Bess, 83, still tilting at social injustice

PALMER — What do the Palmer Arts Council, Daybreak Mental Health Services, Institute of Welcoming Resources, Radio Free Palmer, Valley Christian Charities, Valley Christian Conference and Valley Residential Services have in common?

Howard Bess helped to found them all.

There’s more to the Rev. Bess, 83, than the weekly column he has written for the Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman Faith page for the past 23 years.

Born Jan. 30, 1928, in Fairbury, Ill., Bess’ father was a small-town businessman who owned the local Shell gas station.

His first job was working for his father shoveling coal and grain into the dump trucks he’d purchased to haul whatever needed hauling, Bess said.

“He became the town’s coal dealer,” he said. “But we also hauled gravel, grain, fertilizer — anything that needed to be hauled, we hauled.”

Bess was 13 and a freshman in high school when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He remembers how the war impacted his family and hometown.

Because all the young men were drafted to serve as they turned 18, Bess said the younger boys left behind picked up the slack.

“It meant teenagers worked like men,” he said. “We worked hard and just accepted it as part of what was going on.”

Just make ’em dance

His early years spent doing tough physical labor likely helped him when it came time for the 13-year-old Bess to tryout for his high school football team as a freshman.

Bess played football, basketball and baseball in high school, but he excelled on the gridiron. He graduated at age 17 and earned All Conference honors for football that year. He played center on offense and linebacker defense.

It wasn’t until the summer after graduation that he applied to Illinois State University in Normal, Ill.

“Within a week the head football coach was at my door,” Bess said. “I didn’t really know if I was good enough to play at the college level, but by the first game, I was starting.”

The 17-year-old had a great freshman season as a blocking back for Illinois State, but said he knew when he turned 18 he’d be drafted, so he enlisted in the Army.

After serving two years — including a year in Korea — Bess returned home and worked in the family business.

Bess also returned to his studies. But this time at Wheaton College in Chicago, Ill., where he played football for another three years — this time as center.

“I’d just make ’em dance with me while the running back went by,” he said. “I think football is a good fit for my personality. It’s essentially a collision sport.”

Called to serve

Bess recalls clearly the church service at the First Baptist Church in Normal, Ill., that changed his life.

“The preacher made a call for people to serve God,” Bess said. “I stepped out of the pew and made that commitment and I’ve never turned back.”

He spent the next four years at the Garrett-Evangelical Theological Seminary at Northwestern University.

“Religious? I wouldn’t know how to be otherwise,” Bess said.

After the seminary, he was sent to Bloomington, Calif.

“It was a very troubled area and they plopped me down and said start a church,” he said.

So Bess set out knocking on doors and before long he’d knit together a congregation of 100 troubled souls. In four years, they raised funds to purchase a parcel of property and build a church.

“I loved those people,” Bess said. “That was 55 years ago and I still get Christmas cars from some members of that congregation.”

Next he was sent to Santa Barbara, which he described as at the opposite end of the social-economic ladder.

But when the new minister arrived to lead Bess’ former church he was horrified by the congregation of misfits. So that new minister set out to clean up Bess’ mess and soon the congregation had left, the church was closed and the property sold.

Leaving this congregation is perhaps Bess’ biggest regret in life.

“I wonder what that church could have become,” he said.

Housing first

In Santa Barbara, Bess sparked a fresh fury when he said men and women would serve equally on the board of deacons.

“In my faith, I have not been given any authority to judge or reject,” Bess said.

He said his ministry is one of reconciliation.

It was in Santa Barbara, too, where Bess began to see stable housing as essential to success for people who were struggling.

Looking back, Bess said the work he’s done to help people get adequate housing is the work of which he is most proud.

“There are many hundreds of people who live in warm, stable, affordable appropriate housing because of my efforts,” Bess said.

Around this time in Santa Barbara, he said he became aware of the plight of illegal aliens.

In August 2010, the not-for-profit burned the mortgage papers for the 75 units of low-income housing that Bess helped establish there.

Bess was there at the 30th anniversary celebration. He said it was amazing for him to hear the stories of the children who grew up there, went on to college and now were professional people.

“That housing complex is one of the better things I left in my past,” he said.

‘Pastor I am Gay’

It was also in Santa Barbara where Bess became aware that gay and lesbian people were in his congregation.

“I became their advocate,” Bess said. “When I came up here, I carried with me those convictions.”

Bess and wife Darlene moved to Alaska to pastor the First American Church in Anchorage in 1980.

“They didn’t understand my commitment to gay people,” Bess said. “They didn’t know what they were getting.”

Before long, word got out that Bess welcomed gay and lesbian people in his congregation and soon more and more were attending. The congregation was horrified, Bess said.

“That’s when we moved to the Valley in 1988 as an unemployable Baptist minister,” he said.

In 1995, he wro te a book called “Pastor I am Gay,” which is still available on Amazon.com or locally at Fireside Books in Palmer.

Surely his life would have been simpler had Bess chosen not to champion gay rights. After all, he is not gay, and neither are any of he and Darlene’s five children and 11 grandchildren, he said.

“I admit, injustice just triggers something in me,” Bess said. “For me, gay rights are a justice issue.”

The impact he’s had on gay and lesbian acceptance in churches in the last 35 years is second on his list of valued accomplishments.

Changing priorities

Darlene has a degree in social work and worked at Hospice before retiring. The two survived financially from her wages and Bess’ Social Security and ministerial retirement benefits, he said.

But now Darlene’s health is failing and Bess said his role as her helpmate is his top priority.

Her hands tremble from Parkinson’s disease and she can’t put her body cast on by herself, but Bess says he took his wedding vows seriously when he pledged “in sickness and in health.”

“As far as I am concerned, it is a privilege,” Bess said.

The two also get help from their children and grandchildren living in the area.

Bess’ work at home also limits his board involvement to the Palmer Arts Council and Daybreak Corp., Bess said.

“I came to believe that a key part of a healthy community is the not-for-profit sector,” he said.

Legal legacy

The Besses legacy also extends to case law in Alaska.

The 1999 case Bess v. Ulmer removed from the ballot a constitutional provision that would have allowed the state to warehouse prisoners.

“We argued that the amendment proposed was so radical that it couldn’t be implemented as a constitutional amendment,” Bess said. “That to deal with it they would have to call a constitutional convention.”

And Bess helped to form the not-for-profit that filed a 1997 case, Valley Hospital Association Inc. v. Mat-Su Coalition for Choice, which placed the Mat-Su Regional Hospital under a permanent injunction preventing it from denying abortion services.

Both cases were ultimately heard by and affirmed by the Alaska Supreme Court.

“Jesus was an advocate for the poor, the disadvantage, the abused,” Bess said. “I believe churches are at their best when they take their eyes off their own success and ask how they can help.”

Contact Heather A. Resz at heather.resz@frontiersman.com or 352-2268.