Profile – George Will and New York - I

The next morning I said to George, “Let’s go to Greenwich Village and preach on the street.” So off we went from Brooklyn to Manhattan. We didn’t make it to the Village, at least not that day. Entering Manhattan we found ourselves on Houston Street, a fairly broad street around, if memory serves me correctly, the Williamsburg Bridge. 

We noticed a library and decided to go inside and look in the newspapers for a place to stay. Naturally we had no frame of reference for anything we read, we didn’t know the city; I guess we were like the guy calling for directions and when asked his location replied, “I’m at the corner of Walk and Don’t Walk.”

Leaving the library with not a clue to what we were doing – at least I didn’t have a clue – we saw a laundry mat across the street. Since laundry mats often have bulletin boards in which people post advertisements, George said that he’d go over and see whether or not there might be advertisements for apartments posted. 

In my first post about George I mentioned that he was from south Florida and that he had quite the drawl; and that said drawl was especially pronounced when he sang. As a matter of fact, it’s been 43 years since that day in January and I can still catch the words George was singing re-crossing Houston street from the laundry mat to the Ford station wagon where I was waiting. I imagine that 100 years from now sensitive microphones will be able to pick up George’s drawn-out drawl of songs sung in the 20th century, those words just seem to hang in the air.

One of George’s favorite songs back then was, “I get so thrilled with Jesus, every hour of the day. I get so thrilled with Jesus, He’s the Truth, the Life, the Way…” George would take that word “thrilled” and string it out from here to El Paso. On his way back across Houston Street he no doubt hit the “t” in “thrilled” when his foot stepped off the curb and didn’t find the “h” until he was at the car.

George got in the car to report that there were no apartment postings in the laundry mat. What to do? 

We bowed our heads to pray…and just as our prayer commenced there was a knock on driver’s window where George was sitting.