I can still smell the wet canvas and sawdust of my father’s revivals. Like many old-school country preachers, he believed that any self-respecting revival was held in a tent. The fact that he’d been sent by his denomination from Texas to serve as a “home missionary” in Long Island, New York, didn’t dissuade him.
Every year he rented an old circus tent and set it up in the parking lot of the church he had planted. My brother and I would string naked light bulbs between the tent poles, push the cheap electronic organ onto a plywood stage elevated by cinder blocks, and set up wooden folding chairs that would pinch your butt if you weren’t careful. I have no idea how Dad found sawdust on Long Island.
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