Daddy's First Church, and Daddy's Subsequent Career

After my recent post about the Deep River church history, I decided to dig out a postcard that I have been ignoring ever since I bought it a couple years ago because dealing with it would require research, and I'm lazy.

Here it is:


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I thought it would take a long time to identify pastors of the Deep River church, especially a neophyte who served there circa 1918 as his first church. I was wrong.

Just a little bit of searching in the on-line newspapers turned up a Deep River pastor who apparently started at that church around May 1916 (at least, that was the first mention of him I could find):


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Porter County Vidette (Valparaiso, Ind.), 17 May 1916.

And that was not a one-time appearance. The local social columns in the Porter County Vidette continued throughout 1916 and into the spring of 1917 to report the Rev. Gerald Smith preaching at the Deep River church and being entertained at local homes.[1]

In this March 1917 account of a church-related box social, we learn that the Rev. Smith's mother lived in Viroqua, Wisconsin:


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Porter County Vidette (Valparaiso, Ind.), 14 Mar. 1917.

In mid-May of 1917, the Rev. Smith gave notice that he was resigning as pastor of the Deep River church …


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Porter County Vidette (Valparaiso, Ind.), 16 May 1917.

… but he continued to act in that capacity for a few more weeks, at least:


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Porter County Vidette (Valparaiso, Ind.), 13 June 1917.


So I, in my innocence, typed "Gerald L.K. Smith" into my Google search and … oh, dear. How is it that I never heard of him before?

A brief biography appears on Wikipedia. An Indiana website mentions Deep River among his earliest preaching experiences; apparently it was, in fact, "Daddy's first church." He has written books and had books written about him, some still available to buy on Amazon.com.

He died in 1976. Here is one of many obituaries that were printed in newspapers across the U.S.:


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Miami Herald, 17 Apr. 1976.
(The year of his marriage it wrong: it was actually 1922.)

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Photographs of Gerald L.K. Smith abound on the internet, mostly from later in his career. The earliest I could find was this, from 1926, when he served as pastor of an Indianapolis church:


Image from the Indiana Album, Joan Hostetler Collection.

Here is a later photo (undated).


Image from https://www.4029tv.com/article/arkansas-presidential-candidates/43698269.

Let us go back to the postcard above and take a better look at the young man standing at the left end of the back row:


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Is that the same person as in the two photos above? I don't know. I have run these photos through three free on-line facial comparison programs; two said these photos are all the same person, a third said they are not.

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And now let's look at the notes on the back of the postcard.

"Daddy's first church" was written during the ballpoint-pen era — that is, after World War II. The handwriting looks, to me, like a woman's.

The notes in red pencil may be the Rev. Smith's own writing, but I have failed to locate an on-line specimen to compare. I think these notes were written some time after the photo was taken. I imagine that Gerald Smith and his wife, Elna, were going through some of his old things and making notes for the benefit of posterity.[2] Thus, Gerald Sr.'s memory might have been a little off about the year.[3]

I had heard, of course, about the Moody Bible Institute and Moody Church of Chicago; what I did not know of, prior to researching this postcard, was the Moody connection to Cedar Lake, Indiana. In the timeframe of this postcard, one or both of those institutions held classes and events at Cedar Lake, eventually purchasing the former Monon Park for that purpose.

Here is a sampling of local articles about Moody events at Cedar Lake from 1916 to 1919:


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Lake County Times (Hammond, Ind.), 24 Jan. 1916.


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"Lowell," Lake County Times (Hammond, Ind.), 28 June 1917.



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Lake County Times (Hammond, Ind.), 27 June 1919.


The point of this Cedar-Lake discursion is that I suspect our postcard photo was taken at a Moody event there. The group in the photo is standing in wooded grounds, and the autos behind them suggest they drove there (as opposed to taking a train, as they might have for a Chicago event). While I have failed to turn up, in the on-line newspapers, any specific mention of Deep River church members attending such an event with the Rev. Gerald Smith, they may have done it without publicity.

That would have been a bit unusual, though, wouldn't it? I think the Rev. Smith himself was responsible for so many items about the Deep River Church making their way into the local papers — after he left, the church seems to have dropped from the columns of the on-line papers to such an extent that I can't even find out who succeeded him as pastor there.


But at this point my laziness kicks in again. I'm pretty sure I have identified who "Daddy" was, and I've come up with a plausible hypothesis about the photo on the postcard. Anyone who wants more research done can do it themselves.

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[1] For example, the "Driftwood from Deepriver" columns of 24 May 1916, 21 June 1916, 12 July 1916, 16 Aug. 1916; and the "Southeast Ross" columns of 8 Nov. 1916, 22 Nov. 1916, 17 Jan. 1917, 11 Apr. 1917.
[2] They had one child, an adopted son named Gerald Jr., but as far as I have been able to find out Gerald Jr. left no surviving children.
[3] Nothing about either the fashions or the automobiles says exclusively 1918 or later.