Well, I didn't organize it myself. It had originated much earlier. I was
on the Division committee. But, you see, we have a special staff person
who's responsible for coordinating that plan, but there is a committee
that plans the schools But, the school you went to in Jackson Tennessee
was a regional school. And, in addition to the regional schools - we
have five regional schools, one in every one of the major regions - and
then we have conference schools in every conference. We have . . . how
many conferences? Seventy-three conferences, I believe. In the
conference schools and in the regional schools, [unknown]
if you can go . . . you can't go to very many, because you're just one
person, you see. But when you do go, you have a chance to get to know an
awful lot of women. But, even though I'd never been in a tenth of all
the local . . . no, not a hundredth of all the local societies in the
country, of course, but when I was on the job, I felt I knew them.
Ithink that if your name is familiar to them, then they have a feeling
that they know you. If you happen to see them somewhere, why, it's
great. I was invited to speak at my church here . . . at my church
women's society here in Nashville, Belmont Methodist Church, the other
day. And when I finished, there were about a hundred and fifty women
there, and I'll bet . . . I'll bet fifty women, in one way and another,
said to me, "Well, I've seen your name somewhere, and I'm so glad to get
to meet you." Or something like that, you know. I think all I'm saying
is that in a national structure as
Page 81 big as ours, in
the United Methodist Church, your relation to the local church has to be
through your connectional channels. And, of course, the strength of your
organization is there, because no national staff person has the sense to
make this connection any better, or half as well, even, as a conference
officer could make it. And, see, we . . . the strength of our
organization is in the power of the volunteers. And if we have 36,000
societies that means we have 36,000 presidents. If we have 600
districts, we have 600 district presidents with officers in the
district. There are 73 conferences with 73 conference presidents and all
the conference officers. We have five regions, with a president and the
officers of that region, see. So, you see, if there's any strength at
all in the program that we create, it comes from the fact that you've
got alert, trained volunteers on all the steps of the organization. And
this is one of the reasons why Methodist women work effectively many
times - not always, I'm sorry to say - but many times, more times than
not, on issues that they are asked to work upon, it's because they've
got a channel of communication, you see, step by step. And the most
important is the local, when the news gets home, gets down to the local
church. And I think, really, over the years some very wonderful policies
have been set by the Women's Division. And we've taken action on things
that were . . . that upset the apple cart lots of times. People were
awfully troubled and upset about it. But, in due time, it worked out.
One of the things that I remember, the second year that I was working in
New York, in 1942 . . .