ALL THE WAY MY SAVIOR LEADS ME

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I came to the United States from China. In my first year of engineering school at Brooklyn Polytech, I had great difficulty in the English language, especially in writing. One day, I was invited to a meeting. I did not remember what I heard. The only thing I remembered was that most engineers could not write well. In order to present one’s ideas in English-speaking countries, one must be able to write in good English. A source of good English is the Bible.

Up to that time, I had never read the Bible, even though I belonged to a local Presbyterian church. Taking up the speaker’s advice, I bought myself a Revised Standard Version (RSV) of the Bible from Macy’s. It was fortunate that I bought it from Macy’s, because if I had gone to a religious bookstore, I do not know which version of the Bible I would have ended up with. I might have bought a King James Version, which would have been very difficult for me to understand. The RSV was just right for me because it was written in modern English, very good English indeed.

I used the Bible as an English textbook and read it every morning from 6 am to 7 am. I started from Genesis and read through to the end of Revelation. The Book of Genesis, the first book of the Bible, was fairly easy to read. It contains a lot of interesting stories. The third book, Leviticus, became more difficult because it contains concepts which were quite different from what I knew. Since all I wanted was to study English, I just skipped those portions I could not understand, including the genealogy sections. However, it became much easier the second time around. Years later I learned to read three chapters of the Old Testament and one chapter of the New Testament in one day. This way, I would not lose sight of the New Testament, since I would be reading it alongside the Old Testament. I did that for the next thirty years. Now, I listen to several chapters of the Epistles at a time: for example, the first half of Ephesians, which is on doctrine, and the second half on application. This way, I have much better comprehension. (When Paul wrote his letters, they were not divided into chapters.) As a result of this exercise, not only did my English improve greatly, especially in writing, but I had come to know the righteousness of our creator God.

After graduation, I got a job with a training program at Combustion Engineering Company (C.E.) in New York City. My school had offered me a fellowship to further my studies in graduate school. I did not take up the offer because the training program was very enticing. It involved extensive travels to the many construction sites as well as to the factories of the company. With help from my mother, I bought a second-hand Chevrolet four-door sedan for $1,200 from a GM dealer at Columbus Circle and 59th Street, New York City. In two weeks’ time, I was on my way to my first assignment at Florida Power & Light’s Cutler Steam Plant south of Miami. This was in 1955 and was my first long-distance trip of 1,200 miles driven by myself alone. There was no interstate highway then. The only highway was US-1, with many stretches with one lane north and one lane south. This was in mid-July, and the weather was very hot. There was no air conditioning in the car, and most of the cars then did not have air conditioning either.

Unlike cars made today, the windows of the cars were very close to one’s body, because one needed to stick one’s hand out to signal a turn. On the second day, I pulled up to the side of the highway to take a break, not realizing the shoulder was sloping downward, and there was a lot of tall grass on the side of the road. When the car pulled to a stop, it listed on the right side. I could not pull it back onto the highway. I got out of the car and fortunately saw a Coca-Cola truck coming around the bend.  I waved it down. The driver came over and looked. He said to me: “I could pull you out if you have a chain.” It just happened that I had one in the trunk. It was a Godsend. The chain was from my old car, which I had traded in for this car. Using the chain, he pulled me out onto the highway.

It took me three and a half days to get down to Miami. On Sunday morning at about 10:00 a.m., I arrived at Flagger Street. Across a small bridge, I saw the First Presbyterian Church. I went in just when the service started. After the service, an Elder of the church came over to greet me. I told him that I was going to work at the Florida Power & Light’s Cutler Steam Plant. He asked me where I was staying. It happened that his neighbor had a furnished room with a solar heated bath on the top of his garage for rent. I stayed there for my five weeks’ assignment in Miami. My landlord, a man of about fifty, cared for his sick mother and was homebound over the years. One Saturday afternoon I took him out to the Crandon Park Beach south of Miami, and he had a wonderful time. 

While still in Miami, I and a fellow trainee, Bud Rice, took a weekend trip down to Key West. The trip consisted of a two-lane highway made up of a series of bridges between islands. One of those bridges was seven miles long, the Seven Mile Bridge. We stopped by different beaches for a swim. Key West is a small town at the end of the one hundred sixty-mile route. We stopped at a restaurant for a bowl of turtle soup. At that time Key West was the only place where you could purchase live sea turtles, some of which could weigh as much as 1,000 pounds. You could see them in the big holding pond not far from the restaurant.

