Sausage Sighting of the Preacher's Son

Rock Island, May 1977

When I was in high school, Verne the Preacher's Son was my kind-of boyfriend (at least when there were no girls around).

Nothing erotic happened, but we hugged, and I got a number of sausage sightings.

This guy is over 18, older than Verne at the time, but he has the grin, the same chest and shoulders, and the same beneath-the-belt gifts, a sizeable Bratwurst.

During my junior year, I applied for early admission to Olivet, our Bible College on the prairie, because Verne was going.   It offered 30 majors, but everyone assumed that I would be studying to become a preacher, evangelist, minister of music, or missionary.

As the days and weeks of my junior year at Rocky High passed, Verne began to conjure an idyllic future for us.  We would be roommates at Olivet, of course, and take lots of the same classes. He would play football, and I would be an athletic trainer.

Then, when we graduated, we would get called by the same church, maybe as preacher and minister of music.  They often worked as a team.  We would plan church services together.  We would go on retreats, prayer breakfasts, and sabbaticals. Our wives would exchange recipes in parsonage kitchens.  Our children would grow up together, and eventually marry each other.

Sometimes these conversations involved hugging.  Sometimes they involved playfully grabbing at each other while changing clothes.  I had already seen Verne nude in the locker room, and on our camping trip, but there was something especially erotic about nude horseplay, in his bedroom at the parsonage on a Saturday afternoon.

A random guy

One day in May 1977, shortly after Scott the Cornetist disappeared (later we discovered that he died), we were changing clothes after jogging, and I got tired of the "wives and kids" litany.  "Why will we need wives?" I asked.  "Why can't it just be the two of us?"

He looked at me like I was crazy.  Then, after a long pause: "Have you ever seen a Nazarene preacher that didn't have a wife?"

"Um. ...no."

"Every preacher -- every man --  has to get married.  It's  a fact of life.  But friends are just as important.  Maybe more."  He put his hands on my shoulders and drew me into a warm, sweaty, hug "The Bible says that David loved Jonathan 'more than the love of women.'"

I wasn't satisfied.  "Why can't David and Jonathan live together without women?"

Verne laughed and broke away.  "Man, you get the craziest ideas!  Without women, they would be Swishes!"