Follow the link for Part One of my interview with Arnold Coe.
Matt: You attended Whitman College, is that correct?
Arnold: Yes.
Matt: How was your experience at Whitman, what organizations were you involved with?
Arnold: I did a number of different activities, but when I was a sophomore, I became a dorm counselor and lived four years in dormitories at Whitman, I never lived in a fraternity house off campus. That life became a major focus for me. I was also active in student bodies and did debate one year; just diversified stuff.
Matt: Is that where you got into education?
Arnold: No, I didn’t do any education hours when I was at Whitman, but I left with a Chemistry degree and a minor in Biology.
Matt: What was your intent after school?
Arnold: My intent was to go to medical school. I made one visit to the University of Washington Medical School during my senior year and decided I wasn’t doing that. Then, I farmed for a year or two with my father-in-law and then went back to school one quarter at Walla Walla College, Seventh Day Adventist University. I became a teacher in Milton Freewater.
Matt: Is this around the time that you met your wife?
Arnold: We had actually met in high school. She was raised in Waitsburg, Washington, north of Walla Walla. We both joined and were involved in student council activities, leadership training and that kind of thing, so we had met before we got to Whitman.
Matt: Then you had children.
Arnold: By age, our oldest is Bruce, Valerie Ann was next, then Brad, and the youngest is Laura.
Matt: How was church life for your kids?
Arnold: There was quite a range, our kids were four different kids, but they all participated, and at one time all participated as acolytes, under different priests at St. James. We were active at All Saints Hillsboro and at St. Patrick’s Thousand Oaks, they were at St. George’s with 2,800 communicants. For a church atmosphere with four large congregations each Sunday. They were all active in one way or another.
Matt: Did any of your kids come to Ascension?
Arnold: Yep, I think all did at one time or another. We all had similar experiences, they would come home talking about all of the people they had met. I bumped into the kids of people that I knew when I went to Ascension. There was definitely that sense of continuity.
Matt: How did your perspective change of Ascension school, going from a camper yourself to a parent with children at camp?
Arnold: It changed from being a user of all of that experience and being called to being a provider for that experience. In those teaching years at Mac High, we would do spaghetti feeds for Ascension, and I was not directly involved, and then we were out of the diocese for six years when I worked with Pfizer. We move back in 74, and began to get involved in the diocese. Dirk Reinhardt recommended to (Bishop) Spofford, and in 76 he asked me to chair the then Camps and Conference community. That began my growth and recognition of my calling.
Matt: What was it like then?
Arnold: Well, number one, it was remote, because I was in Milton Freewater, but I would make trips over here to touch base with Louis, but it was not hands on like it became in later years when I was in the North Powder and Baker City area, it became more hands on.
Matt: So this was your reintroduction to Ascension and the diocese in general? You’re growing with your involvement in the church.
Arnold: It was growing more to recognize that my calling, and I did very little program-wise in those years, was to provide a place acceptable for all of that to grow, and because of that whole sequence of events, I was able to end up in the Diocese of Eastern Oregon. I went back to school to be an administrator (around 1986-87) and got a credential, had seventeen applications out, I got one interview and that was at North Powder. The year before at the end of the summer I had gotten an interview in a small Southern Oregon community, the superintendent wanted me to come down and be principle of the high school, and it was a small enough district that they decided to use a model like I did at North Powder and at Cove and ask the superintendent to become principle, so what I thought was a job was not, and we had plan B, which was for me to stay in school for a year and finish my superintendent credential, and as a result, ended up back in the diocese. Now, you can say all you want, but that’s divine involvement in my mind, period.
Matt: Ok, so just to recap, you were Superintendent of the North Powder School District for six years and then the Baker School District for six years, prior to coming to Cove, and then you served as Cove Superintendent, what drove you to work as a superintendent?
Arnold: Yes, well, it was being involved at the quasi-administrative level, I was part-time vice principal at Milton Freewater, a number of superintendent and other people encouraged me to get a credential. In fact, I had an old enough teaching credential that I could have become a high school principal without any more education.
Matt: Right, because you were teaching at Mac High.
Arnold: Yeah, back in the 60s, and so a teaching certificate qualified you to become a principal without any other training, but that’s when I left education and went to work for Pfizer. That’s when our conversation around the house was that what public education needed more than anything else was people with good business, leadership skills, all of that stuff, who learned outside the system. It took a lot of years. One morning when our youngest graduated, my wife said, and I told you this over lunch, that if you’re going to become a superintendent, you’re running out of time. So, at age fifty, I went back to school for a year. Again, more than coincidental that that call came through her. We were prepared to go any place in the state of Oregon for a job, and the fact that after all of the dominoes fell, we ended up here.
