Interviewee: James Jeffrey
Interviewer: Mary Marshall Clark
Session 1, Part 1
December 4, 2003
New York, New York
Q: Good morning, Reverend Jeffrey. Thank you so much for coming.
Jeffrey: Thank you.
Q: I wanted to start with you like we start with everyone, and hear something about where you grew up and what your interests were when you were younger, and your education. Just start whenever you would like.
Jeffrey: Okay. Well, I was born and raised in Louisiana, in the Cajun part of Louisiana, 130 miles west of New Orleans. My family was a Scotch Presbyterian family, and we were one of five Protestant families in our community. So I was raised a Presbyterian.
Then when I went down to college in New Orleans, it’s interesting, our pastor was French, he was a French Huguenot who came to Louisiana because of the French-speaking, and he’d been a former Roman Catholic priest, so I discovered I had much more St. Thomas Aquinas than I had John Calvin in my background. That’s how I ended up in the Episcopal church.
I went to Tulane [University] in New Orleans and majored in civil engineering and worked as a civil engineer for five years before deciding to go to seminary. I discovered in those five years that the thing that really interested me mostly was working with the people that I hired and that I was associated with in my engineering profession. So that led me to the Cathedral in New Orleans, where I was then assistant district manager for the company that I was working for.
By this time I was twenty-five, and decided to go to seminary after talking with the dean of the Cathedral there. And the bishop, who was interesting, wanted me to go to Sewanee in Tennessee, the University of the South, for my seminary education, but I had worked up in New York City with my engineering firm, and I had decided I wanted to go to seminary up in New York. But he sent me to a seminary in New York, decided I needed more liberal arts.
So I went to Sewanee for one year, and then came up to General, here in New York City, in 1955, and spent the three years here. While here I did one summer of clinical pastoral education at Mass[achusetts] General Hospital in Boston, and I must confess I was hooked on that type of education.
Q: What was it like at that time?
Jeffrey: It was interesting. They had a very interesting aspect to their program in that you spent the first two weeks actually working as an orderly on the floors before you began calling on patients. So you got to know about the life of the hospital in a very basic way, because we would be there at seven o’clock in the morning to serve breakfasts, to give patients their baths, and that sort of thing, change beds. I learned how to make a mitered corner on my bed as a result of that.
Then you went on the floors as a chaplain in another part of the hospital, so that was really unique. I always had thoughts of maybe trying to incorporate that as part of a program that I was doing here, but it never seemed to get to—it never was brought to fruition. But that was what turned me on to institutional-type ministry.
Then after I completed my seminary career, I was working on a master’s in psychiatry and religion at Union Seminary, so I stayed on here in New York to continue that, and was an assistant at the Church of the Incarnation on 35th and Madison for four years.
Q: What was Union Seminary like in those days?
Jeffrey: It was very exciting because [Reinhold] Nieburh had just left, he’d just had his first stroke, but his brother, Richard, was still there. There were some really interesting people in the Department of Psychiatry and Religion, because that was an entirely new field at that time, so many of these people were pioneers at that time, working there, so that was interesting.
I never did complete my graduate studies there because I was called to be rector of the church in Eastchester, New York, and I was there for four years. It was during that time that the idea of going into institutional ministry really rose to the forefront because while I love the parish and we grew and had a really lively, vital parish, I found I really—for want of another word, I was bored. I wanted more challenge, more change. The sameness of it after a while began to get to me.
So it was at that point that I made a conscious decision to seek the necessary training and certification to become a full-time hospital chaplaincy. So I became a fellow with the Episcopal Mission Society and received a fellowship grant to do a year of CPE, clinical pastoral education, which I did one unit with Walt Beblot [phonetic] at Central Islip, and then one unit with Fred Perltz [phonetic] at Rikers Island, and then two units with Glen Yancy [phonetic] at Bellevue [Hospital]. My final unit with Glen I acted as a supervisor-in-training to become a full supervisor.
So then from there I went to the Juvenile Detention Center in the Bronx. That was interesting, because there were no hospital chaplaincies available, and they needed a chaplain there, and they’d never had one, they didn’t know what to expect, I didn’t know what to expect. So we just decided to try it and see what would happen. And nothing, nothing, had prepared me for that experience, because all of these kids were in detention for anything from shoplifting to murder. It was quite a challenge.
Q: Tell me some of those stories.
Jeffrey: Well, I was prepared to resign after six months. I simply felt I couldn’t hack it. The Sunday before I was to hand in my resignation to the director, one of the kids at chapel said, “Chaplain Jeffrey, that was the worst sermon I have ever heard.” [Laughs]
In sort of shocked surprise, I said, “Well, what would you have said?” And he told me. I said, “Great. That’s a wonderful sermon. I’ll tell you what, next Sunday I’ll preach that sermon, and we’ll see how the kids respond to it.”
