THE CHURCH OF ST

THE CHURCH OF ST. ANDREW THE APOSTLE, ROCKY HILL, CT

How it came to be…..

In the beginning The Church of St. Andrew the Apostle was a group of eleven men and women who met on April 6, 1960, with the Reverend Edward H. Cook, General Secretary for Mission in the Diocese of Connecticut, because they wanted to have an Episcopal church in Rocky Hill. Prior to that evening, Percy Aldridge, Richard and Lee Bond, John and Lilla Burke, Hale Colton, Richard and Mary Jane Shively, Calvin and Barbara Vinal, and Augustus Wadlow had been going each Sunday to Episcopal churches in neighboring towns and each knew several other Episcopalians who were doing the same thing.They all believed that it was time to “continue in the Apostles' teaching and fellowship, in the breaking of bread, and in the prayers” closer to home, so when Father Cook rang their doorbells in March, 1960, to ask his three basic questions (Would you like to see an Episcopal church in Rocky Hill? Can you suggest other people who would be interested? Will you serve on a committee to get it going?), they all said, “yes.” And as Lilla Burke later said: “When Father Cook rang my doorbell that March Saturday in 1960 and asked if I’d like to see an Episcopal church in town, I never dreamed what was in it for me!” None of that group of eleven did.

The group met with Father Cook four times that April (at the Vinals’, the Shivelys’, the Aldridges', and the Burkes’-- in that order) adding interested people each time. Everyone was caught up in the excitement of creating a new branch of the church family and the joy was infectious. On one occasion Lilla Burke said: “Every morning when I wake up I think of our new church” and she could have been speaking for everyone. Gus Wadlow recalls that the fourth meeting at Burkes’ was standing room only. Obviously the time had come to “hire a hall.”

Hiring a hall had been part of the agenda of the four meetings -- that and the many other “how do we start” questions. Father Cook’s imaginative leadership, Bishop Walter Gray’s interest from the beginning in the Rocky Hill Church, and the committee’s combined experiences and talents all worked together. In the month’s time the group arranged for Sunday worship space in the Myrtle H. Stevens School on Orchard Street, named itself “Grace Church” in honor of a short-lived nineteenth century Episcopal Church in town*, arranged to introduce itself to the town through newspapers, a letter, and a door-to-door canvas; planned the first service and how to prepare for it in a cafeteria; and decided to follow the then prevalent “first Sunday Holy Communion, the rest Morning Prayer” monthly pattern for their liturgical life. They also agreed to hold a regular coffee hour after worship for fellowship as they needed to become a family quickly; to start a choir; to train acolytes as soon as possible; but to wait till fall to organize a church school -- it being so close to the end of the church school year. (A result of the last decision Franci Vinal remembers: “For a number of families that meant a few weeks of going to two churches on Sunday. For Cal and me, that meant that we went to Trinity in Wethersfield where Cal and I were in Sunday school and then raced to Rocky Hill where Mummy and Daddy helped turn the cafeteria into our church.”

(* The name was later changed to The Church of St. Andrew the Apostle at Bishop Gray’s request, an action no one objected to. A church in Rocky Hill had been his idea: he hoped its central location would make it the diocesan gathering place for the Brotherhood of St Andrew as well as a parish needed for diocesan expansion. He pledged his anniversary gift to the committee to help financially in building the church and always found time to meet with any of the committee members.)

The door to door canvas was on Sunday afternoon, May 1. Members of Christ Church Cathedral, Trinity Church in Wethersfield, and the Diocesan Brotherhood of St. Andrew joined the expanded church committee in their effort to cover the whole town. That was a great moment for identifying with the first hearers of the command ”go into the world” and most people felt very like those early Christian “doorbell ringers.” The result—on Sunday May 8, 1960, close to a hundred men, women, and children gathered in the Stevens School cafeteria to start Grace Church, Rocky Hill. Most of them signed the ceramic plate made for the occasion by William and Laura Anderson. As the record shows (bulletin, newspaper clippings), church friends who helped with the canvas joined the new family in worship that day. Canon Clinton Jones brought acolytes from the Cathedral and assisted Father Cook, Barbara Preston brought the girls choir from the Cathedral and played the piano for hymns. Jane Huntoon (St. Jacques) missed that first service because it was her birth day. A month later she was baptized, the church’s first baptism. (The first wedding was two years later in the new building—John and Lilla Burke’s daughter Janet.)

