Several years before, Al Johnson, the retired president of National Life Insurance Company, had invited Cam and Elvira to stay at his home in Hollywood whenever they needed a break. By November 1944, Cam had gathered all the material he needed to begin writing the biography of President Cárdenas. He decided to take Al up on his offer, as it seemed the perfect place to get away and write.
Cam was right. The house in Hollywood was a perfect place to write. All was going well until the evening of December 23, 1944. Cam had just climbed into bed when Elvira began clutching her chest. “There’s no air,” she gasped, ripping back the sheets and groping her way to the window.
Cam rushed after Elvira. As he reached her, she collapsed into his arms. He carried her back to bed and called for Al to help him. Elvira lay still all night, gasping for every breath she took. The doctor came, but there was nothing he could do except suggest that Cam keep her as comfortable as possible. And that is what Cam did. He sat by the bed holding his wife’s hand and praying with her hour after hour. Finally, on Christmas Eve, Elvira’s breathing became shallower, until she stopped breathing altogether.
Cam sat stunned. He had seen Elvira near death so many times before, but somehow she had always managed to pull herself back from the brink. This time there was no coming back. Fifty-two-year-old Elvira Townsend was dead. Half an hour later, Al gently led Cam from the room as he struggled to come to terms with his wife’s death.
Al Johnson generously paid for a large funeral that was held in nearby Glendale, California. Cam was too broken-hearted to trust himself to speak at the funeral, so he wrote a short piece for his friend Dawson Trotman to read during the service. It began: “God gave Elvira as a love gift to the people of Latin America and to us. He used her by His power and now He has taken His handiwork to Himself. The task she served, however, remains, and we remain.”
Elvira Townsend’s gravesite was not like any other. Rather than have people give the traditional flowers, Cam had asked them to purchase Spanish New Testaments for distribution in Mexico and Guatemala. Stacked neatly around Elvira’s grave were thousands of New Testaments that Cam would personally see were put to good use in Latin America.
Following Elvira’s death, Cam threw himself into planning SIL’s new translation work in Peru. He visited the country, flying over the Andes Mountains and into the mighty Amazon Basin, where he met with the few missionaries dotted along the streams and tributaries that eventually flowed into the largest river on earth. Cam was greatly challenged by the work that needed to be done in Peru. Many of the Indian tribes had little or no contact with the outside world. Their lives were shrouded in witch doctor curses and revenge killings.
The more time Cam spent in the Amazon jungle, the more he prayed for two things: medical people to work alongside the translators, and airplanes and pilots to quickly and safely transport the missionaries in and out of the jungle. The alternative to flying was days, even weeks, of tedious hiking, often into areas without the slightest hint of a trail.
Not too long after Elvira’s death, Cam decided to head back to the United States via Mexico. He planned to speak in churches about SIL’s needs in Peru and to look for airplanes, along with pilots and doctors who could form a core team of workers in Peru.
While in Mexico, Cam visited Tetelcingo, as he always tried to do when he was visiting the country. He had so many friends there, and the Indians were anxious to comfort him after hearing of Elvira’s death. Cam’s spirits were buoyed by what he saw. Several SIL families were now living there, along with Elaine Miekle, a tall, blue-eyed teacher from Chicago who was SIL’s first support worker. Elaine’s job was to teach the three school-aged children of the Wycliffe translators. Cam liked Elaine immediately and soon learned how overqualified she was for the job. Before joining Wycliffe, Elaine had been the supervisor of special education for over three hundred schools in Chicago. At twenty-six, she had been the youngest supervisor ever appointed to the school district. Cam was impressed at the way she had given it all up to come and teach three students in a makeshift hut with a leaky roof. Cam and Elaine became good friends, and when Cam had to leave for the United States, they agreed to write to each other.
Back in Los Angeles, Cam visited Dawson Trotman at his office. Dawson Trotman was the founder of the Navigators, an organization that reached out with the gospel to young people in the military. During their conversation, Cam learned that until just a few days before, a fledgling ministry called CAMF (Christian Airmen’s Missionary Fellowship) had been sharing a corner of Dawson’s office. Since the Navigators had needed the office space back, Betty Greene, the cofounder of the group, had moved to a new office downtown.
Cam could hardly believe what he was hearing. One of the reasons he was back in the United States was to recruit pilots for the new SIL work in Peru, and here he was hearing about an entire organization of Christian pilots. Cam plied Dawson with all sorts of questions about Betty Greene and her organization. He soon learned that Betty had been a member of the WASP, the Women Airforce Service Pilots. The WASPs didn’t fly combat missions, but they played an important role in ferrying airplanes to their destinations and flying planes used in war practice. Now that the war was in its final stages, the WASP was being disbanded, and Betty had taken up the challenge of becoming the first full-time member of CAMF. The goal of the organization was to provide airplanes and pilots to help missionaries do their work faster and more safely. It was exactly the same goal as Cam’s! Apparently, Betty Greene had been swamped by hundreds of letters a month from men who had been trained as pilots and aircraft mechanics for the war and were now wondering whether their new skills could be put to use in Christian service once the war was over. Of course, the one problem the new organization had was that it didn’t have any airplanes for these pilots to fly.