Cutler Steam Plant is an outdoor installation. It has an oil-fired steam generator built by my company. A group of us trainees were there to assist the company serviceman for the furnace temperature test. The test involved moving a fifty-pound water-cooled temperature probe fifteen feet long into the furnace to collect temperatures. Two persons were needed to make the traverse temperature measurements in order to construct temperature profiles at different levels. This was backbreaking work, with exposure to the furnace heat through test holes where the probe was inserted. We worked sometimes through the middle of the night and took naps on the floor in the cool control room behind the instrument panels.

After Miami, I was assigned to the Chattanooga office of my company’s main plant in Tennessee for four weeks. At this plant, we trainees observed how the steam generators were constructed. These steam generators can be as tall as an eight-story building. The four walls are made of one and a quarter-inch steel tubes surrounding the furnace. Inside these tubes, high-pressure water is heated to saturated steam, which then is heated again in superheaters. We also went through training in the office, where we observed how the company business was conducted. We were even allowed to look at the company files to see how business letters were written.

The next assignment was the Company’s Monongahela plant in Monongahela, Pennsylvania. In this plant, the superheaters were built. The superheaters are the pendant tube banks hanging in the flue gas path at the furnace outlet. Saturated steam generated from the one and a quarter-inch tubes surrounding the furnace is heated to a temperature of 1050 degrees F. in the superheaters. This superheated steam is used to drive turbine generators to produce electricity.

The next assignment was at Ford Motor Company’s River Rouge plant in Dearborn, Michigan. At Dearborn, I found a room to stay at the home of the fire chief.  The fire chief had a teenage daughter who was somewhat fond of me. Her mother played the piano for us to dance in their living room. They had another long-term roomer, a man of about 30 years old, who constantly made propositions to her. She told me that she did not like that man, and she will only give herself up to the one she loves. The mother was weary of this and asked me to take her daughter out. I did not do this, as I was only there for three weeks and did not want to become emotionally involved.

The next assignment was at Kalamazoo Vegetable Parchment, a paper company in Kalamazoo, Michigan. I was there to assist our company serviceman to start up the new steam generator. One night, I had to go up to the steam drum to watch the water level gauge glass, because it was not electrically hooked up yet. All of a sudden, there was a big boom. Most of the lights went out. I managed to come down through four levels of stairs in the dark. It turned out that the chief engineer of the plant, after taking off the tip of the burner gun to clean it, forgot to put it back. He put the burner gun back without the tip and started firing the steam generator. By the time my company's service-man noticed it, a lot of fuel oil had landed at the bottom of the boiler, since the fuel was not atomized for burning. It was fortunate that the inside of the boiler was relatively cool, so the explosion was a minor one. Otherwise, we all would be dead. After the light was restored, I noticed that some of the big 12-inch steel I-beams which hold the furnace of the steam generator together were bent, but not broken.

My next job was at the Consumer Power Company’s BC Cobb Plant in Muskegon, Michigan. It was deep winter, and I went out to see the people ice fishing at the lake, which was covered in solid ice so that trucks could drive over it. I rented a room at a lady’s house. There was not enough heat in my room, and I offered to pay her money to heat up the room. She said she did not want to heat up the outdoors, but consented to move up the thermostat.

My next assignment was the Kingston Steam Plant of the Tennessee Valley Authority in Kingston, Tennessee. This was then the largest steam power plant in the U.S., having eight of Combustion Engineering’s steam generators. Another unit was added later, bringing the total plant electrical output to 1,700 megawatts. The electric power generated was used to power the Atomic Energy Commission’s Gaseous Diffusion Plant at Oak Ridge, Tennessee. My assignment was to help assist the company serviceman on startup of Unit 2. One day, he wanted to estimate the amount of coal in the silo, but he did not have the formula. I was able to come up with the formula, using calculus I learned in school, for the volume of the silo.

One Sunday, I went to a Presbyterian church. The anthem that day was sung by a young baritone. It was such a beautiful song, but I did not know the name. It was only recently that I came across that song: “I Waited on the Lord” by the great nineteenth-century composer Felix Mendelssohn. Born into a Jewish family, Mendelssohn was baptized as a Reformed Christian. He died at the early age of 38.