The teaching of the Episcopal Church in the 50’s - in church schools, conferences, sermons, and the like - repeatedly posed the question: “If the building where you worship were to disappear, would your church continue?” The members of that steering committee for Grace Church had been confronted by that question on many occasions. By their second meeting on April 17 at the Shivelys, they had begun to feel the answer: the Church is people bound together to worship the Lord wherever they are in whatever place is available, people pledged to Him and to each other in love to do His work. Grace Church, this original Church of St. Andrew the Apostle, Rocky Hill, was a church long before it had its own building, even before it met for its first formal service. And the people who were part of it at that time knew it and were quick to say so. Exciting as the first service was when it finally happened on May 8, as beautiful as the building on Orchard Street has been from the time it was built and through its expansions, this church came into being when the first members of the family gathered together in the name of Christ and asked His blessing. Lilla Burke: “Mostly I remember the love and close fellowship we felt as we worked together to have our church.” Franci Vinal: “Those years in the school taught us all, even some of us kids, that a church is people not buildings. It was exciting to be part of it all.” Mary Jane Shively: “I remember the love and fellowship in Christ we all shared.”

No one kept a journal for the church so the history of those early years is a patchwork of remembered details set in a background of happiness and hard work and a constant sense of the presence of the Holy Spirit.

Preparing for Worship

In order for a group of Episcopalians to worship, paraphernalia is required -- and an altar guild is needed to assemble the things and see that they are in place when needed. Lilla Burke and Barbara Vinal were the first altar guild, joined during those school years by Betty Brooks, Helen Brownsworth, Mary Jane Shively, and Marge Tavel. The first sacristy was a combination of the teachers’ lavatory at Stevens School and Father Cook’s chaplain’s field case from army days. That case held all the altar furnishings except linens and vases. The first altar was a cafeteria table swathed with a plain linen tablecloth as Laudean frontal. The other furnishings were a small silver cross, candle sticks, chalice, and paten from the chaplain’s kit, a matched pair of small blue glass vases and two vinegar cruets from the Vinal china closet, a fair linen and small linens from the no-longer-used reserves of Trinity Church, Wethersfield. Candles also came from Trinity - candle stubs that were a perfect size for the small candlesticks. Flowers came from church members’ gardens until winter weather forced trips to flower shops. Christmas poinsettias and Easter plants came from William Diehm’s greenhouse on Old Main Street. Altar bread came from St. Margaret’s Covent in Boston, and in those early years port wine came from the Heublein ”company store.” During the first year a brass cross, brass vases, and brass candlesticks supplanted the small silver ones of the chaplain’s kit and enough prayer books and hymnals appeared for everyone- - all from no longer used furnishings of neighboring churches. These things brought with them a sense of permanence. St. Andrew’s first very own liturgical piece was a green olive wood processional cross given by Howard and Leda H umphery now painted red to match the beam over the altar, it is still in use.

Franci Vinal writes: “For us and other early families, church on Sunday began at least an hour ahead of schedule because the fathers were involved in setting up the chairs and creating a church in the cafeteria and the mothers were changing a table into an altar or getting ready for the coffee hour. ‘Setting up’ meant taking down cafeteria tables, putting chairs in rows, distributing prayers books and hymnals (a pair on every other chair) and placing two kneeling benches at the front to separate the sanctuary from the nave. After the service, the work was ‘in reverse’ to restore the school cafeteria to order.” Altar guild members of the time recall preparing for the Eucharist (the first one was on Whitsunday, June 5) in the teachers’ lavatory - and cleansing the vessels and linens afterward in a basin that had to be carried gingerly through the hall so that ALL the water used would be poured on the grass outside the school door. In that first two and a half years of regularly turning the bare cafeteria into worship space everyone experienced the basic lesson of liturgy - that the way things and spaces are used is what makes them holy. For an hour each Sunday the beauty of holiness surrounded the increasing number of people worshiping in the Stevens School cafeteria.

