Keep Walking: One Man's Journey to Feed the World One Child at a Time Hardcover - 2007 - 1st Edition

Excerpt

Chapter One


EXACTLY 211 PEOPLE worked in the Oklahoma City headquarters of Feed The Children on January 20, 2006, when most attended a weekly chapel service to hear my story about someone they’d never met. Many, in fact, didn’t know her name.

Essentially, I just repeated the words I’d spoken thirteen days earlier when I preached the funeral of Lera Maybell Jones.

She was my mom.

Close friends, including some at Feed The Children, wondered why Mom had asked me to undertake the painful act of delivering her eulogy.

“Isn’t that asking too much of Larry?” was the recurring query. “How could she ask her own flesh and blood to speak about her?”

But it wasn’t asking too much. I didn’t think so—not for the person who had shaped my formative years more profoundly than any other. And mine weren’t the last words ever spoken about her. I, along with many others, will talk about Mom's exemplary life for as long as God gives me breath.

Psychologists say that 90 percent of a human’s personality is formed by age seven. Think about that. Ninety percent of the decisions that people make for the rest of their lives are based on behaviors they’ve learned by the time they enter second grade. Mom must have known this, and she worked the good right into me as a pup.

She wanted me to be “good for goodness’ sake,” as the Christmas song goes, believing that God had given my childhood to her and she’d better do right by Him.

“Train a child in the way he should go, and when he is old he will not turn from it” (Proverbs 22:6). That scripture was Mom’s words to live by, and if I'm any proof, that principle holds true.

When I was attending elementary school and throwing two paper routes, neither Mom nor I had any idea I’d enter the ministry. The thought may never have crossed her mind until I brought it up when I was eleven. After that, she probably prayed more than I know that someday I would become a preacher.

Mom and my dad, Floyd, were barbers who charged sixty–five cents for a basic haircut during the 1950s. I did my share with my paper routes, and I earned twenty–four cents for every dozen soda pop bottles I found and returned to the grocery store.

Mom and Dad were tithers—they gave 6.5 cents (10 percent) of every haircut to the church. I followed their example, paying 2.4 cents, rounded off to three pennies, for each dozen returned and refillable bottles. I also paid 10 percent of my paper route earnings. The tithe was honored as much in my household as each of the Ten Commandments.

It may sound corny, but the word “wholesome” only begins to describe my boyhood. Our family was as innocent as an Andy Griffith rerun, and Bowling Green, Kentucky, was our Mayberry.

My small childhood home is situated within six hundred miles of three–fourths of the population of the United States, but we were as country as it gets.

Bowling Green is one of the nation’s few places where, in the time of my boyhood, a child could get lost on concrete or inside piney woods in less time than it takes to warm a car on a frosty morning, and no one had to worry about it.

We came to Bowling Green when I was eight, leaving Indianapolis because my dad wanted to return to Kentucky, where he’d once lived in Allen County. My mom consented to go—on the condition that we live in town.

My parents owned separate barbershops. Each had gone to barber school. Mom did advanced-styling study. Her teacher was “Hollywood Joe” of New York City. She was Bowling Green’s first lady barber, and possibly its first barber ever to use a blow-dryer. Today, almost anyone who works with hair is called a stylist. But a woman who opened her own “styling shop” in 1949? In rural Kentucky? Mom was a pioneer!

Mom cut men’s and women’s hair when most of the former were accustomed to a once-over with electric clippers. My dad knew how to give only one kind of haircut—the kind that started with a buzz and ended with all of your hair on the floor. And he gave it to every customer that came in the door.

People regularly stopped by the shop to shoot the breeze and exchange town gossip, even when they didn’t need a haircut. My parents came to be the people in whom much of the town seemed to confide. I’ve never been a drinking man, but I’m told that people who drink frequently tell just about anything to their favorite bartender. In Bowling Green you told the barber. Mom and Dad never ceased to be amazed at the personal things people told them about themselves while sitting in the shop.

Barbershops in those days also offered shoe shines, and my parents' shine man was a likable fellow who was sometimes drunk on the job. He used to say that God always appointed someone to take care of fools, drunks, and babies. My mom scolded his philosophy, but willingly played into his hand by taking care of him. Besides signing his paychecks, she frequently did his laundry and fed him homemade meals.

The day after I played my first basketball game for Oklahoma City University, Mom and Dad were reciting a play–by–play of my performance for neighbors, who wondered how they knew so much about my game, played perhaps seven hundred miles away. There were no e–mails or fax machines in those days, and the regular–season game wasn’t covered by Kentucky television.

I’d eventually learn that my parents heard all of my games in Oklahoma as they nestled in Bowling Green. How?

They drove to the highest hill outside of Bowling Green, parked, and absorbed the static–filled contest over an AM car receiver.

During one of those vigils, my parents encountered a police officer who later became a friend. He had mistakenly thought he’d spotted a teenage boy and girl locked in love’s embrace inside their parked and darkened car. By moonlight, he sneaked to their vehicle, where he intended to startle them and then issue a citation for public display of affection. As the cop approached the car, Mom scared him. She noisily cranked down a window.