Matt: That is an interesting theme, and something Bob (Carsner) talked a little bit about, you know, the leaving home to work in another city, but ultimately coming back to Eastern Oregon. When we sit down and think about it, this (Ascension) is what is bringing us back.
Arnold: It is the common tie to a lot of people.
Matt: It must have been an incredible realization for you. At fifty, and I’m back in the diocese.
Arnold: I’m a person who, some of those things don’t come to me until I spend some time reflecting. It was clear by the time I was at North Powder that my school administration was my first calling, a spiritual calling. I had an interview by a book writer, he was on the staff of the education department at the University of Oregon, his wife was at Lewis and Clark in Portland, whom I did some studying under, and who was writing a book about leadership and administration in small schools. He came to North Powder to interview me, and I wasn’t five minutes into that interview, and he said, how did you happen to be here? I said, that’s my calling, and he said a spiritual calling? I said, yeah. He threw me out of that office, literally, he couldn’t handle that, and his interview, the book writing process, there was just no room for that (laughs), about the only thing he didn’t do was slam the door.
Matt: Clearly, you were not from the same neck of the woods.
Arnold: He was not going to comprehend it.
Matt: Wow, so you stay in North Powder, and then shift to Baker and Cove, and you get involved, more so then you ever did before. When did you come back to Ascension School?
Arnold: Yes, I think, well, the first year at North Powder, I didn’t do anything but work. I was in that building seven days a week. I went to work on August 14 and still had two teachers and a football coach to hire and I had never been a superintendent before, and so that first year, I was totally immersed in work. During those few years out of the diocese, Bob Despain of Heppner, whom you should have some history about, was the board chair, and then so I served on the board and then phased back into being board chair. It was about in 1989 that I really became, quantitatively, much more involved.
Matt: That’s of course during Rusty’s tenure. Was there anyone other than him that encouraged you to get involved?
Arnold: No, not really. I have been referred to as not flexible and bull-headed and those kind of things. This was one of those things where I recognized my calling and involvement level. Reinforcement from Rustin or Richard, or whomever else, that I was working with, we had a connection with some of that past history.
Matt: Right, and over the years, I’m sure you have seen Ascension change, especially architecturally, buildings have come and gone, how has it all changed for you, from your perspective?
Arnold: Well, the main change is to be better equipped to serve the adult community. We went through a lot of years of having that as an objective, I mean a lot of years. My mother would come her for meetings and adult conferences and wouldn’t sleep in a bunk bed, and would go get a hotel. So, that’s been the major change, the new cabins, the new buildings that facilitated that superficial stuff. It’s not the body, the substance, of who we are. When we were able to expand our community by being a place for adults, and that through those years Spofford and Rustin were great at bringing key people, and so there was some programmatic stuff that was actually ahead of our capacity to integrate, and so that was the greatest change that I have experienced.
Matt: You can see change here, that’s what I love about this place; that you can see the history all around you through the many different buildings on campus. How is the new building project going by the way?
Arnold: Well, we have had some slow down, kind of set-backs, you know with the design we had to slow down and make some changes, and some weather hit us wrong and we dug into some water we didn’t expect. We’re behind schedule, not contractor schedule, just our hopes and dreams that we would be fully into by June 1, I’m not sure that is going to happen. We talked about it, and you reflected on it at lunch, change has been what we have been about for over one hundred years. This is just one more change.
Matt: Ascension’s great gift to us is in recognizing, not just change, but our differences, you know, historical context and the passing of time. That is so invaluable for us when we can stop and examine the change around us, but often we don’t, but it’s why we’re here talking today.
