“Oh Kansas land, sweet Kansas land, upon the highest hill I
stand, and look away across the plain, and wonder if it will ever
rain…” So went a song I learned when a small child on
the plains of Western Kansas. My father, LeRoy Melvin Kopp, born
on a large Kansas farm near Fairview, on January 16, 1894, had
brought mother and six children to this rolling prairie, and I
loved it. He was a young minister who felt called by God to work
with these hardy people of the plains. This particular parish was
situated north of a wide place in the road called Gem. The
unpainted parsonage was behind the white church with an
old-fashioned steeple. A vegetable garden and an old pump
separated the decaying house from the church.
Daddy went to Gem because he felt a definite spiritual desire to
help the people there. He never made a move until he “prayed
through.” He was a man who longed to do God’s will,
even when his mind and flesh opposed it. He studied and prayed
until he recognized God’s plan.
Dad’s father, Adam Kopp, was a German farmer and his mother,
Anna Mechau, was part French. Adam, a prosperous farmer from Fairview,
provided well for his family but he ruled with a “rod of
iron.” Anna was quiet and small. Her husband demanded that
she be frugal so that her tall, strapping red-haired sons could
go to college. My father and his siblings were taught to work
hard. The brothers and two sisters studied diligently to please
their father, however, my father dreamed of the day that he would
be free to travel and minister to others. He loved school and won
many debating competitions while attending Fairview High school.
I always felt he should have been a lawyer.
During dad’s senior year in high school, a spiritual
restlessness seized him although he attended church regularly.
When a young evangelist, Wallace Carpenter, accompanied by an
Italian Gospel singer, Joeseph Scorza, came to town preaching
salvation, dad was ready. Joseph Scorza later married dad’s
sister Helena and a relationship between the evangelists and the
Kopp family lasted through many years. While riding home on a
bobsled that night, dad exclaimed that he had been reborn.
Afterwards, he thought about the many people he would like to
tell the message of salvation that he now understood clearly. He
began to study the scriptures and pray in the thickets and
timbers near the farm. He felt the call of God to preach at the
age of eighteen.
He was called the “boy preacher” when he started
preaching in his home church and many came to hear him from the
nearby towns of Sabetha, Fairview and Robinson. Families
harnessed their teams and drove miles to hear him preach. He
preached from bandstands and city halls as well as in churches
and many loved his teachings about salvation, grace and holy
living.
My mother, Eula, came to Sabetha with her family in a covered
wagon when she was six years old. She was born in a log cabin in
Virgil City, Missouri, February 13, 1895. My Mother’s
parents, Tommy and Martha Mills, brought her and her friends to
hear my father preach one Sunday. Mom says she was proud and
haughty before her conversion at age seventeen and a leader among
her friends. My father became interested in mother when he saw
her play the organ at the church services. One Sunday, dad asked
my mother to wait until Monday so that he could give her
something. The next day, dad handed her a thick letter with a
picture of himself before she left for home. Mother’s
brother teased her on the way home so she guarded the letter by
placing it in her bible and went immediately to her room to read
it when she got home. The fourteen page letter was a marriage
proposal from my dad, the “boy preacher.” Because
mother was engaged to another boy named, Oscar, she went to her
father for advice. Her father told her to earnestly pray for an
answer; and, at 4:00 in the morning mother felt peace about
marrying this young preacher. Mother has told us many times about
her love for dad that has lasted through 64 years of marriage
despite many sorrows.
Mother and dad struggled through their first year of marriage
with a power struggle as they were both strong-willed. After five
months of marriage, however, dad entered into a spiritual
darkness while mother was pregnant with their first child. Dad
attributes this depression to reading literature about hell that
he found on his doorstep. He and mother began to wage a battle in
prayer and use the Word of God to overcome his doubts. During
this time, their first child, Faith Evangeline was born. Dad
began to preach again in Sabetha when Evangel Paul and Wesley
Lavern were born. Dad accepted a pastorate in Auburn, Nebraska
and Loran Olin and I were both born there. My sister Faith was
glad to have a sister to help her with the chores surrounding the
many red-haired brothers. I was their fifth child, Rachel Naomi,
a blond haired little girl.
We had moved back to Sabetha when Leroy junior was born and our
family received help from both sets of grandparents because we
had such a large family. Besides evangelistic work, dad painted
houses and barns, worked on a dairy farm, worked in the fields
and helped make new roads to support his growing family. Mother
earned money as a seamstress as well. “Kansas land” was
home to us until home missionary work opened up for dad.
Dad contributed to our education by playing games that made us
think and taking us to the circus and to parks. Besides church,
Sunday school and revival meetings, dad read us stories from
“Hurlbut’s Story of the Bible.” My brothers were
rambunctious and would roll on the floor and do somersaults while
dad was reading the Old Testament stories. Dad and Mom always
talked about faith and dad spent many hours praying about meeting
his financial obligations. As a result, we had enough food, the
rent was always paid and mother made sure that we were neatly
dressed.