Cam very much wanted to meet Betty Greene and tell her about SIL’s plans to use airplanes to transport missionaries in Peru, but right then he had to travel across the country to fulfill some speaking obligations. He made a note to tell Will Nyman to contact Betty and set up a meeting between her and Cam in the near future.
Cam had a feeling things were going to work out so that the two organizations could work together. In the meantime, there was something he could do to help CAMF. He placed a phone call to Pastor Erickson, a pastor in Chicago and supporter of the work of SIL. “I think I have a pilot,” he said. “All she needs is an airplane to fly. Would your church be able to raise $2,500 to help buy one?”
Chapter 17
Jungle Camp
Cam stood at the train station in Chicago stretching his neck for a glimpse of Elaine Miekle. He hoped he’d done the right thing coming to meet her. It had been a spur-of-the-moment decision. He had been at Briercrest Bible College looking in on the Canadian Camp Wycliffe when he received the message that Elaine’s grandmother had died and Elaine was on her way back to Chicago for the funeral. Cam’s first thought had been to phone Elaine and tell her how sorry he was at the news, but then he remembered that he had asked Pastor Erickson to ask his church to help buy an airplane for Peru. Suddenly it had occurred to him that he could take the train to Chicago and visit both Elaine Miekle and Pastor Erickson in one trip.
A minute later, Cam spotted Elaine’s curly hair through the jostling crowd. He waved enthusiastically, and when Elaine saw him, she waved back. Soon Cam was being introduced to Elaine’s father. He was taken aback by Mr. Miekle. Cam was forty-nine years old, and Mr. Miekle was only ten years older than he was. Cam began wondering what Mr. Miekle would think if he knew Cam was interested in his thirty-year-old daughter. Such thoughts were soon forgotten, however, as Elaine and Cam were whisked off by car through the streets of Chicago. They had so much to tell each other. Cam wanted to know all about the work in Tetelcingo, and Elaine was excited to hear how he may have found his first pilot. She was also happy to hear that Dr. Ken Altig, a medical doctor and Camp Wycliffe graduate, was seriously considering joining the team for Peru.
The days passed quickly. Cam divided his time between Pastor Erickson and his Gospel Tabernacle congregation, and Elaine Miekle and her family. Cam and Elaine enjoyed every minute they spent together, and by the time Elaine was ready to return to Mexico, the two of them were in love. Cam wasted no time in asking Mr. Miekle if he could marry Elaine. Mr. Miekle agreed heartily, as long as that was what Elaine wanted. It was, and the two parted promising to write to each other every day until Cam had finished his work in the United States and could return to Mexico.
Cam had a lot to do. He had kept in touch with Ken Pike, who was running Camp Wycliffe at the University of Oklahoma. Ken reported that seventeen men and six women, all of them single, had signed up to go to Peru. The number greatly pleased Cam. World War II had ended with Japan’s formal surrender aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay on September 2, 1945, and Cam expected an upsurge in recruits as young Christian service men and women looked for new challenges. Indeed, Cam had already decided that these new recruits would need extra training in jungle survival and had set about planning a jungle camp in Mexico.
On his way back to Mexico in September 1945 to prepare the site for the jungle camp, Cam stopped in Los Angeles to visit Dawson Trotman. He told Dawson how Will Nyman had been in touch with CAMF and how the group was very interested in providing pilots and airplanes to meet the needs of SIL translators. Indeed, CAMF had located a Waco biplane for sale that would be perfect for the job. The owner wanted five thousand dollars for it, and through the generosity of Pastor Erickson’s congregation, Wycliffe Bible Translators had been able to give half the money toward the purchase of the plane. It was hoped that the plane would soon be overhauled and then flown to Mexico, where it would be based. Cam also told Dawson about Ken Altig’s decision to go to Peru and that Elaine had said yes to his marriage proposal.
Everything was in place when the twenty-three-member team of translators bound for Peru arrived at the jungle camp near Tuxtla, the capital of the state of Chiapas in southern Mexico. Al Johnson, Cam’s old friend, had generously chartered an airplane to carry the SIL workers to the site, since the Waco biplane was not yet ready. The three-month camp was unlike anything the young Americans had ever experienced. It was one long test of survival. The students paddled heavily laden canoes through white-water rapids, hiked over rough mountain passes, hunted for food, constructed makeshift huts without tools, and learned how to treat snakebites and use penicillin, the newest drug on the market. And, of course, they did all this while continuing with their linguistics studies.
At the end of three months, all twenty-three students were ready and eager to begin work in Peru. Cam was eager to get to Peru, too—he just had a wedding to plan first. Originally, Cam had decided that he and Elaine should have an engagement of three years. He planned to wait until the work in Peru was well under way, but his friends urged him not to wait. They pointed out that he and Elaine were obviously a happy couple and there seemed no point in delaying the wedding. Elaine would fit in as easily in Peru as she had in Mexico.
Cam asked Lázaro Cárdenas, the now-retired president of Mexico, to be his best man, and Elaine asked Amalia Cárdenas to be her matron of honor. The Cárdenases gladly agreed and insisted that the wedding be held at their beautiful home on the shores of Lake Pátzcuaro, about a ten-hour drive west of Mexico City. Cam kept the guest list small, or as small as he could, but because of his work with government officials, many important people had to be invited. The wedding was held on April 4, 1946, and the ceremony and reception went off without a hitch, complete with an orchestra, a wedding gift from the Cárdenases.
