Tadpole (eBook)

An Enigmatic Life

R. Franklin Cook, Jacquelyn Cork (Autoren)

eBook Download: EPUB

2022 | 1. Auflage
735 Seiten
Bookbaby (Verlag)
978-1-6678-8190-4 (ISBN)

Infos

Enigma: A person or thing that is mysterious, puzzling, or difficult to understand. An apt description of the life of R. Franklin Cook. Tadpole chronicles this enigmatic life: from Cook's formative years in colonial India; to his experiences during the tumultuous period of its independence from Britain; to his adjustment of returning to the United States, a place he had never considered home; to his witness of the revolutionary 1960s and the 1989 breach of the Berlin Wall that opened the Iron Curtain, Franklin's life and career have often intersected with global events. But India always beckoned him. India, the place he spent his first 16 years, is the compass that always pointed him home.

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Tadpole chronicles the enigmatic life of R. Franklin Cook-author, innovator, missiologist, strategist, and thinker. Franklin spent his first 16 years in India, the son of Christian missionaries, and that experience shaped his worldview, his career, and his life. This is his story. It is also a generational story. Contributing author Jacquelyn Cork, Franklin's daughter, writes poignantly about her own experiences in India and about traveling there with her father. She shares her own perspective, as well as those of her mother and brother who also traveled to India with Franklin. She describes how seeing her dad in the place he was raised helped her understand more about him and more about the complex , diverse, and beautiful place India is. Included are memoirs of Franklin's formative years in colonial India, his experiences during the tumultuous period of its independence from Britain, his adjustment of returning to the United States, a place he had never considered home; and his witness of the revolutionary 1960s and the 1989 breach of the Berlin Wall that opened the Iron Curtain. Franklin's life and career have often intersected with global events. But India always beckoned him. India, the place he spent his first 16 years, is the compass that always pointed him home.

Textauszug

TREE: THE FAMILY BLACKMAN

IN HIS WORDS

Ever wonder what tree you fell out of? I have, often, and my accumulation of years makes these wonderings an ever more interesting topic.

What actually does form a person? Certainly DNA and genetics play a role. When I was a child people told me that I was a “mixture” of my mother and father. I don’t know what this means and strongly suspect they did not either. Perhaps it is just easier, and potentially safer, to tell a person they are a “mix.”

Environmental factors also must have a lot to do with one’s makeup. And here is where mine diverges from the typical because my formative years were so vastly different from the norm. Both the dusty climate of central India and the gloomy skies of western Oregon made me what I am. But first, the genetics.

My maternal grandmother was Ruby Elmore Blackman. I have no idea where this name came from—perhaps a reference to the “far above rubies” scripture in the Old Testament.

I met Ruby’s mother, my great grandmother, on a cold, wet Oregon morning when I was 16 years of age. She was a very short, very stooped, very quiet, very old lady. I felt no connection with her whatsoever. My only concern that icy and slippery morning was getting her in a car without having a major accident. A fall at her age could be fatal. I was not used to having anyone, especially an old woman, lean on me, so I was awkward. It never occurred to me to ask where she came from, or any other questions.

I know very little about the Elmore family. I don’t even know if Ruby had any siblings. She never spoke of any, and I was too “dumb” to ask any questions. I don’t know where Ruby was born, where she went to school, or how she met Frank Blackman, her short-lived husband.

I do know Ruby was an interesting woman. As a teenager I would get very annoyed at her for reasons which now escape me. I have the sense that she may not have finished high school, but I am not sure. Unlike now, formal education in her era was optional.

Ruby had an artistic bent. I remember her playing the piano (not particularly well, but adequate for a sing-along of mostly religious music). She also painted and drew on hanging cloth with crayons, and she did these quite well. I still have a drawing she did of a Bengal tiger in India.

She always noticed flowers, plants, flora of all kinds. In the Himalayan mountains of north India she used to collect ferns, no doubt some of them rare, and “dry” them between heavy books and paper. Then they would go in her scrapbook, which was a collection of drawings, pictures, ferns, and miscellaneous other interesting “stuff.”

She also had a massive stamp collection, concentrating on stamps from the British Empire. She was very sentimental about all things British, including the Royal Family. She was a true Anglophile. There were pictures and mugs and assorted knickknacks with visages of the royals. The hymn “God Save the King” (or Queen) would move her to tears. I think this fascination was tied with her memory of arriving in British India in 1920 with her husband, Frank and daughter Orpha, 10 years old at that time, to be missionaries. In her mind, the streams of sentiment, mission, and memory all flowed together.

Ruby lived with us in India after World War II, and when it came time for her to retire and leave the country for the last time, it took her almost two years to sort and pack. I was astonished. She meticulously went through every letter, notebook, article of clothing (which she had mostly sewed herself—she gave sewing classes for Indian girls). Her room was an exhibition of orderly sorting.

