Traveling Team

Into the Grand Ballroom of Manhattan's Waldorf Astoria one night last week shoved and shuffled 3,000 people--socialites, churchgoers and plain folk glad to get a look at the inside of that famed hotel without having to pay for anything. On their heels trod 1,000 more, of whom 300 were shunted into the Astor Gallery and 700 steered across the street into the Community House of St. Bartholomew's Church. Even then a few score were left with no place to go. The Waldorf guests listened to prayers and speeches. Then amplifiers were turned on and a Voice came to them. Hundreds of miles out on the stormy Atlantic that afternoon the S. S. Europa, already hours late, bucked house-high waves on its way to New York. Aboard was a party of 70 whose round-faced. sharp-nosed leader had planned to preside at the Waldorf gathering that very evening. Another man might have been fret ful and impatient, but not brisk Dr. Frank Nathan Daniel Buchman, who believes in the wisdom of God and His daily guidance. He telephoned associates in New York. There a smart young member of Dr. Buchman's Oxford Groups named Irving Harris got an idea. The New York Telephone Co. and the North German Lloyd did the rest. That night, when the guests in the Waldorf Grand Ballroom were well settled, Dr. Buchman on the Europa summoned three of the 70 "Team" members he was bringing to the U. S. and Canada. The four spoke in turn into a telephone transmitter. Their words were picked up at the Forked River, N. J. receiving station and relayed to Manhattan. "Zzzzzzzzzz. . . . Spiritual telephony with God. . . . Kra-a-a-a-k-k-k-k. . . . The material telephony that made possible this broadcast. Whe-e-e-E-E-E-E. . . . Not a dictatorship of Man but a dictatorship of the Holy Spirit. ZZZZZZZ-ZZZ. . . ." This went on for 15 minutes. Finally Rev. Samuel Moor ("Sam") Shoemaker said: "The material telephony by which we heard Dr. Buchman tonight was very wonderful. But it so happens that God's guidance, to which he compared it, is usually far clearer." Next day Dr. Buchman and Team landed. With that disciplined, well-publicized precision which marks all their movements, they were photographed, interviewed, shown the Empire State Building by Citizen Smith, lunched at the Waldorf and at the Bankers' Club. They descended upon a Salvation Army centre in grubby 14th Street, held a tea to launch Grouper Victor C. Kitchen's book I Was a Pagan.* Before hastening off on a Canadian tour which is to include an Easter house party at Chateau Frontenac in Quebec, the Oxford Groups held a second public meeting at the Waldorf. As crowded as the first, with an additional overflow meeting for 1,000 at the Park Lane Hotel, this was the biggest meeting the Groups had ever held in the U. S. where they were once called "Buchmanites" and looked upon with suspicion by conservative church folk. Now they had not only socialite guests like Mrs. Stephen Baker, Miss Madeleine Satterlee and Mr. & Mrs. William Fellowes Morgan, but also that most cautious of prelates, Episcopal Bishop William Thomas Manning, who had never before lent his presence to a Group meeting. Induced by "Sam" Shoemaker to attend the first night Bishop Manning made a brief, pious address. The Team currently traveling with Leader Buchman includes a London lady, a Latvian, a French and two Dutch baronesses, a Cambridge dean, a League of Nations secretary, a big game hunter, an archdeacon, a vice admiral, an Episcopal bishop's son, an Anglican bishop's sister, numerous Oxonians and Hon. Carl Vrooman of Bloomington, 111. To newshawks last week Frank Buchman declared: "Not one of us is employed. Yet we have managed to come across. I have not received a salary since 1922, but I manage somehow to live out of my seven suitcases. ... I haven't any idea of where all the money comes from."

^Harper & Bros., $1.50.

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