Arnold: Yeah, we don’t. The part that, on the personal side, this is a very thin place for me, spiritually, if there’s any place that I’m going to feel Valerie Ann’s presence, or Lane Barton’s, or Rustin’s, it’s going to be here; not to do with the chapel or the library, but just generically, this place. We have had so much testimony through the years, by non-church people, that come her for one function or another, that the place is different. I will share two stories with you. There’s a document around this, the mid-90’s where we gathered some survey to look at some plans, and we invited John Kyle and others in from Portland architect, so on and so forth, and they had not been here before. We had good representatives from around the diocese, good discussions, and their feedback was we’ll do some building design, we’ll do whatever, but recognize that what you have is a unique place and you need to recognize that for whatever you plan. In later years, when I was superintendent here, there was a superintendent from Spray, Oregon who would not allow his kids to come to an annual small school leadership conference held here because he was so structured about not mixing church with school. At that time, we started something, basketball season exchanges where we traveled and stay at home or whatever we could do to cut down two rounds trips to places like Jordan Valley or Spray or whatever, and his kids just came home twisting his arm to go to this leadership conference. Finally, he came in and brought eight or ten kids, had a great weekend. The next superintendent’s meeting, we were in Ontario, at the Sizzler. I walked into that meeting room, and he was already there; walked the distance from here over to those doors, shook my hand, didn’t say hello or anything else, and he said, I can’t believe a place can make a difference in how my kids behave. We’ve had kid testimony the same, had a little kid from Bend a few years ago who was here through that MET program that supplies scholarship money for non-church kids. He was a sixth or seventh grader who had had trouble in the past. After two or three days, a counselor noted that he hadn’t unpacked his suitcase yet, and she asked him why he hadn’t unpacked his suitcase yet. He said, because any time I go someplace they send me home, and she said well, you don’t have to worry about that here. The place piece has been a great influence on me.
Matt: This is a very spiritual place. I think about how this place has progressed in the early years, first with the French property, then the Paddock years when it went into disarray, and the Remington years which rejuvenated the spirit of Ascension, and now we’re approaching the one-hundred-year anniversary of that first camp in 1924. Through it all, Ascension has only continued to grow and shape the lives of all who encountered it.
Arnold: Well, as I reflect, whether it was Remington, or remember Clarence Kopp, or the staff people we had here, I and the role that Louis Perkins played, I just feel strongly that there is a spiritual call to the right people at the right time. Regardless of their i.e. individual time-oriented effectiveness of not, they are a part of the sequence that got us where we are. Part of what I tried to be involved in as we planned is that we do things that continually recognize the contribution, short-term, long-term, whatever, that we’re building blocks to get us there. There is no way to deny that each of those people in some way contributed to it.
Matt: Right, how else do you explain the archives project?
Arnold: Yes, that certainly wouldn’t have happened ten years ago.
Matt: I’m hoping that now we can move forward with the archives, find ways to get more people involved in the preservation of their heritage.
Arnold: I’m one of those people that, I just can’t believe the family stuff I let slip away. The hard copy, the stuff wasn’t what connected me to family, it was the spiritual connections. I have a lot of good memories with my Grandfather Arnold or my Grandad Coe, I don’t have any stuff that’s memorabilia, and there are days when I regret that I haven’t given some attention to them; those things were not the important part of those relationships.
Matt: You’re right, sometimes it’s not about the material, I mean the things that make this diocese special like Ascension and the relationships that are built here, you can’t place monetary value on it.
Arnold: My Grandfather Coe, my father’s father, has had a major influence on me, because a piece of his lifestyle that I just keep with being in partnership with my dad and uncle at sixty-five sixty-six, whatever year, they bought him out. He continued to work the counter, it was a feed store, you know servicing customers, I don’t know what financial service they were to him, but he had no hobbies, no church connection, no lodge connection, he went back to his apartment and sat. I just watched that, and as a college student and young married man, I said, I’m not going to do that. It has been a positive, what I thought was a negative for him, has been a positive for me, you know, to getting up and still going when I’m eighty. This has been an opportunity to do that.
Matt: That’s an interesting point about your grandpa, so he didn’t really have a community?
Arnold: Absolutely, what he had had, was a close community actually with the generation older than he, on both my grandmother’s side and on his side. By the time he was at that declining age, that community was all gone, he was the only one left, with a limited number of cousins. He didn’t have a growing, changing, community. My involvement with the church has been with many different folks because the population changes. When your only community is only family, it doesn’t change.
Matt: That’s an interesting thought and kind of leads into my next question, how do we as the Episcopal Diocese of Eastern Oregon, as a community, see ourselves, and how do others see us?
Arnold: I really have no experience with how others see us, I just don’t recall getting into those kinds of conversations. I see us as spiritually healthy, because I see people there for a long time. I see us as spiritually healthy in that across our diocese people from the congregations and parishes are reaching out in their community in lots of ways. I worry about numbers, and I know that others worry about numbers, in terms of holding onto our congregations because that’s where we found our relationships. I think the diocese has strong inter-community relationships. When we travelled in that fundraising campaign a few years ago, to go to Klamath Falls and here about the emotional connections with Ascension or somebody in Burns, I think that our diocese is spiritually strong and strong in relationships from one to the other.
