Current is grateful for P&R Publishing’s permission to serialize Marvin Olasky’s memoir, Pivot Points: Adventures on the Road to Christian Contentment. Â Â
Act 2: TOWARD CONTENTMENT 1975-1988
Chapter 7: Today I Am a Married Man
The young woman introduces herself a Susan Northway. She is lovely in shorts and a T-shirt. I’m wearing a green cotton turtleneck bought in Filene’s Basement for a dollar and off-brand blue jeans that don’t quite reach my ankles. She is moving out of one of the six rooms upstairs and wants to return the key. I say I’m the new manager. We stand in the doorway, screen door propped open. It doesn’t matter if several more flies join their friends inside. We chat for a few minutes.
Then she heads to her room. After waiting a suitable time—maybe all of two minutes—so I won’t seem like a stalker, I follow her up and watch as she packs up her stuff. That we are both in American Studies makes us neighbors, even though I’m in graduate school and she has one more undergraduate semester to go. She says after graduation she wants to go to Oregon. We talk about what movies we liked as kids. We both remember seeing gladiator movies as part of double features.
Two hours later, she heads back to her home in suburban Detroit to have her tonsils out. I go back to my reading. But we’ve made a tentative date to go to a movie when she comes back at the beginning of the fall semester. On Saturday, September 6, we’re at a campus showing of Anatomy of a Murder (1959), starring Jimmy Stewart. Then we go to an ice cream parlor just off campus. I squeeze my cone so tightly that I punch a hole in its side. Afterward we go back to my apartment and, purely as students of American culture, watch part of the Miss America contest. I don’t remember who won.
We see each other the next night, and the night after that, all the way to Thanksgiving. I have baggage—my former Communist addiction, my two years of convenient marriage and now-finalized divorce. I’m treasurer of the university’s Cinema Guild, which shows movies on campus, so I write my dissertation by day and go to movies with Susan in the evening. The Guild is accustomed to cheating the film distributors from which we rent movies. We are supposed to pay per-person or per-showing fees, but the custom is to cut by about a third the number of tickets sold or to list one showing rather than two. The first, tiny indication that I’m a changed person is my insistence that the Guild send honest reports—and we do.
Susan invites me to her home for Thanksgiving. I meet her family: one younger sister, two parents, three older brothers. I grew up in a mostly silent household. This all-American family overwhelms me. The next week I break up with Susan. That decision ties with my joining the Communist Party as the biggest mistake of my life—but neither is irredeemable.
I spend New Year’s Eve alone. Early in January 1976, in California for a job interview at San Diego State University, I miss Susan and send her a postcard featuring an orangutan with my cliched inscription: “Can’t live with you, can’t live without you.” But I transactionally entered into my first marriage—let’s have a bicycling adventure—and lightly left it. Am I ready for real marriage, which is heavy?
Since coming to believe in a God of some kind in November 1973, I’ve read the New Testament and Puritan sermons but haven’t lived the kind of life that God approves. It’s time for me to honor God and commit to Susan. That’s all in high-minded theory. Beyond all that, I admit to myself while stepping off the plane, I’m in love. What a surprise. Back in Ann Arbor, I’m grateful she is willing to recommit. We spend several evenings watching Fred Astaire week on a Detroit television station. He dances his love for Ginger Rogers.
Susan comes from a non-churchgoing family with Protestant roots. The one religious activity she engages in at the University of Michigan is the Impeach Nixon campaign. Somehow, we both have an inkling that we should honor God and commit to a real marriage, with vows to stay married until death parts us.
She is also a person of great determination. In June, one week before our wedding, I see a graphic indication of that. Susan’s friends have thrown a shower for her. From it she rushes to our game against the philosophy department. She’s our leadoff hitter and doesn’t have time to stretch. She hits a hard ground ball to the left side. The philosopher-shortstop—call him Kant—fields it cleanly. A few steps down the first baseline, Susan pulls a muscle.
At this point everything seems to be going in slow motion—no, everything is going in slow motion, as Kant scrutinizes the ball to see if it is just an artifice of our human sensibility. Susan doesn’t give up. She drags her leg toward first. Kant finally decides the ball is objectively knowable and worth throwing. He’s a second late. Susan, amazingly safe at first, limps off as a pinch runner takes her place.
Unable to comfort her immediately because I’m next at bat, I decide to swing at the first pitch if it’s reachable and get off the field. The pitch is right over the plate. Filled with passion while contemplating Susan’s suffering, I hit the ball harder than any ball I’ve hit during my mediocre sports career. It’s a rope over the center fielder’s head. Upping my base-running speed from slowest to slow, I make it to third as the short stop catches the ball that the center fielder has retrieved and thrown to him.
I should have tried for a home run, since I had never hit one and the philosophizing shortstop is unlikely to throw me out, but it seems a triple is enough for the day, and I’ll hit a home run some other time. That other time never comes. Years later, when I tell this story to one of my interns, she says, “That’s sad.” I can then say, playing off a line in Field of Dreams, “If Susan had just slipped her key under the door instead of returning it personally, that would have been sad.”
It’s wonderful that life with Susan is so good, because my dissertation in spring 1976 is a battleground. My dad, as I relate in Lament for a Father, had problems with a popular professor lionized in Life magazine in 1939, “Hooton of Harvard.” My dissertation committee chairman receives similar star treatment in People under the headline, “Marvin Felheim is Michigan’s Favorite Professor of Pop.”
