born in 1923 and grew up on a farm in upstate New York in that stretch of harsh terrain and gravel-bottomed lakes which runs from Rochester to Buffalo. From the beginning, he was an exceptional child, especially in school. His high school record was flawless, after having skipped two grades in elementary school. In his senior year, he set a record on the New York Regents’ Exams and won a scholarship to Denison University in Ohio. Besides being a top student, he was regarded as one of the most remarkable and promising young men ever to have passed through his local Baptist church.
His mother, Lucy Spike, was a former schoolteacher and a loyal Baptist. She began taking her son Bob to church from infancy. Lucy did not allow or approve of smoking, drinking or cards. She was a little round woman in spectacles who could be sweeter than honey to a grandchild. I remember the summers that I spent in her Rochester house as the best of my childhood.
As soon as I arrived, she would take down a huge jar of pennies which she had been saving all year and we would roll them up, then take them to the bank and exchange them for spending cash. The best part came after we got off the bus in downtown Rochester. I was free to go through the toy departments of all the local stores and spend every last penny on whatever toys caught my eye. It was almost better than Christmas. But a grandchild’s memories are not a child’s. I know my father lived his childhood under her strong influence and then spent years breaking away from it. And, from what I have heard, my grandfather spent much of his life pushing his wife away.
Warren Spike was gassed in the trenches of France during World War I. He returned alive, but with his face a red map of exposed veins and capillaries. The German gas gave him an incurable skin condition and blood disease which, while it wasn’t fatal, left him looking flushed and furious for the rest of his life. Sad, for the rest of his life would too often justify his angry face.
My grandfather moved from disappointment to disappointment, failure to failure. He began as a farmer and ended as a salesman for furniture with built-in massage vibrators. He kept his failures stored inside. They dissolved into a bitter acid which rarely leaked out, for he was not a talkative man. On those summers when I visited Rochester, when he touched me, I felt the uneasiness and confusion in his fingers. He would tenderly show me his beautiful garden and suddenly, in the middle of a row of flowers, walk away and into the house without a word. He loved to hunt and fish and care for his dogs. He treated each dog he owned like a son.
One afternoon in her kitchen, my grandmother turned from her baking and began to tell me about how my grandfather had beaten my father when he was a boy. I was six on this afternoon. I remember she told me in vivid detail of how Grandpa had stripped off my father’s pants and whipped him with a special leather strap until the blood poured down his naked legs. She told me she screamed and pleaded with him to stop. “Your father was a good boy. But if he was just a little naughty, Grandpa would whip him.”
My father told his best friend, who later told me, that when he was about two years old, he suddenly felt his father stop loving him. He could remember the feeling clearly. Utterly, completely, the love was taken away. What failure or disappointment in Warren Spike’s life made him withdraw his love from his oldest son, I do not know. But my father grew up without a father’s love, knowing that nothing he could do would win it back.
Lucy Spike had enough love and enough visions to shelter him, to keep him alive, to drive him to straight A’s and Denison. Her real vision was of her son Bob in the pulpit. He majored in philosophy in college, joined a fraternity, acted in college plays, and kept active in the Baptist Church. When he graduated—Phi Beta Kappa, the whole bundle of college honors—he decided to return to upstate New York and the Colgate-Rochester Divinity School. He was ordained in 1945 and shortly afterwards he married my mother.
They had met at Denison. She was from Arlington, Virginia, the daughter of a government scientist and a schoolteacher mother. My mother was not what my grandmother probably saw in her visions of a wife for Bob. She was outspoken, vivacious, very bright and independent, with a zany sense of humor. She smoked, drank and played bridge. She wanted children, but she wanted her own life, to be more than a minister’s wife serving coffee to the church women’s society and ironing his clerical collars. Marrying my mother was probably my father’s first step toward total independence. It was a rejection of his mother not only in classical Freudian terms, but in terms of the basic facts of the situation. In college, my father’s thought had already moved far beyond the Baptist theology of his childhood. By the time he was ordained and out of seminary, he had developed his own kind of pragmatic Christian existentialism, very much directed at the sociological mission of the Christian church, based heavily on his understanding of Niebuhr, Tillich, Barth and Kierkegaard. Many years later at the March he would feel, “for the first time in my ministry… the church was where it belonged, in the middle of the street.”
His ministry is best seen in four chronological parts. He was minister of the Judson Memorial Church in Greenwich Village from the late forties until 1955. He left this pulpit to become a church executive for the Congregationalist Church, now the United Church of Christ. There he served for eight years before going to direct the Commission on Religion and Race in the summer of 1963.
The final section of his career began in 1966 when he went to the University of Chicago as a professor and administrator.
Written above, the four parts of his ministry lie upon the page like four spoons on a bare table. But each was full of substance, each was electric.
His beginning, at the Judson Church, was crucial. Here he changed himself, as he changed Judson, from a conservative Baptist into a modern pioneer in the wilderness of postwar American society. I think it was at Judson that he felt for the first time the injustice deeply engrained in our society and felt his own nature respond to it with an urgent need for change. He became a rebel, on his way to becoming a revolutionary. He was one of the most radical ministers in the American church. He was blessed with not only radical ideas and imagination, but a sense of how to change things.
Judson had once been the most fashionable church in New York, back in the days when Henry James was writing about Washington Square. But by the late 1940s, the huge Stanford White-designed brick building was a relic without congregation or program, a dead property in the midst of an Italian ghetto sprawling with life. At the time of his arrival, one of the biggest problems in the Village, as in every part of New York City, was the teenage gangs that were making war on one another and anyone who happened to wander into the middle of their turf. This was one of the two chief annoyances for the neighborhood Italians, who liked to run their lives in quiet, secretive order. The other was the presence of some of the most unhappy but brilliant men and women in the country. These were the artists and writers, the would-be artists, and the self-proclaimed bohemians who lived in the cheap tenements and drank in the local bars. When my father arrived at Judson, he looked around the community to see where his congregation would come from and where his ministry must go. For the most part, it was a question of the ministry going outside the church. His congregation, he felt, consisted of the gangs and the bohemians, along with a small but active group of young people recently out of college who were drifting around on the fringes of the Village. These people weren’t sure if they believed in God, but they came to believe in the Judson Church.
There were several youth programs connected to other churches in the Village, but they all barred any gang members or troublemakers from entering. The people who most needed a place to get off the street were the last ones to find a place. In the basement of Judson was a large gymnasium, several locker rooms, and about seven meeting rooms. These were turned into the Judson Center and thrown open to any kids in the neighborhood who wanted to come. In a few weeks, the toughest kids in the Village, all of them Italian and Roman Catholic, were members of the Center. They called him Spike. They gradually came to trust him with everything.
We—my mother, brother and I—lived behind the church on Thompson Street. I remember many mornings when my father would dress in his clerical collar, usually worn only on Sunday mornings. I would ask him why he was getting dressed up.
“I have to go to court. Vinnie is going on trial today.” It could be Vinnie, Tony, Al, or Rocco. It got so his