“We’re not ‘parking’!” she told the officer. “We’re listening to our boy play basketball in Oklahoma City!”

He recognized my name from my high school days.

He asked Mom if the Larry Jones discussed on the radio was really me. She said it was and asked the lawman if he’d like to get into the car to listen to the game. Then she asked if he’d like some popcorn.

The cop joined my folks inside their car to follow the faraway contest. When the game ended, he said good–bye and so did Mom and Dad. But the evening wasn’t over. It seems the car battery had been drained of power while the suspected lovebirds and their unexpected chaperone had been cheering. The officer then left my parents alone on that remote hill, promising to return with jumper cables. And he did. Mom and Dad, parked outside the city limits, had persuaded a city policeman to run their personal errand and revive their illegally parked car.

Having connected the cables to receive “juice” from the squad car, the cop asked Dad to turn the ignition. The car still wouldn’t start. Drained by the radio and the cold weather, the battery wouldn’t hold a charge. The hour was getting late, the November temperature was falling.

The car had a manual transmission. Perhaps the engine could be started by “popping the clutch”—pushing the car while the driver depressed the clutch, then releasing it when the vehicle gained momentum. Behind the driver’s wheel, Dad did just that as Mom and the policeman pushed the car to a downhill grade. Success! The engine fired. The car went forward under its own power while Mom and the cop stood in its wake, cheering victory in the isolated wilderness. Years later, Mom said she and the cop had yelled as loudly for this victory as they had earlier for me and the game.

When Mom was sixty-seven and I’d been gone from Bowling Green for more than a quarter century, her penchant for economizing was thriving. I still chuckle at the following example.

The city was experiencing one of its intermittent periods of growth and construction. One building had been torn down after a fire, and Mom had a mind to use some of the bricks that would otherwise be discarded. Now, she didn't want to buy the bricks, and she didn’t want to pay laborers to haul them. So this delicate, aging woman went to the sheriff, whose jail she regularly graced to hold Sunday night meetings for prisoners. Everyone at the jailhouse—sheriff, jailer, even the inmates—affectionately called her Lera. Can you say that your mom was on a first-name basis with bank robbers, extortionists, burglars, vagrants, gamblers, hot-check artists, flimflam men, public drunks, and chicken thieves? My mom got Christmas cards from every sort. Our mail carrier claimed ours was the only house in town receiving scores of cards sharing the same return address: County Jail.

“Sheriff,” Mom began her request, “these prisoners aren’t doing you or themselves any good by lying around this jailhouse. I know a way they could improve themselves and the community.”

Presenting her case, she persuaded the sheriff to release his inmates—including repeat offenders—to her custody. Then my mom (weighing all of a hundred pounds) led these men, by herself, to the messy lot where the bricks lay strewn. She instructed the inmates to pick up the bricks, clean them with chisels—and not run away. Then she took off their handcuffs.

Not one man fled.

Can you imagine? A bunch of criminals obeying the command of an old woman, “uniformed” in a flower print dress, instructing them to chip cement from piles of fallen bricks? Passersby did double takes at these motley wards of the county, overseen by a “warden” wearing an apron.

Those men respected and honored my mom because they sensed her love for them. She was a bright spot in their lives. They looked forward to her shuffling into the jail every Sunday night, singing the Lord’s praises and preaching His Gospel. My mom ministered to a congregation separated from her by vertical bars—bars that kept the bodies of inmates inside but couldn’t keep out her spirit.


***

IF NORMAN ROCKWELL had made movies, he would have filmed in Bowling Green.

I can imagine his lens focusing on fearful faces of schoolchildren perched before a darkened steel tunnel that served as an exterior fire escape. Weekly fire drills had us plunging down the tunnel while sitting on gunnysacks. Burlap pressed against slick metal gave a rapid ride.

For me, the pass through the tubular contraption was thrilling. It began in darkness and ended with a bolt into blinding sunlight. Nevertheless, it was all some of the kids could do to muster enough courage to climb inside the claustrophobic pipe.

When I watch present–day television, with its surplus of sex and violence, I’m reminded of Thursday nights during summers, when townsfolk gathered on grass to watch celluloid classics. Dr Pepper Bottling Company sponsored this community viewing of black-and-white films directed by Frank Capra or Cecil B. DeMille. Their endings were always predictable but never boring. Good always triumphed over evil. The old, brittle filmstrips broke frequently. But the crowd—mostly work-weary parents holding sleepy youngsters—waited patiently while a projectionist fumbled by flashlight to re-thread the reel. To my wide, expectant eyes, heroes never failed. A larger-than-life John Wayne or Randolph Scott overwhelmed the flimsy screen that quivered in the breeze. The aroma of popcorn mingled with the fragrance of newly cut grass. The smell of alcohol or smoldering marijuana, taken for granted at many of today's community functions, was unimaginable in 1940s Bowling Green.

There were folks in Bowling Green whom I didn't know. But there were no strangers. People weren't wary of each other back then.