After we returned to the United States, she would visit us from time to time. I was a teenager, and this was the time period when she most irritated me, for the previously stated unknown reasons. The last time I remember seeing her was in California in the early 1960s when Maylou and I were pastoring in the thriving city of Ord Bend. She died in California sometime later, and I did not attend the funeral.

At some point, Ruby married Frank Blackman. Never did I hear how they met, when they got married, or much about their early married life. I do know that in 1910 they had a girl, Orpha, my mother.

Frank died in 1925, nine years before I was born. I only know him through stories told and pictures taken. He had a barrel chest and receding hairline, an imposing looking figure in his formal attire of the early 20th century, a black suit.

Frank’s barrel chest seemed appropriate for a gifted tenor who became quite well-known for singing at tent meetings and in large arenas for a variety of religious and operatic events. Some compared him to the legendary tenor of his day, Enrico Caruso. I cannot verify this since no known recording of his voice exists. I do know that when Frank lived in Calcutta, India, which at the time was the capitol of British India, the London Opera Company asked Frank to sing a key tenor part in a touring company. His musical talents carried forward to his daughter, Orpha.

I never heard any talk in our household about the Blackman heritage, but years later I discovered a photograph of “Grandpa Blackman” sitting with his wife and children (none of whom I knew nor heard about) which identified him as a minister in the Methodist church.

When Frank announced he was giving up a “promising career” as a preacher and singer to take his diminutive wife Ruby and their only child Orpha to “Far Away India,” there was a great deal of dismay and surprise. This announcement must have made an indelible impression on many people who knew the talented family.

The Blackman family set sail in 1920 for the land known as the “Crown Jewel” of the British Empire. Their destination was Calcutta where they docked on the Hooghly river. The Hooghly is an enormous river which flows out of the snows of the Himalaya through the plains of northern India and is a tributary of the Ganga (Ganges), the holiest river in India. Oddly enough, it was on this same river and at these same docks that Frank was to contract his fatal illness just five years later.

The young couple plunged immediately into “the work” (of being missionaries), into the study of the Bengali language, and into leadership. One indicator to me of Frank’s apparent charisma and leadership skill was that in just two years he was made leader of the eastern part of mission work of the Church of the Nazarene in India. He was only 33 at the time.

The Blackmans lived in a city called Kishorgonj in Bengal, then part of India, but now part of Bangladesh following the 1947 partitioning of the sub-continent as part of the agreement that gave India its independence from the British Empire. In Kishorgonj they lived life as most missionaries did during the colonial era, in a low-slung bungalow with tile roof, roaming cows, and ever-present groups of people and the usual hordes of monkeys on the grounds. They ran a girls’ school and engaged in a wide variety of mission activities.

Lacking any other education options, Orpha was sent to boarding school in Darjeeling. Known as the “Queen of the Hill Stations,” Darjeeling was one of a string of towns which the British established as a refuge from the heat for westerners. These hill stations, as they were called, became the hub of social and political life for the colonial system. In fact, one of them, Simla (now called Shimla) became the “summer capital” of India. Each spring a large caravan of trains, trucks, buses, and oxcarts would haul mountains of paper files and other paraphernalia from Delhi (or earlier, Calcutta) up the long climb to the mountains. There, the British Governor (or Viceroy) of India had both his mansion and his entire government close at hand.

Darjeeling, at the eastern side of the Himalaya mountains, was known as the most beautiful of these Hill Stations. Located at 6,000 feet, clinging to the side of mountains with acres of tea estates (Darjeeling Tea), gorgeous waterfalls and ferns, it was a spectacular place. Darjeeling was in sight of Mount Kanchenjunga, the spectacular third highest mountain in the world at an elevation of 28,169 feet. At a distance Mount Everest, the highest point on earth, could be seen. For many years in the early part of the 20th century, Darjeeling was the jumping off point for expeditions to climb Mount Everest, the highest point on earth. All these expeditions were doomed to death or failure until Sir Edmund Hillary and his legendary Sherpa, Tenzing, succeeded in 1953. Kanchenjunga was first ascended in 1955, two years after Everest.

Also close by were the kingdom states of Sikkim and Bhutan, and just to the north Tibet (China) was in full view. The dominant population of Darjeeling and surrounding areas were the Gurkhas, well-known as warriors, and Tibetans who had an Asian appearance and were primarily of Buddhist faith.

Darjeeling housed a boarding school called Mount Hermon which operated for the benefit of children of westerners. It was common, and even expected, that children beginning at about age six, would be taken to the school to live, away from parents, for about ten months of the year. Since the academic year began in February and ended in December, it was possible for children to be “at home” for Christmas down on the “plains.” And so it was for Orpha, who at age ten was taken to Mount Herman.

At some point in the...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 22.12.2022
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Biografien / Erfahrungsberichte
• ISBN-10: 1-6678-8190-6 / 1667881906
• ISBN-13: 978-1-6678-8190-4 / 9781667881904