Matt: You have seen membership in the church decline?
Arnold: I have seen membership decline in my lifetime, yes. Places where there were strong congregations with a priest only have numbers to share a priest only. With St. James, the first in our diocese for the entire congregation to become the vestry because they declined so much in numbers, so there are a lot of indicators. Beyond a certain point you would see no ramifications for reduction in size. As long a congregation like Redeemer is able to have a full-time priest and carry on those other functions, it could be the size it is or three-times the size and you wouldn’t really know. Where what you see is visible, you know, Heppner shares with the Lutheran church, you know you see those things. Nyssa and Vale were strong congregations in our diocese for years. Betty Rinehardt was one of the first and strongest voices to go beyond the congregation to bring kids to Ascension, and that was out at Nyssa. It has changed and it is going to change.
Matt: Because we are a rural diocese, with wide open spaces, we have a western spirit and conservative politics, very opposite to the western portion of the state. I grew up in Salem, and so I immediately recognized the cultural differences out here. What makes us so special?
Arnold: I think that what makes us so special is that survivalist’s necessity from the turn of the century that is almost inbred, it’s almost in my blood, you just knew that you picked yourself up by the boot straps and you do it, instead of spending all kinds of time figuring out how or talking about why not. I remember when I was in North Powder, first year I was there, I just surveyed the teachers and how they used the standardized test scores in those years; they didn’t use them, so I threw them out. I didn’t like them any way, they were poorly written those years. The state called me and said if you don’t start using those tests we’re going to cut off your funding. About that time, they changed the test and across Oregon, all of the small schools did better in the math section at the tenth grade level than any of the high schools up and down the valley. The top twenty percent were dominated by Pine Eagle, Dufur, all of those people. The Oregonian called to ask me why we did so well. Well, in my sarcastic attitude, I said, well I sent two kids home that day and it took me half an hour to dig up, because you see we had sixteen kids in the class, and so my point is that’s how the scores can be manipulated and so they’re worthless. Then another call back and some analysis talking with my kids; taking a test and solving a problem wasn’t anything new to them. They had to figure out how to fee their steer, get on the bus at 7 A.M., get ready for basketball practice and a Friday night’s ballgame play basketball and play in the band at the same time. Confronting a test of any kind was not an issue, that was a lifestyle, so they entered a testing room so to speak with a whole different mindset and skill set than the kids at Gresham High School. I was president of state’s superintendent’s division, and so I was involved at that level and drove to Salem a lot for lobbying. People just couldn’t fathom, the Westside-Eastside division over issues is a matter of not knowing, it’s not a matter of anybody being opposed, just not knowing. I had the Portland School District’s superintendent in Baker City at one time because he didn’t understand why we didn’t drive busses to every kid in the district, because that’s what the law says. Basically, I said, because I can’t get there from here.
Matt: Had he ever been here before?
Arnold: He came out, and took a serious look. We had kids that picked up at Durkee. The family had already brought them twelve miles on a gravel road in a pickup to get to the school bus. As the rest of our church looks at Eastern Oregon, nationally as the Episcopal Church looks at us and the fourteen and fifteen other dioceses with the similar distance of populations, they haven’t got a clue. To know that it’s hours between congregations, I used to have marketing and tech people come out to travel with me when I worked out of Portland or Los Angeles from the New York office and not understand why in the L.A. Basin I can’t have six appointments in one day. It’s two and a half hours between destinations, and so that impedes our relationship with The Episcopal Church. Nedi’s done great work to mend some of that.
Matt: So much space, there’s a vastness here, what is the diocese, like 70,000 square miles?
Arnold: Something like that.
Matt: You’re right, I think that people outside the diocese don’t really know what it’s like to be a small diocese in large territory.
Arnold: Well, back to the basis of your question, I think that is our strength. That spirit, it’s the inherited boot-strap, we’re going to get it done, survival, you know, whatever it takes.
Matt: What is your hope for the future of Ascension and for the future of this diocese?
Arnold: My hope for Ascension School is that it remains a vital part of the diocese, that it’s ministry be continually broader, whether that’s reaching different parts of our population within our diocese or bringing people in. I don’t say that, well, I don’t mean Episcopal, whatever, you know, I think we have an opportunity and an obligation for the ministry here to be more inclusive. My hope is that what I contribute will facilitate that happening.
Matt: Right, and we see all of the dedication, hard work, and sacrifices from the people who visited or worked at Ascension, yourself included. Well, that was my final question, I thank you so much for meeting with me.
Arnold: You’re welcome.
