Suddenly Cam felt a strong hand grasp his hair and tug him towards the surface. He saw sunlight, and his mind told him it was okay to take a deep breath. Cam coughed and spluttered as he did so.
“He’s here. I think he’s okay,” Cam heard his oldest cousin yell. Then Cam crawled up the bank and vomited.
For a long time, Cam lay in the sun at the edge of the canal. The thought of nearly drowning took a little adjusting to. Until now he’d never thought much about dying, but only moments ago it had been a real possibility. Cam decided not to go back in the water that day and instead walked back to his aunt’s house. As he walked, thoughts about living and dying tumbled around in his head. The rest of the visit in Fresno passed uneventfully. Cam confessed to the others that he could not swim, and he never tried to go out over his head again.
The experience made Cam feel older and wiser. It also changed the way he thought about school. Until then he had coasted along, not really caring whether he got A’s, B’s, or even C’s on his report card. However, when he went back to school that fall, Cameron Townsend had a goal. He was going to do his best and become a schoolteacher. He studied hard and came out at the top of his class.
Studying hard often wasn’t enough in 1910. Many children had to drop out of school after eighth grade and get a job. It looked like Cam would be one of them. His parents did all they could to pay the family’s bills, but they struggled desperately just to make ends meet. Finally Cam decided it was his duty to start earning a wage to help out the family. His sisters, though, would not hear of it. Lula, who was planning to marry that summer, insisted on putting the wedding off a year so that she could keep working as a secretary and give most of her income to her parents, freeing Cam to go on to ninth grade.
Lula’s fiancé was not happy about the arrangement. He could not see any reason why a fourteen-year-old boy should still be attending school and why Cam’s older sister felt obliged to pay for him to go. When he could not change Lula’s mind about helping support her family, he broke off the engagement.
Before Cam started ninth grade, Lula was offered a better job in Santa Ana, and so over the summer, the whole family moved to a farm nearby. In Santa Ana Cam enrolled in ninth grade and continued to work very hard at his studies. He also began attending a local Methodist Sunday school. His teacher, Eugene Griset, wasted no time in visiting his newly arrived student. Then his visits became more frequent; he even began visiting when Cam was out.
Something was going on, which Cam soon figured out. Eugene might have said he was coming to visit Cam, but the person he really hoped to see was Lula! Soon Eugene and Lula began dating, and at the end of Cam’s ninth year of school, the two were married. Once again the family moved, this time to Clearwater, where Cam enrolled at Compton High. Cam’s father was in a slightly better financial position now, so Cam was able to attend Compton High from tenth through twelfth grade.
Even while attending school, Cam tried hard to make money whenever he could. He got a job hauling a group of other students who also lived in outlying areas to school in a wagon. He was responsible for driving the wagon in all weather, and he was paid seventy dollars a month from the school board for doing so. It sounded like an enormous amount of money until Cam discovered he had to feed and house the horses out of the money. He gave any money left over at the end of the month to his parents, who were grateful for his hard work.
Cam continued to excel at school. He played the lead in the school production, edited the 1914 yearbook, joined the debating team, and won a tennis championship. His whole family had sacrificed to get him this far, and Cam was determined to make the most of the opportunity. When the grades were added up at the end of his twelfth-grade year, Cam topped the class. However, he couldn’t be the official valedictorian, since he had transferred into the school.
Nineteen fourteen was an uncertain year to graduate from high school. England and France had just declared war on Germany. Europe was in an uproar. Who knew what might lie ahead for the United States?
Cam also was uncertain about his future. He began having serious doubts about becoming a teacher, and by the time he had graduated, he had something else in mind.
Chapter 3
Discharged
Cam Townsend stood at the gate to Occidental College, a Presbyterian liberal arts school in Los Angeles. It was the fall of 1914, and he was about to begin college. Over the summer after graduating from high school, he had worked as a bellhop aboard the S.S. President, a steamship that plied the waters between San Diego and Vancouver, Canada. The job had been an eye-opening experience. The crew had come from many countries and backgrounds, and they laughed at and teased Cam because he was so naive. Cam, though, didn’t mind. He was earning money, money that along with a partial scholarship from the Presbyterian Church would get him through college, as long as he was frugal.
The future laid out for Cam seemed as straight and well-defined as the neatly paved path that led to the main office of Occidental College. At the end of twelfth grade, Cam had made up his mind to be a Presbyterian pastor, and he hadn’t had a single doubt since. Becoming a pastor would involve four years of study at Occidental College before going on to seminary for his final training.
As he swung the gate open and walked up the path, Cam recalled how pleased his family had been at the news. His sisters had all agreed to give a little extra money to support their parents so that Cam could be free to study without worrying about their welfare.
