Break in the
Clouds
If the sun and moon should doubt,
They'd immediately go out.
William Blake, "Auguries of Innocence"
According to an impartial survey (conducted by his mother, Ruth Osborn) Michael Kirk MacIntosh was an extremely handsome baby, all eight pounds, twelve ounces of him. His sea-blue eyes reflected the look of his Pictish ancestors in Scotland, while the infectious smile that showed up early was straight from Ireland by way of his maternal great-grandfather. He made his appearance on March 26, 1944, in Portland, Oregon.
Good looks don't matter much, however, when you are poor. And Michael's folks were working class. His grandfather had been driven out of Scotland by deplorable conditions in the shipbuilding industry, but he found work on the Willamette River yards in Portland. His father was a handsome man who went into electronics, but a taste for drink and a lust for gambling made him considerably less than a perfect husband. As for Ruth, Michael's mother, whose father had died when she was seven months old, all her life she had known struggle. Yet this woman, who had
Page 8
no man to guide her when she was small and too many men to try to please when she grew up, was able to bequeath one priceless gift to her three sons — a sense of humor.
Humor is a lower order of faith. Both deal with the irreconcilabilities and incongruities of life. Ruth could laugh when there was no food or money in the house, and she taught her sons to do the same. (Years later, Michael could stand before thousands of youths and joke easily, saying things like, "Would the car get me there on time? God, get me there on time! I pray, O God, I pray! Jesus help me! Naw, I'll never make it. Come on, blast you. Move, you clunker!" And they loved it.) Laughter was Ruth Osborn's way out of adversity.
Ruth was the gorgeous, blond, rebellious daughter of a Bible-quoting widow, Ella Rose Lane. Ruth's grandparents, Samuel and Catherine Lane, escaped from Ireland's famine conditions and came to Canada as immigrants in the mid-nineteenth century. Lane was a carpenter by trade. They soon moved to South Dakota where their son, David, was born. Eventually the elder Lanes settled in Oregon, but their son had caught a vision that led him into the Christian ministry. His pursuit of education was such that he would crawl in the window of the local Carnegie library at night to read the books by candlelight. At age nineteen he enrolled in Bible school and, after being ordained a minister of the Methodist Episcopal church, pastored congregations in North and South Dakota. He married Ella Rose, of Yankee and Irish stock, and they in time became parents of two boys and a girl. Then in 1914, when Ruth was seven months old and her father just twenty-seven years, the Reverend David Lane died suddenly of a burst appendix.
Ella returned to normal school, obtained her certificate, and spent the next several years teaching in one- and
Page 9
two-room schoolhouses in the Dakotas. Like many a God-fearing minister's widow of those days, she prayed to God that one of her two sons, if not both, would follow her husband as a preacher of the gospel; and let there be no doubt that she knew the ways of intercession.
But it was not to be. George, her older son, sought personal fulfillment in the unsanctified precincts of United States Gypsum, turning out wallboard, while the younger died at the age of ten during a visit to his grandparents in Portland. As for little Ruth, her mother had tagged her early to be a foreign missionary by the grace of God. But Ruth soon began to think of many more interesting places to live than the interior of China.
When Ella received a telegram telling of her son's illness, she was teaching in the tiny hamlet of Glover, North Dakota. Taking George and Ruth, who had just turned nine, she boarded a train for Oregon. They arrived in Portland a day after the boy died, and never went back. Eventually Ella remarried and established a home in Portland and, later, in Eugene. As for Ruth, she put up with her mother's gung ho Nazarene variety of Methodism (no lipstick, no jewelry, no movies, no dances) until she reached adolescence, when it all seemed hopelessly out-of-date. Living with a prayer warrior, Ruth found, was not easy when the warrior sprang from the loins of Yankee Puritanism.
At age eighteen Ruth raised the flag of independence, slipped across the Columbia River, and married a soldier. This soldier, who feared neither God nor woman, unfortunately mistook his bride for a target in the combat zone. The young girl endured his abuse for three years, during which they became parents of a son whom she named David — for David Lane, the father she never knew. After divorcing, Ruth let several years elapse before she married again, this time to the personable Wilbur MacIntosh.
Page 10
But while Wilbur was gentler, the home was not one of his top priorities. Following the birth of two sons, Kent and Michael, this marriage also collapsed. Finally, two years after divorcing Wilbur, Ruth married a machinist named Warren "Ozzie" Osborn in 1950. Michael was now six years old.
Between her second and third marriages to Wilbur and Ozzie, Ruth found work as a receptionist. During weekdays she placed Michael and Kent, then four and five, with a middle-aged German couple named Hofmeister who had a small farm and orchard outside of Portland. The melancholy experience of those two years left its mark on Michael.