Other Altar Guild Memories From The Early Years

The Eucharistic vessels purchased for the new church building - the large and small silver chalices and patens, the silver breadbox and lavabo, and the crystal cruets—all came from the International Silver Company in Meriden. Lloyd Fenelon, International’s national accounts manager at the time, a business friend of Calvin Vinal, made it possible for the church to use well its combined gifts of money for church silver. Calvin and Barbara met with him in the Meriden showroom and chose the pieces, having been instructed by the Bishop’s Committee of St. Andrew’s to “keep it simple.” Lloyd was generous: his contribution “on paper” should be remembered, as well as the contributions from church members that actually went to International for the vessels.

Gradually new linens were added, several made by needlewomen of the Diocesan Altar Guild, and as money was given for Eucharistic vestments, Claire Huntoon made them. Specific gifts of other ornaments and furnishings are listed in The Book of Remembrance, itself a gift. Each was a welcome addition to the worship life of the church. Among the early ones were the brushed aluminum candlesticks, vases, and missal stand; the pulpit, prayer desks, lectern, and notably the font which was given by the children of the Diocese through their Mite Box Offering and the children of the Hartford Arch-deaconry through their birthday thank offering. And the great wooden cross over the altar given by the mother and father of Mary Schulthess (wife of the vicar), which has been the focal point for worshipers ever since.

All the pews came from a church in Bridgeport that was being dismantled. Several of the men in that early group went to Bridgeport one Saturday with a truck, removed the pews, loaded them, and delivered them to Rocky Hill to a vacant barn on Elm St. owned by Joseph Anulewicz. They were stored there where the men eventually refinished them and installed them in the new building…a tremendous gift of time and energy with a lasting result.

The pall was made by the altar guild working together, meeting once in the parish house to cut it out, and after that in members’ houses to sew. Everyone who worked on it remembers the project. Barbara Vinal remembers the joint trip to Dunn’s in West Hartford Center to buy the material and the important decisions about measurements, purple and red velvet, tassels and braid. By the time the material was wrapped, half the clerks in the store knew what was going on! The altar guild women measured, cut, and sewed as a team in the beginning, but Mary Jane Shively recalls, “Some of us were absolutely rotten sewers, but did strive valiantly. I hope none of my stitches were where they could be seen! I think in due time I was given the job of pinning.” And Lilla Burke remembers sewing on Vinals’ dining room floor and herself “being promoted by unanimous decision to read to the sewers. I sat and detoured the dog around the pall.” Margery Tavel remembers that the names of all the women who worked on that pall were sewn inside. The pall was used for the first time at St. Andrew’s first funeral, that of Gerry Huntoon in 1963.

The sacristy was designed by Barbara Vinal, altar guild directress, and Lewis Wallace, church member who was also master mason and later sacristan of the Trinity College Chapel. Lew’s name is inscribed on the Trinity Chapel wall with those of the rest of the builders, and his likeness is chiseled in two places in the stone work of the chapel and portrayed in stained glass in one of the chapel crypt windows. He was a basic part of the Trinity Chapel, but he made himself a basic part of St. Andrew’s as well. He and Barbara roughed out the plan for their ideal sacristy on the wood sub-flooring of the sanctuary, that being the largest unobstructed flat place close to the intended location of the sacristy. Lew transferred that rough draft to blueprint, refining it here and there with his builder’s know-how, and then built the sacristy himself, every inch. The church has the blueprint. The sacristy was Lew’s gift of himself to the church as it is St. Andrew’s memorial to him. In the early years, to comply with Bishop Gray’s wishes, the sacrament was reserved in the aumbrey in the sacristy - a locked box in the middle back of the vesting table. The sanctuary light hung outside the sacristy door by the organ. The reserved sacrament was moved to its present location by the altar during Bishop Hutchens’ tenure.