Well, the word got out that I was preaching this sermon and everything. The next Sunday, it was totally different, and the kids all—we had dialogue, and they paid attention. There was good composure, which was unusual in the chapel, because one of my greatest fears was having a riot, which we did have once.
I’ll never forget my reaction to that. There are things you just can’t prepare for in life, and I remember leaping up on the backs of the pews and yelling, “Peace!” And the riot just stopped that instant, and the kids looked up at me like, “Has this man lost his mind?” And that was it. The riot just quieted down immediately. So that’s one of the reasons why I still like to walk in the aisle and not get in a pulpit when I’m preaching, to this day, is to have that access to the congregation.
But, anyhow, from that moment on, it changed my entire ministry in that institution because I had the kids writing my sermon every week. I would give them the text before the week, starting on Monday, and they would talk about it, and then on Thursday I would go around to each dorm, get their comments, input, and then my job was to incorporate all of this into a sermon which they would recognize what they had said. And they would give me feedback, lots of feedback, while I was preaching so that we were in dialogue, and it was a real turning point for me. I actually have talked to a few of my clergy friends and urged them to try this with parishioners, and it’s worked very well to have groups that meet Sunday after coffee and talk about next week’s sermon and how they would express it. It worked.
So I was there for three, four years, and it was at that time that I was asked if I would be interested in coming on board with the East-Midtown Protestant Chaplaincy.
Q: And who asked you? Who invited you?
Jeffrey: Actually, it was Carlton Sweester, the first director. He and I have been friends for many years, so he asked me if I would be interested in considering the job. They were primarily interested in me because I was a clinical pastoral education supervisor, because prior to my arrival on the scene, the Blanton Peale Institute had used these hospitals--Lenox Hill, New York [-Cornell], Memorial [Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center], and Special Surgery--all four of them, as their clinical sites for doing their clinical pastoral education programs. They had their seminars down on West 29th Street, behind the Marble Collegiate Church there, and then in the afternoon the students came up to the hospital and called on patients, but there was no immediate supervision of the students at that clinical site. The hospitals were not too happy with that situation.
Prior to my arrival, they had terminated that relationship with the Blanton Peale Institute to send their students up to that site, but they wanted to continue having the students. So they asked me if I would come on board in that capacity, to be able to offer the clinical pastoral education and give on-site supervision.
So I started in ’70, and at that time, our offices were in Lenox Hill Hospital. I had a part-time secretary, Betty Feeny [phonetic]. Julia Sibley was the only full-time person on the staff besides myself when I was hired. Then we had, though, about four or five part-time chaplains who worked half-day, maybe two times a week; some only worked a half day one time a week.
Q: In varying hospitals?
Jeffrey: In the various hospitals. So they were doing the major portion of the patient visitation. So my immediate job was to get the center provisionally accredited, so I did that very first thing when I came on board, and we had our first group of students in the summer of ’71.
Q: Who was the accreditation agency?
Jeffrey: The Association of Clinical Pastoral Education.
Then in the fall of ’71 I began my first extended units of CPE, and that was rather innovative because I don’t think there were more than one or two other centers in the country who were doing the extended unit. It was exactly the same program as the ten-week summer program, but extended over a thirty-week period where the students came in two days a week, did their patient visitation, as well as attend seminars, and they could do this during the academic year and be in seminary at the same time.
Q: How did you know who would make a good person in pastoral education?
Jeffrey: One thing I looked for in my interviews was their commitment to pastoral care or to ministry itself. That was the one gauge that I utilized primarily in my acceptance of a student, and that you get through their written materials and from the interviews that you would have.
So, getting the program off the ground, the CPE program, was my really first objective. Then the thing that I then wanted to concentrate on was the thoroughness of the patient care. And while the part-time chaplains did an excellent job coming in as infrequently as they did, I did not feel that it had the same commitment that a full-time chaplain would have. So my next job was to begin hiring full-time chaplains. Starting in the fall of ’72 I hired Sam Dibler [phonetic] as the next full-time person on the staff, meanwhile letting some of the part-time chaplains go.
Then in ’73 I hired Monty Cox [phonetic], a Methodist. Sam was Baptist and Monty was Methodist. They came on board full time.
Q: What was the relationship with the hospitals like in those days?
Jeffrey: It varied from hospital to hospital because one of the founding members of the [HealthCare] Chaplaincy at Lenox Hill Hospital was Lou Shankweiler [phonetic]. So Lenox Hill had a big commitment to the Chaplaincy, and our office was there, so we were very visible. It was interesting, because while we were not a department of the hospital, everyone assumed that we were, and consequently we were widely accepted by the staff as co-workers with them.
