My Grandfather's Card

I have in front of me a business card.  In appearance, it’s a perfectly ordinary card.  It has a person’s name on it, their title, and the organization they represent.  It has an address and a telephone number.  That’s it.  No fancy design or anything.  One solid color, other than the writing.  A perfectly ordinary business card.

Except to me, it’s anything but ordinary.  You see, the name on the business card is Joseph Nadenicek, my grandfather.  His title is Pastor.  The organization is the Slovak Presbyterian Church.  The address is 2670 Taylor Street, Youngstown, Ohio.  The telephone number (referred to as the “auto phone”) was 74646.

You might still be saying “so what”.  But my grandfather died on January 1, 1929.  That means this business card has to be at least ninety years old.  And you may remember the odd way this card came into my possession--it was in the pocket of a vest found by my cousin’s wife’s cousin in an old trunk that had been thrown out as part of a city wide cleanup day.  She had only found it because she thought the trunk might make a good prop for her community theater group.

Because I never knew my grandfather, and because we both ended up in the same profession, this business card means a lot to me.  The church he was pastor of no longer exists--it was torn down some years ago to make way for an expressway.  I looked up the address on Google Maps--it appears to be simply a vacant lot.  As the old song says, “They paved paradise and put up a parking lot.”

I think of my grandfather from time to time, though.  I have his picture in my office.  He was a rather handsome man, in my opinion.  I wonder what he’d think of me and my ministry.  I hope he’d be proud of me, although I have no way to know.  I know that he loved music, although he favored classical music.  He might be a little puzzled at my love of bears, my love of baseball and bad puns, and my dabbling in public address announcing.  Maybe not, though.  While he appears to have been a serious man, he does not seem to have been stuffy at all.  My mom tells me that he used to show Charlie Chaplin movies to attract people to church.

He was also a very intelligent man.  As such, I think he’d have realized that times change, and that it may not be a good idea to continue to do things the way they were done ninety years ago.  God does not change, God’s word does not change, but the way we present God’s word certainly can change.  And I think my grandfather would have realized that.

At any rate, I am grateful to God, or to fate, or to whatever it was that brought me this business card.  I treasure it.  It’s a way to connect to a man I never knew.  And that’s a pretty cool thing.