Fellowship

Fellowship marked the Church of St. Andrew the Apostle from the beginning. The intense sense of family shared by the members across all age lines was undoubtedly fostered and strengthened by having to be the Church without a building for two and a half years. When someone in the family needed help, someone else in the family was on the spot to give it. People were ready when they were needed with hands to work, ears to listen, shoulders to cry on, arms to hug. And they were ready to laugh with each other, too. What is remarkable is that that sense of family has continued through the years.

Sunday coffee hours began with the first service on May 8. In the school, the coffee and occasionally goodies were at the back of the room behind the chairs. Franci Vinal now writes, after her interim experiences of other churches’ coffee hours, “It must have been hard for people to sneak out of the service and not participate. They had to get friendly.” That was the reasoning of the steering committee: coffee hours promote togetherness, and togetherness is what will build the church.

Several people recall the first church school picnic (really parish picnic) in Mill Woods Park, Wethersfield - with relay races and baseball, too much food because it was semi-pot luck, and a blueberry pie-eating contest which young Jim Shively won. The Shivelys remember "marvelous church suppers with all kinds of great ethnic food from the varied backgrounds of the congregation.” One supper accompanied the first annual meeting at the Grange Hall in January 1961. Another accompanied the Maundy Thursday evening service in the school as members were together at the supper tables before eating their meal - an event unusual and extremely significant to that group at that time, although agape meals today in the era of the 1979 Prayer Book are not at all unusual.

In May 1962 the Hartford Chapter of the Society for the Preservation and Encouragement of Barbershop Quartet Singing in America presented “An Evening of Harmony” at Rocky Hill High School for the benefit of the building fund - thanks to Anthony Bruno, sometime president of the organization and enthusiastic promoter of barbershop quartets and the Church of St. Andrew. It was a gala evening.

The organizations of the greater Church reached into St. Andrew’s and chapters were formed when need or demand arose just as the altar guild had been formed in the very beginning. The first junior altar guild members were Franci Vinal and Linda Rudewicz who needed something to do to be part of liturgy in that time when girls could not be acolytes. They worked with the adult members. When the acolytes’ guild was formed at the start, there were few older boys so some of the younger ones were confirmed earlier than was usual in order to be eligible to serve. Mary Jane Shively recalls one hot summer morning “when Jim as acolyte fainted dead away with a loud thump” and “the trip some of us took with the acolytes to a Maundy Thursday service at Grace Church in Hartford. It was a sung mass with incense and the works. The beautiful service and stripping the altar were so impressive many of us were moved to tears.” George Brownsworth, Franklin Nott, and Calvin Vinal were the first licensed lay readers starting when services were still in the school. In the school, too, Morton Nace, General Secretary for Layman’s Work in the Diocese, installed the first members of St. Andrew’s chapter of the Brotherhood of St. Andrew - Percy Aldridge, George Brownsworth, John Burke, Roland Hall, Ronald Hall, Franklin Nott, and Calvin Vinal. Franci Vinal remembers that Mary Schulthess started a Girls Friendly Society in the early years, and that the age limits of the Young People’s Fellowship were somewhat loose. She also writes: “When I was in junior high school Mr. and Mrs. Shively were our teachers and hosted some neat Halloween parties at their house.”

John Upton was seminary assistant to Father Cook the first year. He traveled from Berkeley Divinity School every Sunday to help the mission in whatever way he could - in worship, teaching, working with young people, visiting. John went home with different families from week to week for Sunday dinner and in time most people knew that he didn’t like eggplant. But Ann Cook, Father Cook’s wife didn’t. On one occasion the Cooks invited John and the Vinals to their home for dinner and Ann served one of her specialties, a delicious eggplant casserole. Nothing was said about eggplant and it wasn’t recognizable in the dish. Everyone ate heartily and John complimented Ann on the casserole and asked for a second helping. The joke was too good to let pass, so finally Calvin told him what he and been eating - but not until he had finished.