End of the interview.
Matt: You attended Whitman College, is that correct?
Arnold: Yes.
Matt: How was your experience at Whitman, what organizations were you involved with?
Arnold: I did a number of different activities, but when I was a sophomore, I became a dorm counselor and lived four years in dormitories at Whitman, I never lived in a fraternity house off campus. That life became a major focus for me. I was also active in student bodies and did debate one year; just diversified stuff.
Matt: Is that where you got into education?
Arnold: No, I didn’t do any education hours when I was at Whitman, but I left with a Chemistry degree and a minor in Biology.
Matt: What was your intent after school?
Arnold: My intent was to go to medical school. I made one visit to the University of Washington Medical School during my senior year and decided I wasn’t doing that. Then, I farmed for a year or two with my father-in-law and then went back to school one quarter at Walla Walla College, Seventh Day Adventist University. I became a teacher in Milton Freewater.
Matt: Is this around the time that you met your wife?
Arnold: We had actually met in high school. She was raised in Waitsburg, Washington, north of Walla Walla. We both joined and were involved in student council activities, leadership training and that kind of thing, so we had met before we got to Whitman.
Matt: Then you had children.
Arnold: By age, our oldest is Bruce, Valerie Ann was next, then Brad, and the youngest is Laura.
Matt: How was church life for your kids?
Arnold: There was quite a range, our kids were four different kids, but they all participated, and at one time all participated as acolytes, under different priests at St. James. We were active at All Saints Hillsboro and at St. Patrick’s Thousand Oaks, they were at St. George’s with 2,800 communicants. For a church atmosphere with four large congregations each Sunday. They were all active in one way or another.
Matt: Did any of your kids come to Ascension?
Arnold: Yep, I think all did at one time or another. We all had similar experiences, they would come home talking about all of the people they had met. I bumped into the kids of people that I knew when I went to Ascension. There was definitely that sense of continuity.
Matt: How did your perspective change of Ascension school, going from a camper yourself to a parent with children at camp?
Arnold: It changed from being a user of all of that experience and being called to being a provider for that experience. In those teaching years at Mac High, we would do spaghetti feeds for Ascension, and I was not directly involved, and then we were out of the diocese for six years when I worked with Pfizer. We move back in 74, and began to get involved in the diocese. Dirk Reinhardt recommended to (Bishop) Spofford, and in 76 he asked me to chair the then Camps and Conference community. That began my growth and recognition of my calling.
Matt: What was it like then?
Arnold: Well, number one, it was remote, because I was in Milton Freewater, but I would make trips over here to touch base with Louis, but it was not hands on like it became in later years when I was in the North Powder and Baker City area, it became more hands on.
Matt: So this was your reintroduction to Ascension and the diocese in general? You’re growing with your involvement in the church.
Arnold: It was growing more to recognize that my calling, and I did very little program-wise in those years, was to provide a place acceptable for all of that to grow, and because of that whole sequence of events, I was able to end up in the Diocese of Eastern Oregon. I went back to school to be an administrator (around 1986-87) and got a credential, had seventeen applications out, I got one interview and that was at North Powder. The year before at the end of the summer I had gotten an interview in a small Southern Oregon community, the superintendent wanted me to come down and be principle of the high school, and it was a small enough district that they decided to use a model like I did at North Powder and at Cove and ask the superintendent to become principle, so what I thought was a job was not, and we had plan B, which was for me to stay in school for a year and finish my superintendent credential, and as a result, ended up back in the diocese. Now, you can say all you want, but that’s divine involvement in my mind, period.
Matt: Ok, so just to recap, you were Superintendent of the North Powder School District for six years and then the Baker School District for six years, prior to coming to Cove, and then you served as Cove Superintendent, what drove you to work as a superintendent?
Arnold: Yes, well, it was being involved at the quasi-administrative level, I was part-time vice principal at Milton Freewater, a number of superintendent and other people encouraged me to get a credential. In fact, I had an old enough teaching credential that I could have become a high school principal without any more education.
Matt: Right, because you were teaching at Mac High.
Arnold: Yeah, back in the 60s, and so a teaching certificate qualified you to become a principal without any other training, but that’s when I left education and went to work for Pfizer. That’s when our conversation around the house was that what public education needed more than anything else was people with good business, leadership skills, all of that stuff, who learned outside the system. It took a lot of years. One morning when our youngest graduated, my wife said, and I told you this over lunch, that if you’re going to become a superintendent, you’re running out of time. So, at age fifty, I went back to school for a year. Again, more than coincidental that that call came through her. We were prepared to go any place in the state of Oregon for a job, and the fact that after all of the dominoes fell, we ended up here.