My next assignment was in Ashtabula, Ohio, working on a small boiler plant. Since this plant involved only about a dozen union boiler makers, three of us trainees were allowed to work alongside with them. We got inside the boiler drum and rolled boiler tubes into it. On this assignment, we trainees worked under a person who had his wife traveling with him. He was a very nice man. They invited us trainees to spend Christmas with them.

During the time of my assignments, I encountered many bad things as well as good. I knew of many servicemen who picked up women at bars after work and had relations with them. They wanted me to go along with them. They even convinced one of the trainees, named Jim Butkus, who was already engaged. Jim later called off his engagement. One X-ray technician from my company, who had extramarital activities with many women, even told me that he loved his wife. This did not make sense to me. Bob, another man from my company, invited me to his home for the weekend. His wife sort of knew about Bob’s extramarital affairs and begged me to tell her husband not to keep seeing these women. I was not even a Christian then, but I knew what these people were doing was wrong.

The assignment at Ashtabula was my final assignment. After this, I was assigned to work at our company headquarters in New York.

At our New York office, I worked as an engineer in the Proposition Department. We prepared preliminary designs and made proposals for new businesses. I was assistant to Joe Singer*, who later authored the book Combustion: Fossil Power Systems.

In New York, I had a dentist by the name of Dr. Hillsley. He had his office at one of the high rises of the Rockefeller Center. He spent so much of his working hours telling jokes and stories that I wondered how he made his living. One day he complained to me that his son was having such a hard time at M.I.T. His professor had told him that he was not the material for Ph.D.

At work, my boss, Robert Wolin, was an M.I.T. graduate with a master’s degree. A thought came to me, why don’t I try for it? I did and surprisingly was admitted. Professor Santalo, who liked my background, also offered me a half-time teaching fellowship.

I lived in the Graduate House, the dormitory of the graduate students. My work was just across the street on Massachusetts Avenue in the old building. Besides teaching half time, I was given a research project on two-phase flow funded by the Office of the Naval Research, coming with a full-time paid technician. This research was the material for my thesis. In the Graduate House lived a group of Christians. They had a Bible study every Wednesday in the dining hall. Since I was reading the Bible anyway, I joined the group to find out what the Bible teaches. There was an undergraduate student by the name of Bob Barret. He was a member of the Campus Crusade for Christ. Knowing I read the Bible every morning, he always asked me what I had read that morning. Strangely enough, I always forgot what I had read. One day I had a test. As I was already late, I was running down the stairs at the Graduate House. Somehow Bob was there. He stopped me at the end of the stairs and asked me: “George, do you have eternal life?” I was in a hurry and did not know the answer. He quoted the verses of 1 John 5:11-12: “God has given us eternal life, and this life is in his Son. Whoever has the Son has life; whoever does not have the Son of God does not have life.” A few weeks later, I went with the Bible study group to a meeting. The speaker was a woman. Whatever she said, I did not remember. The only thing I remembered was the verse she quoted from the book of Hebrews 9:27-28: “Just as people are destined to die once, and after that to face judgment, so Christ was sacrificed once to take away the sins of many; and he will appear a second time, not to bear sin, but to bring salvation to those who are waiting for him." Somehow by this time I knew that I was a Christian.

I finished school early, in December 1958 instead of June 1959, and got a job in New York City. My fellow Christians at M.I.T. told me that I needed to find a church in New York City that taught God's Word, the Bible. I asked, how do I know which one? They told me to pray about it. That Sunday morning, while taking a shower, I asked God to show me which New York church to go to. Afterward, I went as usual to Park Street Church on Boston Common, a congregational church whose minister was Dr. Ockenga. 

I went and sat on the upper left side of the balcony. Just before worship began, a young couple came and sat beside me, with the wife sitting next to me. Then they decided to switch seats, with the husband sitting next to me. After the worship service, the man turned and introduced himself and his wife to me. They then invited me to their house for dinner. Since they seemed to me a very nice couple, I accepted their invitation. As we were coming down the stairs, the husband saw his friend Linden Cole and invited him too. Linden had come up from New York that weekend for his Harvard reunion and was on his way back home. The man, whose first name was Stuart, knew Linden before through InterVarsity Christian Fellowship.

As we entered their home, I smelled the meat being cooked in the oven. Upon entering their dining room, I noticed four place settings on the dining room table. I was later told that they had invited two foreign students for dinner that Sunday, but they had both called up sick.

