On Christmas Eve 1932, at Bethesda Evangelical Lutheran Church on the north side of Milwaukee, Wis., all the classes in our elementary school took part in the highlight of the year-the Christmas Eve program.
I had attended our beautiful red-brick Gothic-style church since the day I was baptized, and now I was in the school's third-grade class. I was 9 years old and had been given a special verse to recite in front of the whole congregation.