I was a senior in high school and still eating regularly at Mrs. Spivey’s. She owned a boardinghouse where she fed anyone as many staples as he or she could eat, plus pie, for sixty cents. She had two tables surrounded by sixteen chairs that were never vacant during the noon and evening meals. Diners had to eat in a rush. Hungry folks stood in line behind their chairs, waiting to take their places when they finished. The chain of diners seemed endless—workingmen and homemakers eating side by side, passing the “vittles” family style.

Everyone in 1940s and 1950s Bowling Green seemed like family. It’s just that not all were related.

Probably no song has expressed the American spirit of that era more meaningfully than Tom T. Hall’s “Engineers Don’t Wave from the Trains Anymore.” Its lyrics describe the friendliness that America’s blue-collar folks expected from the men who ran the railroads in that time.

Air travel was still a luxury, something portrayed on television commercials as velvet excursions among the clouds that were available only to the rich. For the common people, though, glistening rails tied the familiar to the unknown—a conduit to a brightly imagined new world.

My favorite train was the Hummingbird, the passenger service that rumbled through town without stopping at 7:00 p.m. daily. A fluttering hummingbird was painted on the caboose. In wintertime, when darkness fell early, I could see the passengers inside the cozy, lit cars.

I was hypnotized by trains that rolled past the railroad gates. The horizontal restraints, with their stripes, blinking lights, and clanging bell, prevented motorists from crossing the path of thundering steel that shook the ground.

My young buddies and I enjoyed putting pennies on the track. After the train passed, they were flat enough to cut, hot enough to burn. One cent’s worth of smashed copper made for a priceless treasure to little boys whose dreams went even further than a passing locomotive could take them.

The boxcars that stopped at the Bowling Green crossing were sometimes open. Sliding doors leaked sunlight into their mysterious darkness. To a nine-year-old, their ebony interiors held the secrets of everywhere they’d been.

And they held hoboes.

Many a fearful lad sneaked forward on tiptoes to peek at the sleeping, grizzled wanderers inside their makeshift mobile homes. More recently I’ve read of youths being arrested for dousing sleeping vagrants with gasoline and then setting them on fire. How times have changed. My buddies and I pitied the destitution but admired the tenacity of these grimy men, filled with wanderlust, whose freedom took them wherever rails could roll.

Another vivid memory: Bowling Green’s chewing-tobacco-processing plants, where workers took cured leaves and twisted them by hand into braided rolls from which customers would eventually cut plugs with pocketknives. The laborers handled tobacco stalks with the precision of surgeons. We pressed our noses against the plant's windows in astonishment, marveling at what workers could do with what nature had grown.

Media reviews

Advance Praise for Keep Walking:

“Larry Jones is a man on a mission. In Keep Walking he shares the passion that drives him, the faith that sustains him, and the dream of a world without hungry children that motivates him. I have seen firsthand Larry Jones’s work, and he has something to say that we all need to hear.”
—Bishop T.D. Jakes

“Larry Jones has more stars in his crown than most people. He has worked tirelessly for years to help children around the world who would go hungry without his efforts and Feed The Children. He has been a huge inspiration to me. He inspires me to work harder to help more people.”
—Reba McEntire

“Larry Jones touches your heart and soul with the things that touch the heart and soul of God. He is a master storyteller, a consummate humanitarian, a compellingly insightful evangelist trying to make the world work for the people that it doesn’t work for. He is friend to all and beloved by those he serves who will never know him. Read this book and you will have an expanded soul too.”
—Mark Victor Hansen
Co-creator, #1 New York Times bestselling series Chicken Soup for the Soul ®
Co-author, Cracking the Millionaire Code and The One Minute Millionaire


“Keep Walking is a must-read for anyone who ever thought humanitarian work is easy. Larry Jones has been stranded 10,000 miles from home while hustling food to the starving on both sides of warring enemy lines. He and Feed The Children have been the first to arrive and the last to leave the world’s most horrific natural disasters and acts of terrorism. Our nation is looking for a hero. It need not look beyond Larry Jones.”
—Lee Iacocca

“It has been my privilege to pass out baby food and diapers with Feed The Children to people who were so wonderful and very grateful. I respect and admire Larry and Frances, and this book is enlightening, interesting, inspiring, and very important to the world. God has found great servants in these wonderful people, and must be truly pleased that they have dedicated their lives to doing ‘His’ work.”
—Barbara Mandrell

Many celebrity athletes and I have often helped Larry Jones organize and participate in mass feedings, from 10,000 people at Christmastime in Harlem to more than 125,000 children receiving daily meals in Africa. Larry’s efforts provide food for the body. Reading how it all came about and stays together is food for the soul. This is one of those riveting stories about one man that will make virtually anyone a better person for having read it.”
—Billy Hunter
Executive Director, National Basketball Players Association

“To have a horrible tornado hit my hometown meant Feed The Children trucks were on the way. Larry Jones lives a life of giving like no other man I’ve ever seen. Reading about his past gives direction to all of our futures.”
—Duane Allen
Oak Ridge Boys