The Friend Ship

Walter Parr of Paducah, Ky., can spot the two turning points in his life to the day and minute. The first came when he was 18 and riding his horse one night near his home town of Bowie, Texas. Suddenly a ball of fire seemed to flash across the sky in front of him, and he heard a voice say: "I am God, who has called you." Walter Parr knew then that he would devote his life to the ministry. When he told his English-born mother about it later, she exclaimed: "I knew it would happen! We never told you before, but when you were a baby, your father and I put you on the altar and dedicated you to God."

Walter Parr's second turning point came in 1952, when, as a minister of the Cumberland Presbyterian Church, he was seeing his marine sergeant son off to the Korean war. Standing on the San Diego dock studying his son's troopship loaded with men and means of war, Pastor Parr made a private promise to himself: "If my son returns, I will load a ship like that and send it to Korea with the things of peace and good will."

Marked Man. He had learned something about the ways and means of international relief as regional director of the Christian Rural Overseas Program (CROP) at Fort Worth, and when his son returned from Korea, Parr was four times as good as his word. He resigned his pastorship and organized World Friendship Inc., which sent four shiploads of staples to Korea.

Inevitably, Walter Parr became a marked man--marked, for one, by Jordan's Ambassador to the U.S., Dr. Yusuf Haikal, who read of his one-man Korean relief program and invited him to Jordan last year to learn of Jordan's needs at first hand.

Reliefer Parr has been working on the Jordan project ever since. Concentrating on four states--Kentucky, Georgia, Florida and Texas--he is collecting some $1,000,000 worth of goods. Already in hand, among other things, are: three tractors, a 1/2-ton truck, a nine-passenger station wagon, an ambulance, a fire truck; 200 head of sheep, ten Jersey heifers, ten beef cattle; a raft of school supplies; $300,000 worth of drugs, medical supplies, and hospital equipment; refrigerators, washing machines, sewing machines; salt and pepper shakers, can openers, frying pans; about 200 baby beds for a refugee children's hospital, baby bottles, diapers; agricultural tools, such as hoes, rakes, and ploughs; two pianos; two freight-carloads of lumber.

Spiritual Viewpoint. Last week slight, 61-year-old Reliefer Parr was in western Kentucky beating the bushes for $5,000 to buy well-digging equipment to help Jordanians supply themselves with the Middle East's greatest need: water. This week he is scheduled to visit Atmore, Ala. (pop. 8,173), when the town will present a new tractor and a carload of timber for the Jordan boat, scheduled to leave Oct. 1 under the name Jordanian Friend Ship.

Presbyterian Parr hopes he is helping fight Communism as well as discharging a Christian mission to mankind. "We must attack Communism from a spiritual viewpoint," he says. "Just the idea of friendship is worth a lot." After the trip to Jordan, he plans more one-man relief projects along the same lines. "But perhaps not on such a large scale," he admitted last week. "I'm getting old, and it takes a lot of work to get together a ship."

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