HILLSPEAKING
from The Anglican Digest
EASTER A.D. 2002

THIRTY years is a long time.  For most of us, it a roughly a third of our lives.  For Patient Wife and me, it is the span of time we have lived in the Ozarks and have been intimately associated with the multi-ministries at Hillspeak.  It is the longest either of us has lived in one area -- first  in the town of Eureka Springs, then in the Old Residence here at Hillspeak, and, now, in the Farm House here.

Unless both readers of “Hillspeaking” revolt and write in, “Enough, already,” I intend to use the remaining issues of TAD for this year to write an informal chronicle about living and working here at Hillspeak these past thirty years.  This series of “Hillspeakings” seeks to set out what has occurred to develop a definite persona within the Anglican communion.

Heraclitus has it that “There is nothing permanent except change” -- and there have been changes aplenty at Hillspeak, but there have also been constants.  My relationship has been constant although it has taken various forms -- volunteer, employee, retiree.  Sharing the constancy have been, in addition to Patient Wife, the Rt Rev Edward Lloyd Salmon, Jr as Chairman of the Board of Trustees since 1972, and Tom E. Walker as General Manager since 1995.

Bishop Salmon, whose tenure as a Trustee began in 1970 when he was rector of St Paul’s, Fayetteville, Arkansas, has continued through his rectorship of St Michael’s and St George’s, St Louis, Missouri, and on as XIII Bishop of South Carolina since 1990.

Mr Walker, a native of Eureka Springs, came to work at Hillspeak in 1965.  It was he who “showed me the ropes” when I came as a volunteer in 1972.  “Showing the ropes” is an apt term; in the late '50s and early '60s he was called to active duty in the U. S. Navy and took part in Operation Deep Freeze in Antarctica.

Aside from Bishop Salmon and Mr Walker, thirty years have seen a lot of changes amongst those with whom I have worked.  When computers were much slower than they are today, we needed the night hours to post the day’s activities (today we post in a few minutes at the end of the working day).  We employed a number of part-timers who basically did the work of a night auditor.  One is now a practicing attorney in Little Rock, another is a television photojournalist, another a banker, and a fourth left her daytime job to become a full-time SPEAK employee and has since retired.

Using the term SPEAK brings us around to an acronym and a name that is oft times an occasion for confusion.  In the early 1950s, the Rev Howard Lane Foland, founder of the Episcopal Book Club and The Anglican Digest, incorporated his vision of a “service to the Church” as the Episcopal Book Club.  As the Digest took on an identity of its own and other ministries were added, he realized that the corporate name needed to reflect better that vision.  In 1967 he filed for incorporation as the Society for Promoting and Encouraging Arts and Knowledge [of the Church].  SPEAK thus became the umbrella organization for the Episcopal Book Club, The Anglican Digest, and, later Operation Pass Along, The Anglican Bookstore, and the Foland Library.

It was an easy and logical step then for the location of SPEAK, on the third highest mountain in the county, to become known as Hillspeak.  How well that name has become an integral term for a portion of the Ozarks locally was borne out in the 1980s when a judge ruled that “Hillspeak” is a commonly known and accepted term that describes a portion of Carroll County, Arkansas.

The Episcopal Book Club and The Anglican Digest had their genesis in Nevada, Missouri, in the ‘50s. Father Foland and his colleagues moved to Arkansas in 1960.  The last thirty years have seen an identification of SPEAK and its five ministries develop and solidify into a common understanding of what is done at Hillspeak.