I love reading books and articles about things I know little or nothing about. In this vein, I got a kick out of turning through a restaurant management magazine I pick up in a waiting room, one that featured a piece on “plate coverage.” I learned that the average diners don’t want blank places around their entrés, so it helps to slice the meat thinner for more cuts to spread out. Also parsley provides colorful, visual fill. And several times back in the day, I encouraged my students to read Sports Illustratedto improve their writing, noting that this magazine could engage and hold my attention on matters of no interest to me before reading about them. For instance, they could feature a report on a curling team on a Dakotan Indian reservation, and I’d want to move up there, buy a fan jacket, and make all their home games. Good writing does that.

But then there are items I turn to because I’m already familiar with and appreciative of the subject at hand. It’s the sort of impulse that drives me to buy a copy of The Tennesseanto see what they have to say about the Titans game I watched from beginning to end. I want to relive the highlights, fill in gaps in my understanding, and get their take on what the results portend for the team’s future. 

This particular Browsings collection fits the latter category, in that I was already fairly well up on the work of the people in question and appreciated them in some measure. So the experience came first, the book second.

The Boys, by Ron Howard and Clint Howard. I couldn’t resist picking this book up at one of my favorite bookstores, Costco. On the cover, I spied the beloved “Opie” (Ron Howard in his Andy Griffithdays) walking between his less-famous-actor family members, his father (Rance) and brother (Clint). Actually, I was familiar with Clint’s work, e.g., as an engineer at an Apollo 13control console and as a goofy guy in the stands in The Waterboy. The book was a great read, with lots of  behind the scenes stuff, e.g., the need for an off-camera adult to throw the rock into the pond in the whistling-sound-track opening with the fishing poles, since little Ron couldn’t make the distance; the regret expressed to Ron’s mom by actresses Maureen Stapleton, Jessica Tandy, and Gwen Verdon—the three in Ron’s third directed film, Cocoon—that, unlike her, they hadn’t spent more time with their children; the “rural purge” around 1970 that took out such shows as Green Acres, Petticoat Junction, and Beverly Hillbillies, replacing them with more socially provocative programs like All in the Familyand M*A*S*H. It goes on and on.

I was particularly intrigued by his courtship of Cheryl Alley:

Cheryl’s father, Charles, was a Louisiana native who looked and dressed like the aerospace-era scientist he was: crew cut, black horn-rimmed glasses, gray slacks, and a short-sleeved dress shirt with a pen protector in his front pocket . . . Cheryl was raised in a strict Southern Baptist household, and she wouldn’t have gone out with a guy who proposed seeing a PG movie on the first date or, God, forbid, wanted to sneak into a rated-R picture . . . For starters, I pretended that I had found religion. We were not churchgoers in our household. But Cheryl went with her dad every Sunday and was, in those days, pretty pious and hardcore—sufficiently so that she was genuinely a little worried about my soul. So I told my parents that I had become interested in Cheryl’s Southern Baptist faith and wanted to go to church with her. They couldn’t object to their boy going to church, could they?

Green Shoot from Gum Log, by Harriet Grant Hall—(The cover doesn’t appear with the others because I’ve misplaced the book in my basement/garage library, and, besides, unlike the others, it has a plain cover, green in this case.) From 1954 till his retirement circa 1975, my father, Raymond Arthur Coppenger (BA, Mercer; MDiv, SBTS; PhD, Edinburgh) taught at Ouachita Baptist University (“College” when he began). He came there from professorial posts at Belmont, Carson-Newman, and Cumberland, all Baptist colleges in Tennessee. (Cumberland was Baptist in the early 1950s, but went non-denominational when Tennessee Baptists acquired Ward-Belmont and dropped the “Ward”; the law school moved to Howard (now Samford) in Birmingham.) 

This biographical book was written by his daughter Harriet, who married Andrew Hall, longtime pastor of FBC Fayetteville, AR. When we arrived 1954 (as I was just entering the first grade), the recently-dedicated J. R. Grant Hall, honoring Harriet’s father, stood at the center of campus as the administration building. (That’s why you get the “Grant Hall” echo, with one a married daughter, the other a building.) Her brother, Daniel, was a distinguished professor at Vanderbilt, where, as a political scientist, he designed the Metro form of government, in which Nashville and Davidson Country are melded. And, in my college years, to my good fortune, he came as president of Ouachita. (And I’m sure he was instrumental in my getting a full ride in the philosophy doctoral program at VU.)

Their daddy was a remarkable man, serving as president of Ouachita 1934-1949, pulling it from the brink of closure during the Depression, shepherding it through WWII, bolstering finances, building buildings, and raising the school’s academic and denominational standing. Before reading this book, I had no idea that he’d previously served as president of Arkansas Tech, with a masters degree from the University of Chicago, graduate study at Columbia University, the PhD from Peabody, and teaching experience both at Marshall College (now University, in WV) and the University of Arkansas. And he’d been a school superintendent in Greenwood, Arkansas.

He was a bit of a prankster, and his sense of humor would show through regularly. For instance, when he was sending travel dispatches back from Europe to the Arkansas Democrat, he wrote from Holland, “I have seen more women working on farms, driving trucks, etc., today than I’ve seen in many a day. I was glad for my wife to see them working.” And he had a talk entitled, “How to Worry Scientifically,” with 12 pieces of advice, including #7: “Set a time limit. If you must go beyond it, give yourself credit for time and-a-half”; and #11: “Two times never to worry: (a) when you can help the situation; (b) when you cannot.” He concluded with #12: “Never worry alone. Take it to the Lord (see Prov. 24:19; Phil 4:6).” 

It’s clear that Dr. Grant took a lot to the Lord, and the Lord blessed him and those around him wonderfully.

