LIFE-WORK ENDED?

The whole of his first month was spent tramping the streets trying to whip up a congregation and acquire suitable premises. All Buchman could find was a triangular three-storey building, on the corner of Lancaster Avenue and 62nd Street, the ground floor of which had been a store. This had to serve both as church and living quarters. One friend offered to pay the first month's rent, another to lend some chairs, providing that Buchman could arrange to have them picked up in Philadelphia. A month after he had arrived in Overbrook, the Church of the Good Shepherd opened its doors. There were eighty at the first evening service and the collection was $10.35.

It was hard and often dispiriting work. ‘I do so miss the home life,’ he wrote. ‘Everything is so quiet, but I shall again be accustomed to it ere long. Pray for me and that I may have strength to continue.’30 Buchman ate his meals off an old trunk covered with a cloth and, when his mother eventually sent a rug for the floor, he wrote that it made him feel as if he were living again. Nor was there any longer the consoling prospect of marriage. During the years at Overbrook, the relationship with Florence Thayer seems quietly to have faded away, even though at a reunion of his Muhlenberg class of '99 he was proposing the toast of 'Our Sweethearts'.

Buchman took an active interest in the School for the Blind in Overbrook. He enlisted the pupils to help him, and invited their chorus to sing in public. Genevieve Caulfield, blind since the age of three months, was one of these pupils, and sixty years later was decorated by President Kennedy for her life-work for the blind in Asia. She had never forgotten Buchman. ‘He was very interested to know that even then I was thinking of going to Japan,’ she recalled. ‘He asked me all about it when he took us out to the park or the zoo. He knew how children liked to eat, and he knew just what we liked to eat.... I never forgot him. He was kind without being patronising, and didn't take us out because he thought we were blind, but treated us as if we were real people whom he expected to do something in the world.’31

Following a pattern which persisted throughout his life, Buchman spent himself entirely on his work at Overbrook, and by the following summer was so exhausted that his doctor prescribed a long holiday. In June 1903 he sailed for Europe on the Vancouver, with a college friend, Howard Woerth. Buchman had hoped that his wealthier parishioners would provide the fare. It seems, however, to have come from his father, who at first was outraged at the thought of added expense after three years of college fees but then relented and won over his wife, for once disinclined to generosity towards her son. It was, in fact, most unusual for any but the wealthiest of Pennsylvania Dutch families to send their sons abroad.

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