Miscellany

When it came time to build the church, the Bishop and the Diocese invited an architect and one of the leading contractors in the Hartford area to put together a set of figures for the building committee. Richard Shively remembers that the estimate “turned out to be way beyond the financial capacity of the church, to say nothing of the budget we had set ourselves. Joe Squillacote was a contractor whose office at that time was just down the hall from me in Newington. So one day I said; ‘Joe, did you ever build a church?’ He said: ‘No—but I’ve built banks and a post office.’ ‘Do you think you could build a church?’ I asked. ‘I can build anything,’ he said. He looked the situation over, talked with Canon Ralph Read, Bishop Gray’s representative, and presented a bid that was so favorable—a good third less than the previous one—that we couldn’t turn it down. So we hired him. Joe took a personal interest in the church. He cared what he was doing and put much of his own labor and love into the job. He always seemed aware that he was building a church. As a result we wound up with a physical facility worth more than what we paid for it, to say nothing of a building that we—and he—could be proud of.”

When the building crew broke ground for the church, the bulldozer unearthed a huge rock. Joe was determined to bury it again to get it out of the sight, but Barbara Vinal was determined to save it “because a church needs to be built on a rock and this one wouldn’t have come to light without a purpose.” Fortunately Gerald Huntoon, who was a daily unofficial supervisor for the building committee, supported her in this altercation and Joe’s bulldozer finally shoved the rock to a spot south of the driveway out of the builders’ way. Sometime later the dinosaur footprints on its surface were identified, St. Andrew’s own bit of Rocky Hill’s pre-historic story. (After the church’s thirty-fifth birthday, the rock was moved to its present significant location beside the front door.) Calvin Vinal planted an evergreen tree from Vinalhaven, Maine, behind the rock and various people planted bulbs and other plants in front of it to create a garden spot. The tree survives.

The clear glass windows of the church building were important to most people from the beginning. A few members, however, occasionally brought up the idea of stained glass. They were effectively overruled each time on the ground that God’s continually changing world outside the building, framed by clear glass, made far lovelier pictures to enhance worship than stained glass windows ever could. The subject persisted, though, and eventually reached the ear of the Reverend Kenneth Cameron, the priest who supplied each summer when Father Schulthess went on vacation. Dr. Cameron, who was for years archivist of the Diocese and a Trinity College English professor, was a commanding homilist and a forthright person. On his next visit to St. Andrew’s, he stopped after moving into the pulpit for his homily and looked out the windows first to the right, then to the left. “How wonderful it is,” he said, “to be inside a church and be able to look outside and see the beauty of God’s world! Some congregations seem to think that stained glass windows are essential in a church and they install them as soon as possible. I do hope you people in this church never do that. You have a treasure in these clear glass window!” On all his successive visits Dr. Cameron invariably found some way to speak of the clear glass windows of St. Andrew’s and of the wisdom of the parish in keeping them.

Parking was not a problem during the time of worship at Stevens School. Cars would usually fit into the school parking lot—with a little spill over along Orchard Street on great occasions. This situation changed when the church moved to the new building. There was no parking lot and cars stretched out along the street sometimes as far as the school to the north and more than a block to the south. One had to arrive for any function early to park in the driveway. The inconvenience to people arriving at and leaving church bothered the Bishop’s Committee (Vestry), to say nothing of the hazard implicit in having so many people walking in the street, especially with children or after dark or in bad weather. Some men were particularly concerned, Calvin Vinal among them. Building a parking lot beside the church became a frequent subject of conversations—how big, how to raise money for it. Calvin died in September, 1964. At his funeral the parking problem was particularly noticeable-as it had already been on other occasions which drew a large number of people to church. As a result, in deference to his concern about the parking and in keeping with his practical approach to life, all the gifts of money made to the church in Calvin’s memory became the base of a fund to build an adequate parking lot next to the parish house.

By the Grace of God, families remember good times in their voyages through life, winds and currents that have held them together and on course through any crosswinds that may have ruffled the waters. So with the family of The Church of St. Andrew the Apostle. All in all the Body of Christ in this place has weathered its journey well for forty-five years. Its heritage of good navigation and solid fellowship is strong, its future on the journey full of promise.

Barbara Vinal Gent