the fourth Sunday in each month, when they came by horse and buggy to preach the monthly sermon. Some of those sermons were long enough to last a month and sounded more like filibusters-but it was sound preaching. Father always let me sit up late on those Saturday nights, before the open fire, and listen to him and the minister talk about the things of God. It beat all the television that has been seen since.

Vance Havner, from his biography Journey from Jugtown by Douglas Malcolm White; published by F.H. Revell, Old Tappan, NJ 1977.