Then Memorial welcomed us with open arms and felt that we had a very valuable contribution to make there with their patients.
Special Surgery was a delight to work in, because you had people coming in usually for elective surgery who were going to come in, go out much more capable of doing what they wanted to do in their life than they had been before, so the whole outlook was so totally different.
Monroe Hovey [phonetic], who was a vice president there, once made a remark to me that he felt that having a chaplain on board was worth many patient representatives because the chaplains were able to allow the patients to ventilate and to be able to voice any dissatisfaction or unpleasantness they’d had in the hospital. So they were very supportive there.
The most difficult hospital was New York Hospital. They were very proud of the fact that they were the second--third oldest hospital in the United States, and don’t you ever forget it. So it was very difficult to make inroads there, so we always had the feeling we were just on the verge of in and out of the door, as it were. So that was the most difficult hospital.
But they were—and, again, it would vary from department to department. We were extremely welcomed at Lying-In Hospital, which, as you know, obstetrics and gynecology, and so that—there, throughout the hospital.
I’ve neglected to mention that at the same time we also were providing Sunday services and on-call duties at DeWitt Nursing Home, and we would go in. That was a big aspect of the program at that time, was we provided Sunday services in every one of our institutions. Starting in the morning, we had three in the morning and three in the afternoon. Usually the staff chaplains would be on duty on Sunday to take the morning ones, but in the afternoon, particularly at New York Hospital, we invited the area clergy to come, and usually it was like once a year; we were able to space it out so that all the area clergy could come in and assist us with taking a Sunday afternoon service. They also took services at DeWitt Nursing Home.
Also, we had twenty-four hour on-call service in all of our institutions, and again we utilized the area clergy for that purpose as well. So that was part of my job, was arranging for all of these Sunday services to be covered, as well as the twenty-four hour on-call service.
Q: I was going to ask you, too, about the relationship with some of the churches, and I’d love to hear some stories about Hugh McCandless, if you remember him.
Jeffrey: One of my favorite people associated with the Chaplaincy was Hugh McCandless at Epiphany, because he was really one of the main instigators in the founding of the Chaplaincy from the very beginning. As it got going, he withdrew and allowed others to step in, but he was always one of the main driving forces behind the Chaplaincy, and he was one person I could always turn to whenever there was a difficult situation or something had come up that I needed to consult with someone.
Hugh was always readily available, and he was very influential in many ways in smoothing the way in various hospitals. He was particularly helpful at New York Hospital because he had had this long association, having been at Epiphany for many years, and he specifically cultivated New York Hospital, so he was very helpful in that regard.
I remember at the last Chaplaincy annual meeting he ever attended in, I think it was ’79, the Chaplaincy presented him with an award in recognition of his long-term service to the Chaplaincy. He was making his speech, and he started to talk about the history of the Chaplaincy, and he said, “No one realized at those early days that it would grow to be such an important and vital aspect of the different hospitals that we covered,” and he burst into tears and started to sob. It was very moving. I think everybody in the room was in tears also, because he was such a significant factor in the development of the Chaplaincy.
Q: I was sharing with you before we started today a memo he wrote about the length of time the idea had been in their minds, really, beginning in 1946.
Jeffrey: Hugh had this dream of the Chaplaincy and he was able to carry it off very effectively. He was one of the main guiding forces in the early days, but he was a constant presence certainly during my tenure in the Chaplaincy.
Q: You were also executive director of the Chaplaincy after a couple of years, right? In ’72?
Jeffrey: Right.
Q: What was your vision for what the Chaplaincy should be, and taking into account what were the obstacles you faced, and how far did it come, during your time, in terms of your vision?
Jeffrey: Oh, boy, that’s a loaded question. When I first came to the Chaplaincy, the vast potential was, I guess, the most daunting aspect of it. I remember when we were going through our accreditation process, the chair of the Accreditation Committee asked me what was the most frustrating aspect of my job, and I remember responding to him at the time, “Seeing the vast potential and not having the immediate resources to respond to that.” I think that was true throughout my tenure with the Chaplaincy.
Q: What was it you wanted to do? If you’d had the resources, what would you have done?
Jeffrey: Well, we did do a lot of the things. One was setting up a residency program for students, and with the hiring of Emily Jean Gilbert, that was possible, so that she and I both ran groups of students, and we would alternate taking the extended students and the residents and the summer students, so that we had actually the three different groups of students.