When we were small, dad pitched in with the house work when
mother was ill and even bathed and tended to us. He was not good
at discipline because he was soft hearted and left mother with
that task. Dad was humorous despite the rigors of life at the
time. He taught us games and tricks to make us laugh. Once when
frustrated because the Model T Ford had stalled, he heard my
brother say, “I wish Samson were here!” This made him
laugh and broke the anger that was boiling inside him.
We moved a lot during those days and dad ministered all over
Eastern and Western Kansas. Once, dad heard that a female
evangelist, Aimee Semple McPherson, was holding special healing
services in Wichita; so he brought his blind friend, Mr.
Kirkpatrick, with him to the meeting. When the evangelist prayed
for Mr. Kirkpatrick in the name of Jesus, he was healed of
blindness. From there, dad applied the healing teachings into his
own ministry.
Because a pastorate opened for dad to go to Los Angeles, California,
we prepared to move across the prairie and wastelands in the
middle of a bitterly cold winter. Dad sent mom and baby Leroy to California
on the train while the rest of us piled into our Model-A Ford.
Besides all of us, dad had made cupboards filled with bedding,
canned foods, water and clothing that fit into the car as well.
We began the adventure and crossed the “wash-board”
roads of the Southeastern desert. We had lunches of ginger snaps
and cheese and stayed in little rented cabins at night. We saw
real Indians along the way and stopped to play and hike while dad
fixed flat tires.
We arrived in California and thought we had moved into paradise.
Dad said it was the land of no winter as we made the final turns
on the old highway outside of San Bernardino. There were palm
trees and orange groves. We stopped for a big 100-lb. bag of
lemons for just $1.00. Soon we arrived at the beautiful English
bungalow on 109th Street in South Los Angeles and were
greeted by mother and baby Leroy. Dad had scored a major victory.
We were busy with life in California and the Green Meadows
Foursquare Gospel church and did not miss Kansas very much except
for not seeing our family. My brothers were busy with guinea
pigs, pigeons and making rafts for ponds filled with pollywogs
while my sister was serious with her studies and had recently
experienced salvation. I was happy listening to records while I
stood on a chair changing needles. I began my musical pursuits
with my tambourine in the band at Sunday school.
Dad worked very diligently in California; always hurrying and
worrying about people’s souls. He spent long hours
ministering and studying and filled hundreds of pages of sermon
notes. He was last to bed and up before dawn. Occasionally, we
took trips to the mountains and the seashore.
For one year, we went back to Wichita, Kansas but dad soon
decided that California was a better place to raise his family.
We had a house car (precursor to a travel trailer) and traveled
back to California again and took a church in Taft, California on
the border of the desert. Mother and dad invigorated a dwindling
congregation there and we had a good education in the local
schools. However, my sister, Evangeline, was going to school in Los
Angeles; therefore, dad wanted to move closer to her. We took a
church in Monrovia and loved it there very much. Mom put on
dinners for the poor and we were glad to be able to be the care
givers instead of the other way around as we had been in Abilene,
Kansas.
Evangeline graduated from Bible College and we moved to South El
Monte to be near the Holiness school where we attended. The boys
had occasional jobs while in high school and I began to study the
piano. Dad had a facial stroke after a tour of preaching
throughout the United States for six months. After my graduation
from the Holiness school, we again moved to Los Angeles where dad
pastored the South Park Foursquare Church. He also started a
radio broadcast called “Radio Revival.”
Dad continued his travels and evangelistic work while Evangeline
and Paul married and also entered into ministry. The other boys
found secular work but Wesley Lavern suffered from a sun stroke
and never recovered. I married a missionary and ministered in South
America. Dad changed churches again and went to Calvary
Tabernacle on Hoover Street. He had many popular evangelistic
conferences there; but, most of all, I remember a time when my
husband and I returned from Columbia. Dad embarrassed my husband
with a huge sign that read “Welcome home, Eddie and Naomi”
and we had quite a celebration in the church.
On the move again, dad and mother went to Calvary Temple in the
heart of Los Angeles. Over the door a sign read, “Behold I
set before you an open door.” There he spent three years and
formed a Christian day school. He also began a ministry to the
Jewish people in Boyle Heights. His love for the Jewish people
encouraged him to go to the Holy Land, Israel where he studied
Hebrew and preached on the shores of the Mediterranean Sea. Next
he went further into Los Angeles and pastored Calvary Temple II
until it was condemned because the building was over 100 years
old.
Dad had an automobile accident when a drunk totaled his car and
knocked him into another car in 1972. Thirty hours later, he
suffered from a heart attack. When he recovered he sold the home
in El Monte where he and mother had lived for 19 years and
decided to move to Baldwin Park. Finally, at the age of 78, dad
suffered a stroke while trying to paint the new home in the
hottest part of the summer. I was on leave and drove to the Baldwin
Park house where he was working at this project. He was never
able to preach again.
We learned many things from my father’s and mother’s
examples. We learned love and respect for people no matter who
they were or what their background was. We learned compassion and
to rise above circumstances no matter where or what country we
were in. These years of “light affliction” will seem as
nothing compared to the Glory which shall be revealed in Jesus
Christ. So, it may rain southwest of “Kansas land” but
it takes “showers to bring forth flowers,” says an old
hymn I love.