My Story: Thanks a Lot Mr Kibblewhite, by Roger Daltrey—It’s a cliché, but a true one nonetheless: Rock was “the soundtrack of my youth.” Graduating from high school in 1966 and college in 1970. These were the years when every week or so, we’d get a new, fine offering from the Beatles, Stones, Mamas and Papas, Four Tops, Simon & Garfunkle, The Temptations, The Kinks,  the Jackson Five, Creedence Clearwater Revival, The Hollies, Steely Dan, Wilson Pickett, Aretha Franklin, and The Who, with Roger’s Daltrey’s stuttering lyrics in “My Generation” (“ . . . just because we g-g-get around. . .”)

When, a few years back, Sharon and I heard he was coming to Nashville to perform, we bought tickets to join the crowd on the lawn (the cheap seats) at Nashville’s Ascend Amphitheater on the banks of the Cumberland River. Roger Daltrey, a septuagenarian like myself, but four years older, was performing songs from the “rock opera” Tommy, the vehicle for such classics as “Pinball Wizard” and “See Me. Feel Me. Touch Me. Heal Me.” A selection of musicians from the Nashville Symphony backed him up, and it was a fine evening.

Then, this summer, when we landed in Seattle as part of a AMTRAK excursion, celebrating our 50thwedding anniversary, we made our way up to the Space Needle and to the nearby Museum of Pop Culture, a Frank Gehry-designed building. There, in the bookstore, I found Daltrey’s autobiography. I didn’t need a nudge to buy it, and then I read it cover to cover.

First, the subtitle references the pronouncement of Daltrey’s school headmaster on the then-fifteen-year-old boy (a handful, indeed) he was expelling: “We can’t control you, Daltrey. You’re out. You’ll never make anything of your life, Daltrey.” Well, he made something of it, and the story is fascinating, including an account of how he fashioned his first guitar. And he goes on to say that Little Richard’s song, “Tutti Fruitti,” is “a good example of how rock and roll got sex past the censors; that, though he was an “uncaring bastard” for walking out on his first wife and child at age twenty, he’s not sorry he did it, because it was necessary for his career; that, at a point, for him, “Rock and roll had become all about taking as many drugs as possible until you died”; that Brits have bad teeth because NHS dentists have a bad incentive system (more fillings and extractions, more pay); that he makes room for “open marriage,” saying “sexual infidelity should never be a reason for divorce”; that talking to his bandmate, Pete Townshend (“like a scorpion with a warm heart”) “could be like walking through a minefield wearing a pair of clown shoes”; that he started his signature microphone twirling because he “didn’t know what to do with [his] hands during the solos”; that “the beauty of rock . . . [is] so irreverent, you can make a show out of almost anything, even an unmitigated disaster . . .” (as when drummer Keith Moon passed out on stage); that the tax rate at the height of “socialist Britain” in 1975 (“top earners paying 98 percent”) was driving many bands into exile; that in 2012, billions watched the band close the Summer Olympics; and that his religious confession is “I’m agnostic, bordering on atheist. The whole God thing seems to me to have caused most of humanity’s problems.”

Still and all, I’m glad I bought a ticket to that riverside performance of Tommy. And I stop what I’m doing when the manic keyboard intro to “Baba O’Riley” kicks in over whatever sound system might be serving the coffee shop I’m visiting, even though the words indulge a “teenage wasteland.” It’s stirring music, the sort of thing that seriously lost people can fashion and deliver. Man, I wish Daltrey would find the Lord before he passes. He’s getting on toward 80, and he needs to get to studying for finals.

Ron Dunn: His Life and Mission, by Ron Owens—Bible teacher/evangelist was one of my favorites through the years. He died at 64 in 2001 of pulmonary fibrosis, and musician/teacher Ron Owens penned his bio. (I’ve had the privilege of crossing paths not only with Ron, but also with the Owens—Ron and Patricia—through the years.) The first time I heard Ron was at an Arkansas Baptist gathering in Little Rock, where he said that heaven will be so wonderful that gold will just be asphalt. And then, on another occasion, he spoke of his version of the “Billy Graham/Pence Rule,” whereby you took care to avoid temptation. In this instance, he said that when he was on the road, he booked adjoining rooms with an associate and that he left the door open so that his life would be an open book to colleagues in ministry. Then, the last time I met him, he was our guest at Midwestern Baptist Theological Seminary, to which I’d invited him for chapel. The night before, we took in a Royals-Yankees game at Kauffman Stadium. He was a big fan of Yankee centerfielder Bernie Williams, and he wondered if I could get him a Yankee cap that night. Unfortunately, the Royals vendors had hearts of stone, and none was available.

The big surprise I had in reading the book was the dire physical maladies he faced. The MLB game we shared came in the fall of 1999. I had no idea that less than two years later, he would be gone. And I’m most grateful to Ron Owens for telling the story of the remarkable man’s life. In it, I learned of the 1970s revival of MacArthur Boulevard Baptist Church, during which there were 340 professions of faith in the first year; of a forlorn SMU student, who upon hearing that Christ has paid for her sins on the cross, said “But, that’s not fair!” (to which Ron replied, “I know it. That’s love”); that when he and his wife Kaye returned from the graveside service for their son Ronnie, who committed suicide in 1975, they received a call from longtime missionary to China, Bertha Smith, who sang all seven verses of “How Firm a Foundation”; of his invitation to preach at the Keswick Convention in England’s Lake District.

Keswick’s five sequential emphases were: “(1) the exceeding sinfulness of sin, (2) cleansing and renewal, (3) full surrender/the lordship of Christ, (4) fullness of the Holy Spirit, climaxing with (5) sacrifice and service, or missions.”  And that is the message that Ron preached wherever he went, including to my ears, for which I thank God.