So that was one of the immediate goals that I had, was to get the residency program going, which we did fairly quickly. And that grew rapidly until we—the main thing was getting the funding to be able to support the residents with their grants. Bill Herman, who was the treasurer at that time, was exceedingly helpful in making contacts with different foundations and such, and it wasn’t until Charlotte Fry came on board that we were able to have someone really coordinate that aspect of the Chaplaincy, began to approach foundations, to secure grants to cover the residency program.
Q: I’d really like to hear you talk about her and what you think her contribution was to the Chaplaincy.
Jeffrey: Well, Charlotte was a breath of fresh air. She had been director of volunteers at Memorial Hospital, so she was well acquainted with the hospital scene and the workings of the hospital. So she really was a tremendous assistant in coordinating our relationships with the hospitals. And then as her job developed, she was able to then take on the foundation approach aspect of her job and began writing proposals and submitting them to the different foundations.
My favorite story is how we were able to get a pediatric chaplain at Memorial Hospital. That had to do with one day I came down the elevator and as we got to the fourth floor, which was the pediatrics floor, they simply—there was a plaque saying that this floor was a donation of the Lila Acheson Wallace Foundation, and so it occurred to me that, well, maybe they would be willing to fund a chaplain for this.
So I went back, I spoke to Charlotte about it, and she wrote the proposal, and since we had such a good relationship with Laurance [S.] Rockefeller, I sent it. I had a covering letter, and then I sent the proposal to Mr. Rockefeller, and I said, “I would appreciate your looking this over, and if you have any suggestions or changes that you think would help us to secure this proposal, this grant, I would greatly appreciate it.”
So I went off on vacation, and a week later Charlotte calls me up, and she says, “We just got a check in the mail from the Lila Acheson Wallace Foundation for the amount we requested for our grant.”
I said, “Well, how is this possible? Because we haven’t even sent it to them.”
Later, when I met with the grant people, with the Wallace Foundation, I mentioned something about this, and they showed me my letter to Mr. Rockefeller, in which he had just simply written across, “Dear Lila, I think this is a project you’d be interested in. Love, Laurance.” And she just wrote the check out, and that was it. That’s how we got started, and that’s when George Handzo was hired as a pediatric chaplain.
But that was just one illustration of the way in which Charlotte’s input and ability to be able to write the proposals such to attract the foundation. Because, you see, up to this point, we were totally supported by our various churches and the various hospitals, and the hospital contributions were very small back in those days. We were really dependent on the contributions of the churches. One thing I always mention, when I came to the Chaplaincy, our budget was $32,000, and out of that, they paid my full-time chaplain salary, Julia Sibley’s full-time salary.
Q: What was your full-time salary?
Jeffrey: Mine? Ten thousand dollars in 1970. That’s what I started at. We really were hand-to-mouth, and there were some months when I would call up the various churches and say, “Would you mind sending your contribution? Because we cannot meet our payroll this month.” It was that tight. So that was a whole new aspect of our outreach, as it were, when we began to approach the various foundations.
Q: Was it around this time, too, that the board of trustees was developed, was sort of in this period of the early seventies, that it became more of an organizational—what was the organizational structure? Let me ask you that.
Jeffrey: When I arrived, the board of trustees was strictly representative of the sixteen various churches that we were associated—not all the churches had a representative, and I think our board of trustees was something like twelve, maybe even fifteen at that time, but each person there represented a particular church that supported us. So that was our total income.
Q: So fundraising must have been a big headache.
Jeffrey: Yes, it was, and it was—you know, we never knew whether or not we were going to be able to make it from year to year. I think the real change came about with the amalgamation with the Bible and Fruit Society [Mission].
Q: Tell me about that.
Jeffrey: Sam Dibler, who we’d hired early on, had been a fellow of the Bible and Fruit Mission when he was going through his clinical training. They had funded his training in this, and I think it was the first and only time they had ever done this. So they knew Sam, and Sam had maintained a relationship with them. So they knew he was working for us, and they realized that their membership was aging and not going to be able to carry on much longer because there was no one coming along to continue the organization.
So Virginia Mitchell, who was then the president of their board, felt that it would be wise for them to seek out a similar type of organization that would be able to carry on their work. So they knew Sam, they knew that he was with us, they knew a little bit about us, so they—I’ll never forget, Virginia Mitchell and her husband came in to see me in my office at Lenox Hill Hospital, which was one room, and I sat on one side, and Betty Feeny, my secretary, sat on the other side. So Mr. And Mrs. Mitchell were sitting in front of my desk, and they were asking all kinds of questions about what we did and how we did it and who was on the staff.
Finally, somewhat exasperated, I said, “Would you mind telling me what this about?”
Mr. Mitchell says, “It’s about 600,000.” [Laughs]
Q: Okay, great. Let’s stop and change tapes here.
