On Melvin’s good days, he was eccentric.  Other days, he tipped toward fanaticism.   While he was in the army in Korea, he wrote home asking Mama how she’d like a Korean daughter-in-law.  Mama wouldn’t like that at all.  Answering her it was just a joke; that was the end of it.  After mustering out, he came home and married Maggie, a young widow with a son.  Almost immediately, they had a son, then a year later, a second who was born with birth defects.  Melvin became was inconsolable and melancholic, sure his child was being punished for his sin of abandoning the woman and child in Korea he’d not having the courage to marry and bring home to his disapproving family.

Isolating himself, Melvin gave his life to God becoming an evangelical, Hell-fire and brimstone preacher in a sect of his own concoction.  Sadly, his fanaticism made life on his…