Book #56: "Praise to the Man"

When I close my eyes and picture the summers of my childhood, I have a lot of memories: watching "Petticoat Junction" and "The Beverly Hillbillies" on TV in the mornings; endless games of hide-and-seek in the warm nighttime; trips to Wild Waters. But what I remember best was all the time we spent at the Little League baseball fields.

I mentioned before that I have six siblings: four brothers and two sisters. With varying degrees of enthusiasm, we all played baseball or softball (seven years, in my case; the Jukebox played one year of T-ball.) My mother also served several years as the Little League president, so the majority of our spring and summer nights were spent at the ball fields or in the car on the way there.

This was in the late eighties and early nineties, when legendary radio host Paul Harvey in his broadcasting heyday. In his most famous segment, Harvey would tell a story with a revealing fact (usually a famous person's name or a date in history) saved for the penultimate sentence. He would then conclude his tale with this trademark phrase: "And now you know...the rest of the story."

In this book, Larry Barkdull takes a Paul Harveyian approach to the story of the title hymn. Based on the experiences of W.W. Phelps, I think the subtitle ("a story of uncommon friendship") says it all. If your only experience with this hymn is singing it in church (and wondering why most organists persist in playing it a snail's pace), you need to read this book.

Author: Larry Barkdull

Potentially objectionable content: Incidents from Church history include some violence and other unsettling things.