Everything went much as planned at Occidental College. During his first year, Cam took general courses and Spanish. He joined the debating team and made many friends, including Carroll Byram and Elbert Robinson. “Robby,” as Elbert Robinson was called by everyone, was ten years older than Cam and was the head of the college’s branch of the YMCA. He was also a very enthusiastic member of the Student Volunteer Movement (SVM), an organization that challenged the best and brightest students to go overseas, especially to China and India, as missionaries. In fact, the SVM had sent out over ten thousand missionaries, which represented nearly half of all Protestant missionaries in the world. Out of respect, Cam always listened politely when Robby talked about the Student Volunteer Movement, but he wasn’t particularly interested, since he knew his future lay in America.
During the summer following his freshman year, Cam took a job as a magazine salesman. He hated every minute of it. He wished he were back aboard the S.S. President, where he earned a steady paycheck. Somehow, though, he managed to save enough money to go back to college for another year.
Soon after Cam began his second year of study, John R. Mott, the leader of the Student Volunteer Movement, came to speak at Occidental College. Of course, Robby invited Cam to go along and hear him. Cam accepted the invitation, reasoning that since he was going to be a pastor it was his job to be informed about what was happening in the rest of the world. Instead of being a spectator, though, Cameron Townsend found himself drawn into the spirit of the gathering.
After the meeting, Cam signed up to become a member of the Student Volunteer Movement, not necessarily as a foreign missionary but as a person who was willing to consider it. To become part of the group, new members had to say why they wished to join. Cam, who normally had no difficulty putting his thoughts into words, was unable to come up with an intelligent answer. All he managed to write was, “I’m not sure why I wish to belong.”
The following day, Robby gave Cam a copy of a book titled Hudson Taylor in the Early Years: The Growth of a Work of God. Cam read the book from cover to cover and decided that if he ever wanted to be a missionary, he would want to be like Hudson Taylor. Hudson Taylor had put aside his own culture to dress and live like the Chinese people he was trying to reach with the gospel.
When Cam told the family he was willing to consider being involved in foreign missions, they were not at all happy. Cam’s mother’s eyes filled with tears. “Aren’t there enough challenges right here in America for you, son?” she asked.
Cam did not know how to answer her. Besides, the whole question of his future had become moot. It was 1916 and the United States was gearing up to enter the First World War. President Woodrow Wilson was trying his hardest to keep the United States from becoming involved in European affairs, but most people, including Cam, felt it was inevitable that the country would eventually be drawn into the war.
As the prospect of involvement in the war grew, Cam and his friend Carroll Byram decided the smartest thing to do was join the military before they were drafted. By doing so, they would have some choice as to who would train them and what they would do. Both men chose to join the National Guard. Carroll Byram was particularly interested in the engineering training the National Guard offered, and although Cam was not drawn to engineering, he thought the two of them should stick together.
While he waited to see what would happen with the war in Europe, Cam moved in with his parents at the small house and plot of land they had rented nearby. Money was tight during his third year at college, and living back at home with his parents was a way he could conserve the few dollars he had left. In his spare time, Cam helped his father plant and harvest barley as well as harvest the wild oats that grew on the vacant land next door.
Will and Molly Townsend had not yet adjusted to the idea that their oldest son might choose to become a missionary over being a pastor in the United States. As a result, Cam found himself writing many notes to his father trying to explain the vague feeling he had that he should be prepared to go as a missionary if need be. Because of his father’s deafness, notes were the best way for Cam to explain his feelings. However, after each note, his father kept pushing for details. Because Cam had no specific details, just a vague feeling, in the end he wrote his father a note saying, “The greater need is where the greatest darkness is.” His father nodded in understanding. He had ended every prayer Cam could remember with the same words: “May the knowledge of the Lord cover the earth as the waters cover the sea.” He now knew that his son wanted a tiny part in making that prayer become a reality. Cam was relieved that at last his father understood his interest in becoming a missionary.
Not long afterwards, in January 1917, Cam heard of an interesting opportunity that would test his commitment to missions. The Bible House of Los Angeles was advertising for people who would sell Bibles in remote tribal areas in Central and South America. Since Cam thought he might like to do that the following summer, he replied to the advertisement. Within a week he received a letter telling him he had been accepted as a Bible salesman in Guatemala. Cam had no idea where Guatemala was, so he pored over an old map until he found it. Guatemala turned out to be a small country located right next to Mexico at the top of Central America. Cam stared at the map for a long time, trying to imagine what it would be like in Guatemala.
Three months later, in April 1917, his plan to go to Guatemala didn’t seem to matter. The United States had finally entered the war in Europe, and it would be only a matter of time before Cam and Carroll Byram were called up and sent off to fight. Given this, it was quite unexpected when Mr. Smith, director of the Bible House of Los Angeles, contacted Cam to tell him a Miss Stella Zimmerman wanted to meet him. Stella was a missionary from Guatemala who was visiting the Los Angeles area.
“There’s no point,” Cam told Mr. Smith politely. “I just heard from my commander, and we are all going to be shipped off to France soon.”