First, there were the snakes. The cornfields were full of them, and when Kent started first grade and crossed the field to the bus stop and Michael would walk with him, they invariably encountered half a dozen garter snakes. Once when they were playing, Kent and another boy picked up Michael and tossed him into a haystack. A snake was lying in the stack and bit him in the arm.
Then there was bedwetting. This was a daily trial not only to Michael but to his proxy mother, who tried everything, including dressing the boy in girl's clothes, to shame him. A coffee can was placed under his bed at night. Then there were the spankings. A ruler applied to the back of the hand was Mrs. Hofmeister's method; her husband worked on the more familiar part of the anatomy. Michael was spanked for not knowing how to tie his shoelaces (Kent had to teach him). He was spanked for running through the rows of corn with the collie dog chasing him and knocking off the ears. He hated the farm because even at that age he knew what love was, and the love of a mother and father wasn't there.
Mrs. Hofmeister was a well-meaning, pious woman, if rather uncommunicative. She taught Michael to read the
Page 11
Bible and did what she could to provide a home away from home. But the raw milk from her cow transmitted bacteria that produced undulant fever in Michael — an affliction that caused rapid rises in his body temperature for years. As for her husband, he was (in Michael's words) overbearing, bull-headed, and hypocritical. One weekend when the two little boys were at home with their mother, the foster parents drove to the house to pick them up and take them back to the farm. Michael, who was sitting at the table, saw who it was and, leaving his dinner, disappeared out the back door. It was hours before they found him hiding behind a fence.
After her third marriage, Ruth collected all her boys, and she and Ozzie Osborn established a full-time home in a small, two-bedroom frame house. David was by now a high school senior and Michael was six. For the half dozen years that Ruth and Ozzie lived together, Michael had the only father he was ever to know. They were good years. Ozzie was pleasant to the boys and the family became close. For a while Michael took the surname Osborn as his own. He became active at William Clark Elementary School and joined the Cub Scouts and the school band, taking up the trumpet. As he grew older, he took part in science fairs, acted the role of Captain Corcoran in a production of H.M.S. Pinafore, and was elected vice-president of the student body. He made first string on the school basketball team and also played on the YMCA Gra-Y's and the Montavilla Baptist Church team.
There was a sweetness to Michael's nature, his mother said, that made him popular with everyone. In the early school grades he became a leader and an achiever, the head of his class. He would get the whole family involved in the projects he was engaged in, whether it was a science exhibit or making model airplanes. He showed a love for other people and little creatures, and was particularly
Page 12
sympathetic to the misfits and the left-out. If a buddy was having trouble at home, he would bring him to his own house. If a sparrow was lying on the ground with a broken wing, he would carry it home.
The Montavilla church was located across the street from the school, and some of Michael's friends began inviting him to Sunday school. Church had never been a part of Ruth's weekly routine since she left home, but now Michael enjoyed the friendships, the sports, and sitting in church with a red-haired girl named Diane. It seems he had always believed in God, and his reading of the Bible was one pleasant memory from the farm. When he walked in the fields and saw shafts of sunlight breaking through the clouds that so often cover the Oregon skies, he would imagine that angels were walking down them to visit the earth. One Sunday morning some missionaries from Africa came to Montavilla and spoke to the Sunday school children. The man preached a powerful message and gave the children an opportunity to commit their lives to Christ. "Keep your heads bowed and your eyes closed," the missionary said, "and just put up your hand."
Diane, sitting next to Michael, squirmed, and he thought she was raising her hand. Impulsively, he raised his. This means, he thought, that we'll go down into the basement and talk, and I'll get to be with her. But she didn't raise her hand; in fact, Michael was the only one in the room to do so. Now he was forced to examine his motive. What did he want to do? The room was becoming stuffy, and he liked it downstairs; that was where the classrooms were and where he played hide-and-seek. He decided to go, Diane or no Diane. When he reached the basement he found his Sunday school teacher crying.
Michael had never seen a man's tears before. "Why are you crying?" he asked.
Page 13
"Don't you realize what you've just done?" asked the teacher.
"Well, I raised my hand to say that I believe Jesus is the Son of God."
"But you will have eternal life!" The man believed this pupil had done something more than what Michael thought he had done. But Michael wanted to believe, and his teacher explained the simplicity of the gospel.
Michael knelt on the cold linoleum floor, put his arms on the seat of a gray metal folding chair, and asked God to forgive his sins.
Afterward, while he was walking home, he kept looking up and waiting for the skies to open so he could see God. He told his mother he had become a Christian; and Ruth, who had been through it all with the Methodists and Nazarenes, took it in stride. At school Michael continued to bring home top grades, and he was becoming an outstanding basketball player. What life held for him was still around the bend; but right now the stream was flowing calmly and it all looked good.
