Becoming a Church Community
The Boston Chapel pastoral duties had just been passed to me (Jim Takser) by the Reverend Nevin Crouse. Among the multiple duties and related tutelage Nevin hurriedly passed to me was how the Chapel's weekly bulletin/newsletter was prepared for mailing mid-week. Introducing me to an aged mimeograph machine, Nevin described how to clean the hand-cranked machine, cut the fragile paper stencils with a ribbon-less typewriter, brush thick glue-smelling purple ink evenly onto the cylindrical drum, carefully wrap the fragile blue-colored paper stencil correct-side-up around the drum (doubly assuring the bulletin print would not come out backward), insert the blank mimeo stock paper into the feeder tray, and then crank away clockwise with the handle to produce hopefully readable printed pages of the Chapel's church bulletin for that week.
If you are familiar with the mimeographing process, you remember that a typo would require patching the error spot on the fragile stencil paper with correction fluid, and then carefully retyping in that exact spot when the fluid had dried. Other dangers included applying too little or too much of the thick ink to any area of the drum, resulting in fuzzy letters, big blobs or blank areas in your church bulletin copies. We needed to make a minimum 200 copies, so the post office would allow the bulk mailing (cheaper) rate, plus a few dozen more for evangelism to hand out on street corners, when knocking on doors seeking Sunday School children, and for hospital, home and jail visits.
After a few months of this, suddenly - Divine intervention. "Ken Sullivan wants you to come meet him in the new ENC Print Shop", Boston Chapel student Secretary Betty Manna told me as I came out of Dr. Delp's Koine class. I can't remember ever meeting a more pleasant man with a more welcome announcement during my ENC days or my nearly 4 years as pastor of Boston Chapel. "If you bring me 1 (one!, he said) typewritten copy of your newsletter, I can make the 200+ copies with no charge to the Chapel, and our printing machine will even fold the Chapel bulletins for mailing."
I later learned that Ken and his wife Helen had themselves already established a new church while in in Canada. They certainly helped with establishing Boston Chapel Church of the Nazarene in 1961.