After moving to New York City, I went to the church that Linden belonged to, the Gospel Tabernacle of the Christian & Missionary Alliance. Linden taught a Sunday school class which I attended. Shortly after going to the church, I asked our pastor Paris Reidhead how to live a Christian life. He told me that Linden had recently called off his engagement and was in need of a place. He suggested that we should room together for the time being. Linden and I found an apartment at 84th street and Central Park West on Manhattan, New York City. Since a new fellow had also joined the church, Jacques Beney from Switzerland, we thought we should include him. Jacques’ father was with the Union Bank of Switzerland, and Jacques came to the U.S. for a training program at a different U.S. banks.

The most significant thing I learned from Linden is that a person is justified in God’s sight by his faith in God, and not by what good he may have done. Linden is a very good thinker. He taught me how to think straight. He also taught me how to give, which I recently thanked him for. In a recent email, he told me the following:

"Your story about how you found the Gospel Tabernacle brought back many very happy memories! Those were good days. When we lived on West 84th Street, we could actually walk to church, on nice days! I don’t remember who told me about the church, but I was involved with a sort of unofficial “alumni group” from Inter-Varsity in New Jersey, and it was probably someone from that group. But the finest part of the Gospel Tabernacle was the fine preaching!"

To be a student in Linden's class, he gave me a Worker's Covenant (see attached). I did not read this covenant until much later. Later I became the Sunday School superintendent, and I found it very useful.

A WORKER’S COVENANT

Recognizing the high privilege that is mine to serve my Lord through our Sunday school and trusting in the help and guidance of the Holy Spirit, I earnestly pledge myself to this covenant.

1.     I will at all times manifest a deep spiritual concern for the members of my class. My first desire shall be to bring about the salvation of each pupil who does not know the Lord Jesus and to encourage the spiritual growth of every Christian. Daniel 12:3

2.     I will carefully prepare my lessons and make each class session a matter of earnest prayer. I Thessalonians 5:17

3.     I will be faithful in attendance and make it a practice to be present at least 10 minutes early to welcome each pupil as he arrives. If at any time, through sickness or other emergency, I am unable to teach my class, I will notify my superintendent at the earliest possible moment. I Corinthians 4:2

4.     I will teach according to the doctrines of our church, Christ our Saviour, Sanctifier, Healer and Coming King. Acts 20:27

5.     I will live what I teach in separation from the world and purity of life, “avoiding all appearance of evil” setting an example in dress, conversation, deportment and prayer. Ephesians 4:1

6.     I will regularly attend and urge members of my class to be present at the church services, recognizing that the church and school are inseparable. Believing in the importance of prayer, I will endeavor to maintain a regular attendance at the midweek prayer service, as well as Sunday services. Hebrews 10:24,25

7.     I will co-operate with the absentee program of our school and will strive to visit the homes of each pupil at least once a year. Matthew 18:12

8.     I will wholeheartedly support the Sunday school program endeavoring regularly to attend the monthly workers’ conferences and the training classes. II Timothy 2:15

9.     I understand that my appointment as a teacher is for the 12 month period of the Sunday school year. Whether my appointment is made then or later in the year, I understand that it automatically terminates at the end of the Sunday school year. I Corinthians 3:9

10. I will cheerfully abide by the decisions of my church and Sunday school. I will co-operate with my fellow laborers in this teaching agency of our church so that our ministry will be effective and fruitful. Matthew 28:19,20; John 15:16

Meg Skinner, daughter of Bob Wolin, sent me the following message:

"We moved to the Hartford area when Combustion moved (1960?) which is where my sister and I grew up. My father retired early from Combustion Engineering at the end of 1977 , and my parents moved to Cape Cod , where my father conducted his engineering consulting business, including with Stone and Webster. He fully retired in his mid 70’s. They happily lived on the Cape, travelled a lot and played golf. My father had a stroke at age 94 in 2011 and died; my mother died at age 97 in 2015. We were a close family, and my parents had a great life. We donated money to MIT in my father’s name after he died. My childhood was filled with references to all the locations you mentioned, and I have very happy memories of family dinners discussing the locations and the people. My sister and I also grew up knowing their friends- Joe Singer, Elno Powell, Larry Grabiwski , etc. so it was nice to hear Joe Singer’s name which I hadn’t heard in many years."

The picture below is of myself with Linden Cole and his wife Jane in 2013.