Matt: That is an interesting theme, and something Bob (Carsner) talked a little bit about, you know, the leaving home to work in another city, but ultimately coming back to Eastern Oregon. When we sit down and think about it, this (Ascension) is what is bringing us back.
Arnold: It is the common tie to a lot of people.
Matt: It must have been an incredible realization for you. At fifty, and I’m back in the diocese.
Arnold: I’m a person who, some of those things don’t come to me until I spend some time reflecting. It was clear by the time I was at North Powder that my school administration was my first calling, a spiritual calling. I had an interview by a book writer, he was on the staff of the education department at the University of Oregon, his wife was at Lewis and Clark in Portland, whom I did some studying under, and who was writing a book about leadership and administration in small schools. He came to North Powder to interview me, and I wasn’t five minutes into that interview, and he said, how did you happen to be here? I said, that’s my calling, and he said a spiritual calling? I said, yeah. He threw me out of that office, literally, he couldn’t handle that, and his interview, the book writing process, there was just no room for that (laughs), about the only thing he didn’t do was slam the door.
Matt: Clearly, you were not from the same neck of the woods.
Arnold: He was not going to comprehend it.
Matt: Wow, so you stay in North Powder, and then shift to Baker and Cove, and you get involved, more so then you ever did before. When did you come back to Ascension School?
Arnold: Yes, I think, well, the first year at North Powder, I didn’t do anything but work. I was in that building seven days a week. I went to work on August 14 and still had two teachers and a football coach to hire and I had never been a superintendent before, and so that first year, I was totally immersed in work. During those few years out of the diocese, Bob Despain of Heppner, whom you should have some history about, was the board chair, and then so I served on the board and then phased back into being board chair. It was about in 1989 that I really became, quantitatively, much more involved.
Matt: That’s of course during Rusty’s tenure. Was there anyone other than him that encouraged you to get involved?
Arnold: No, not really. I have been referred to as not flexible and bull-headed and those kind of things. This was one of those things where I recognized my calling and involvement level. Reinforcement from Rustin or Richard, or whomever else, that I was working with, we had a connection with some of that past history.
Matt: Right, and over the years, I’m sure you have seen Ascension change, especially architecturally, buildings have come and gone, how has it all changed for you, from your perspective?
Arnold: Well, the main change is to be better equipped to serve the adult community. We went through a lot of years of having that as an objective, I mean a lot of years. My mother would come her for meetings and adult conferences and wouldn’t sleep in a bunk bed, and would go get a hotel. So, that’s been the major change, the new cabins, the new buildings that facilitated that superficial stuff. It’s not the body, the substance, of who we are. When we were able to expand our community by being a place for adults, and that through those years Spofford and Rustin were great at bringing key people, and so there was some programmatic stuff that was actually ahead of our capacity to integrate, and so that was the greatest change that I have experienced.
Matt: You can see change here, that’s what I love about this place; that you can see the history all around you through the many different buildings on campus. How is the new building project going by the way?
Arnold: Well, we have had some slow down, kind of set-backs, you know with the design we had to slow down and make some changes, and some weather hit us wrong and we dug into some water we didn’t expect. We’re behind schedule, not contractor schedule, just our hopes and dreams that we would be fully into by June 1, I’m not sure that is going to happen. We talked about it, and you reflected on it at lunch, change has been what we have been about for over one hundred years. This is just one more change.
Matt: Ascension’s great gift to us is in recognizing, not just change, but our differences, you know, historical context and the passing of time. That is so invaluable for us when we can stop and examine the change around us, but often we don’t, but it’s why we’re here talking today.