Felheim, who teaches about popular culture, is sixty and on the political and cultural left. We talk during my first Michigan semester when I’m a Communist. He then takes a two-year leave of absence, so he does not know I’m now an anti-Communist. His recommendation to potential academic employers begins, “Marvin Olasky has made the most distinguished record of any of our graduate students in recent years. He is a phenomenally good student.”
I quote that praise only because Felheim retracts it when he reads a draft of the final chapters of my dissertation. In them I show that the House Un-American Activities Committee during the 1950s has some positive effects on Westerns by pushing out screenwriters who see everything in class struggle terms and bringing in writers whose scripts depict psychological tensions and trade-offs: the Western hero may still win in the end, but in the process he loses a fortune, a job, or a peaceable existence—and maybe even his life.
Felheim wants me to change my conclusions. I refuse. At the last moment he resigns from my dissertation committee. That’s an exceedingly rare event in academia, but since Felheim chairs the American Culture program, other professors do not want to antagonize him. Besides, they share his politics.
Desperate, I turn to the history department—which partly overlaps American Culture—and the one professor (out of thirty-eight) known as a conservative, Stephen Tonsor. I know him only from reading his essays in National Review. He has multiple reasons to turn down my emergency request to not only join my dissertation committee but chair it. His field is European intellectual history, not American movies.
And yet, when I show him Felheim’s critiques and the controversial chapters of my dissertation, he quickly agrees to assume the chairmanship. He asks good questions about parts of the thesis and then approves the whole. He could not have done better by me had I been his student for years, working through the whole process under his guidance. His Catholicism also makes him ready to stand up to academic pressure.
On June 27, Susan and I marry in her parents’ living room. In July, with dissertation done, we pack everything we own into the back of our new, base-model Chevy Chevette. Under two thousand dollars and under two thousand pounds, it has no back seat, radio, or air conditioning. We head to California where I have a one-year appointment at San Diego State University.
We don’t talk much about our future beyond that year, but we both have a desire to learn something about God. Susan and I know nothing about denominations. After we rent an apartment just east of San Diego, I look in the Yellow Pages under “Church” and see one a few blocks from us under the “Baptist-Conservative” heading. That makes sense to me since I’ve read that Christians baptize, and I don’t want a Marxist church. The First Baptist Church of La Mesa has a plain sanctuary with a big baptistery that’s shielded by curtains from the rest of the sanctuary. For three months we don’t know it’s there because the curtain never opens. We’re the only newcomers in this old, small congregation.
Senior Pastor John Burgar preaches essentially the same sermon every week, “Ye Must Be Born Again”—and it’s the one we need to hear. Somehow the simple service and the basic sermon reach below our layers of pride and snobbery. Week after week for two months the organist ends each service with the hymn “Just as I Am.” Week after week several dozen pairs of eyes politely stare at us, waiting for us to go forward. Week after week we don’t move.
Finally, the deacon of visitation, elderly Earl Atnip, comes to our apartment. He and I sit outside in the fall southern California sunshine. A simple, kind man, he offers no intellectual razzamatazz. He holds up a Bible and says, “You believe this stuff, don’t you?” I mumble, “Well, yeah, I do.” He says, “Then you’d better join up.” My reply—“Well, I guess I should”—may set the record for the weakest proclamation of faith ever.
Looking back, “The Hound of Heaven,” an 1890s poem by Francis Thompson, summarizes my story well:
IÂ fled Him, down the nights and down the days;
IÂ fled Him, down the arches of the years;
IÂ fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways.
And yet, God pursued
 with unhurrying chase,
 And unperturbèd pace,
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy.
For nearly three years I’ve resisted grace that proves itself irresistible. On the Sunday after Atnip’s visit, Susan and I both publicly profess faith and are baptized. I’m a Christian for one huge macro reason, God’s grace, but God also provides the micro, Susan’s love. God’s love for her, and mine supporting that, also changes her. In a landscape with many small divots, the theological and personal pivots cemented by professing faith in Christ and making marriage vows become the huge changes that last.
After those changes, life is calmer than it was. Soon, Susan and I learn she is pregnant. We’re grateful about that, but it does concentrate the mind, since my earnings must now support three people. I teach freshman composition courses at San Diego State on a one-year contract and do not find the work inspiring. Typical students can lovingly coordinate shirts and shorts but not complete sentences.
I think about returning to newspaper reporting but want to fight Communism directly. Look, here’s a tiny ad in National Review about a one-day Christian Anti-Communism Crusade seminar in Long Beach, 112 miles to the north! Fred Schwarz, a sixty-three-year-old Australia-born author and entrepreneur, heads the CACC. In the 1950s and early 1960s, it fills arenas and the Hollywood Bowl with guest speaker Ronald Reagan and appearances by John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart.
By 1977, the CACC is down to fundraising dinners peopled by elderly supporters at Knott’s Berry Farm near Long Beach and hotels in Philadelphia, Indianapolis, Milwaukee, and other cities. But when I tell seminar attendees about my experience, Schwarz (whose father was Jewish) sees that my Jewish, Yale, and Communist background will make a boffo speech titled “From Judaism to Atheism to Communism to Christ.”
In July 1977, one month after Susan gives birth to our first son, I pivot out to the highway, looking for adventure and not realizing that a spotlight and applause are poison for a new convert.