Columnist's Chapel

When the war was over, Newspaperman Clarence Dirks did what most other city people just talk about doing. He settled down on a little farm to .raise cows, chickens and fruit.

He was as green at it as a stock character in a rural comedy; killing a chicken was a new and horrible experience, and at first, he ate a comb of honey a day, until he found he could sell them for 55-c-. The pittance Dirks got from his 76 acres on Camano Island in Puget Sound would have sent most men back to the city, but he eked out his farming by kidding himself in a column ("City Bred Farmer") for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. He signed off each column with the number of eggs he had collected that day.

Things Not Seen. One day in 1949, things got too much for Clarence Dirks. The farm seemed to be a failure, he hadn't sold a story for five months, his wife had been temporarily committed to a mental hospital. He did something he had never done before: he went to church and prayed. And it worked; faith and the love of God flooded in upon him, and from then on everything in his life seemed different.

In one of his columns, Dirks wrote about Camano's little frame church and two of the people who kept it going--Sunday-school Teacher Mrs. Mertie Best ("a saint in a house dress") and Pastor Walter Jerome Wheeler. "How much nicer and more convenient it would be, say," he wrote, "if a church were located closer at hand. Perhaps in a grove of hemlocl where the cleared land descends toward the blue channel water; somewhere, wher the kindly Sunday-school teacher would not have so far to go . . . Last night th Farmer [Dirks] could contain himself m longer. He visited Mr. Wheeler, who said 'If a fund was started to build a small church, I certainly wouldn't oppose it But remember ours is a small community Just now, it takes all the Sunday collection to run the children's bus.'

"Faith, the Good Book says, is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen. Things,' in this connection, might still be a new little church Eggs collected: three."

Miracle In the Woods. Next day L woman in Seattle sent in a dollar. "Have faith," she wrote. Other dollars followed ($9,474 to date), and Clarence Dirks set to work to build Camano Chapel, as he called it. Nearby farmers, carpenters, plumbers, even visitors from the city lent a hand. A lumber company gave cedar logs, which were hauled out of the forest, free, by a trucker, sized and split by two roofers in return for the butts, which the chapel could not use. Seattle hotel and restaurant men gave enough money for a $2,500 organ. One rainy day, when Dirks needed 28 men to help pour the concrete foundations, exactly 28 turned up. The last man to arrive was from North Dakota; he had read about the chapel, on the mainland, and decided to come over and help. "It's a miracle in the woods," said Dirks.

Last week, interdenominational Camano Chapel was dedicated with a soundproof "crying room" for mothers with babies. Eight hundred people came to the dedication, and 3,000 turned up three days later when Evangelist Billy Graham came over for a visit. Big, rugged (6 ft. 2 in., 220 Ibs.) Clarence Dirks, 48, was about as happy as a newspaperman--or even a farmer--could be. But he couldn't say anything at all when one of his farmer neighbors read a poem about him, and said: "Clarence Dirks is a good man, beloved by his neighbors."

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