Arnold: Yeah, we don’t. The part that, on the personal side, this is a very thin place for me, spiritually, if there’s any place that I’m going to feel Valerie Ann’s presence, or Lane Barton’s, or Rustin’s, it’s going to be here; not to do with the chapel or the library, but just generically, this place. We have had so much testimony through the years, by non-church people, that come her for one function or another, that the place is different. I will share two stories with you. There’s a document around this, the mid-90’s where we gathered some survey to look at some plans, and we invited John Kyle and others in from Portland architect, so on and so forth, and they had not been here before. We had good representatives from around the diocese, good discussions, and their feedback was we’ll do some building design, we’ll do whatever, but recognize that what you have is a unique place and you need to recognize that for whatever you plan. In later years, when I was superintendent here, there was a superintendent from Spray, Oregon who would not allow his kids to come to an annual small school leadership conference held here because he was so structured about not mixing church with school. At that time, we started something, basketball season exchanges where we traveled and stay at home or whatever we could do to cut down two rounds trips to places like Jordan Valley or Spray or whatever, and his kids just came home twisting his arm to go to this leadership conference. Finally, he came in and brought eight or ten kids, had a great weekend. The next superintendent’s meeting, we were in Ontario, at the Sizzler. I walked into that meeting room, and he was already there; walked the distance from here over to those doors, shook my hand, didn’t say hello or anything else, and he said, I can’t believe a place can make a difference in how my kids behave. We’ve had kid testimony the same, had a little kid from Bend a few years ago who was here through that MET program that supplies scholarship money for non-church kids. He was a sixth or seventh grader who had had trouble in the past. After two or three days, a counselor noted that he hadn’t unpacked his suitcase yet, and she asked him why he hadn’t unpacked his suitcase yet. He said, because any time I go someplace they send me home, and she said well, you don’t have to worry about that here. The place piece has been a great influence on me.
Matt: This is a very spiritual place. I think about how this place has progressed in the early years, first with the French property, then the Paddock years when it went into disarray, and the Remington years which rejuvenated the spirit of Ascension, and now we’re approaching the one-hundred-year anniversary of that first camp in 1924. Through it all, Ascension has only continued to grow and shape the lives of all who encountered it.
Arnold: Well, as I reflect, whether it was Remington, or remember Clarence Kopp, or the staff people we had here, I and the role that Louis Perkins played, I just feel strongly that there is a spiritual call to the right people at the right time. Regardless of their i.e. individual time-oriented effectiveness of not, they are a part of the sequence that got us where we are. Part of what I tried to be involved in as we planned is that we do things that continually recognize the contribution, short-term, long-term, whatever, that we’re building blocks to get us there. There is no way to deny that each of those people in some way contributed to it.
Matt: Right, how else do you explain the archives project?
Arnold: Yes, that certainly wouldn’t have happened ten years ago.
Matt: I’m hoping that now we can move forward with the archives, find ways to get more people involved in the preservation of their heritage.
Arnold: I’m one of those people that, I just can’t believe the family stuff I let slip away. The hard copy, the stuff wasn’t what connected me to family, it was the spiritual connections. I have a lot of good memories with my Grandfather Arnold or my Grandad Coe, I don’t have any stuff that’s memorabilia, and there are days when I regret that I haven’t given some attention to them; those things were not the important part of those relationships.
Matt: You’re right, sometimes it’s not about the material, I mean the things that make this diocese special like Ascension and the relationships that are built here, you can’t place monetary value on it.
Arnold: My Grandfather Coe, my father’s father, has had a major influence on me, because a piece of his lifestyle that I just keep with being in partnership with my dad and uncle at sixty-five sixty-six, whatever year, they bought him out. He continued to work the counter, it was a feed store, you know servicing customers, I don’t know what financial service they were to him, but he had no hobbies, no church connection, no lodge connection, he went back to his apartment and sat. I just watched that, and as a college student and young married man, I said, I’m not going to do that. It has been a positive, what I thought was a negative for him, has been a positive for me, you know, to getting up and still going when I’m eighty. This has been an opportunity to do that.
Matt: That’s an interesting point about your grandpa, so he didn’t really have a community?
Arnold: Absolutely, what he had had, was a close community actually with the generation older than he, on both my grandmother’s side and on his side. By the time he was at that declining age, that community was all gone, he was the only one left, with a limited number of cousins. He didn’t have a growing, changing, community. My involvement with the church has been with many different folks because the population changes. When your only community is only family, it doesn’t change.
Matt: That’s an interesting thought and kind of leads into my next question, how do we as the Episcopal Diocese of Eastern Oregon, as a community, see ourselves, and how do others see us?
Arnold: I really have no experience with how others see us, I just don’t recall getting into those kinds of conversations. I see us as spiritually healthy, because I see people there for a long time. I see us as spiritually healthy in that across our diocese people from the congregations and parishes are reaching out in their community in lots of ways. I worry about numbers, and I know that others worry about numbers, in terms of holding onto our congregations because that’s where we found our relationships. I think the diocese has strong inter-community relationships. When we travelled in that fundraising campaign a few years ago, to go to Klamath Falls and here about the emotional connections with Ascension or somebody in Burns, I think that our diocese is spiritually strong and strong in relationships from one to the other.
Matt: You have seen membership in the church decline?
