Father & Sons

When Phillips Brooks died in 1893 and churchmen were casting about to fill the vacant Episcopal Diocese of Massachusetts, President Charles William Eliot of Harvard said to a friend: "I don't think they necessarily need a great preacher, or a very able man. ... I think they might take somebody like you, Lawrence." Shortly thereafter the Episcopalians did take Dr. William Lawrence to be their seventh bishop. This rich, cultivated, liberal-minded churchman, then 43, had six children of whom the only boy was W. (for William) Appleton Lawrence, 4.

Last week Son Appleton Lawrence, now 47, was elected an Episcopal bishop in Massachusetts.

In 1901, when the Diocese of Massachusetts made so much work for his father that its western half was lopped off to make a new see, young Lawrence was a baseball-playing student in Boston. In 1911, when Bishop Lawrence was hobnobbing with the elder Morgan and formulating the idea which later grew into his Church's $30,000,000 Pension Fund, his son was a tall, handsome Harvard senior, completing his course six months ahead of his class and returning to coach the fresh man baseball team. Schooled thereafter for the Church, Wr. Appleton Lawrence got his first cure in 1913, as assistant in Grace Church in Lawrence, Mass., where his forebears had owned mills and where his father held his first and only rectorate.

In 1926 when Bishop Lawrence retired on his 76th birthday, W. Appleton Lawrence was called to Grace Church in Providence.

Since then, a vigorous man of God who still plays first base on Church teams, he has busied himself with such Church bodies as the National Conference of Jews & Christians, such welfare organizations as the Rhode Island Birth Control League, to which he lends respectability as the father of seven children. Last week in Springfield, Mass, at a special convention of the Diocese of Western Massachusetts-the one sliced off his father's old see-Son Lawrence was elected on the second ballot to succeed the late Rt. Rev. Thomas Frederick Davies.

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