Arnold: I have seen membership decline in my lifetime, yes. Places where there were strong congregations with a priest only have numbers to share a priest only. With St. James, the first in our diocese for the entire congregation to become the vestry because they declined so much in numbers, so there are a lot of indicators. Beyond a certain point you would see no ramifications for reduction in size. As long a congregation like Redeemer is able to have a full-time priest and carry on those other functions, it could be the size it is or three-times the size and you wouldn’t really know. Where what you see is visible, you know, Heppner shares with the Lutheran church, you know you see those things. Nyssa and Vale were strong congregations in our diocese for years. Betty Rinehardt was one of the first and strongest voices to go beyond the congregation to bring kids to Ascension, and that was out at Nyssa. It has changed and it is going to change.
Matt: Because we are a rural diocese, with wide open spaces, we have a western spirit and conservative politics, very opposite to the western portion of the state. I grew up in Salem, and so I immediately recognized the cultural differences out here. What makes us so special?
Arnold: I think that what makes us so special is that survivalist’s necessity from the turn of the century that is almost inbred, it’s almost in my blood, you just knew that you picked yourself up by the boot straps and you do it, instead of spending all kinds of time figuring out how or talking about why not. I remember when I was in North Powder, first year I was there, I just surveyed the teachers and how they used the standardized test scores in those years; they didn’t use them, so I threw them out. I didn’t like them any way, they were poorly written those years. The state called me and said if you don’t start using those tests we’re going to cut off your funding. About that time, they changed the test and across Oregon, all of the small schools did better in the math section at the tenth grade level than any of the high schools up and down the valley. The top twenty percent were dominated by Pine Eagle, Dufur, all of those people. The Oregonian called to ask me why we did so well. Well, in my sarcastic attitude, I said, well I sent two kids home that day and it took me half an hour to dig up, because you see we had sixteen kids in the class, and so my point is that’s how the scores can be manipulated and so they’re worthless. Then another call back and some analysis talking with my kids; taking a test and solving a problem wasn’t anything new to them. They had to figure out how to fee their steer, get on the bus at 7 A.M., get ready for basketball practice and a Friday night’s ballgame play basketball and play in the band at the same time. Confronting a test of any kind was not an issue, that was a lifestyle, so they entered a testing room so to speak with a whole different mindset and skill set than the kids at Gresham High School. I was president of state’s superintendent’s division, and so I was involved at that level and drove to Salem a lot for lobbying. People just couldn’t fathom, the Westside-Eastside division over issues is a matter of not knowing, it’s not a matter of anybody being opposed, just not knowing. I had the Portland School District’s superintendent in Baker City at one time because he didn’t understand why we didn’t drive busses to every kid in the district, because that’s what the law says. Basically, I said, because I can’t get there from here.
Matt: Had he ever been here before?
Arnold: He came out, and took a serious look. We had kids that picked up at Durkee. The family had already brought them twelve miles on a gravel road in a pickup to get to the school bus. As the rest of our church looks at Eastern Oregon, nationally as the Episcopal Church looks at us and the fourteen and fifteen other dioceses with the similar distance of populations, they haven’t got a clue. To know that it’s hours between congregations, I used to have marketing and tech people come out to travel with me when I worked out of Portland or Los Angeles from the New York office and not understand why in the L.A. Basin I can’t have six appointments in one day. It’s two and a half hours between destinations, and so that impedes our relationship with The Episcopal Church. Nedi’s done great work to mend some of that.
Matt: So much space, there’s a vastness here, what is the diocese, like 70,000 square miles?
Arnold: Something like that.
Matt: You’re right, I think that people outside the diocese don’t really know what it’s like to be a small diocese in large territory.
Arnold: Well, back to the basis of your question, I think that is our strength. That spirit, it’s the inherited boot-strap, we’re going to get it done, survival, you know, whatever it takes.
Matt: What is your hope for the future of Ascension and for the future of this diocese?
Arnold: My hope for Ascension School is that it remains a vital part of the diocese, that it’s ministry be continually broader, whether that’s reaching different parts of our population within our diocese or bringing people in. I don’t say that, well, I don’t mean Episcopal, whatever, you know, I think we have an opportunity and an obligation for the ministry here to be more inclusive. My hope is that what I contribute will facilitate that happening.
Matt: Right, and we see all of the dedication, hard work, and sacrifices from the people who visited or worked at Ascension, yourself included. Well, that was my final question, I thank you so much for meeting with me.
Arnold: You’re welcome.
End of the interview.